All About Woks

Make your stir fry a wok in the park

Why do you need a wok? Woks are one of the more versatile pans in a cook's arsenal. Ten or fifteen years ago a wok might have been considered a novelty where as today they are considered essential in any well outfitted kitchen.

Wok man

Rogue gourmet, food historian and wok master, Anthony Bourdain has called China the parent of cuisine around the world. Whether you are deep frying or creating a pasta dish you are using techniques that were first developed in China and most likely performed in a wok.

Like many aspects of Chinese cuisine the focus is efficiency and economy. Steaming is used to conserve oil when cooking meats that require no additional fat. With woks and stir-frying the concern is the conservation of fuel. Woks use a rounded bottom so that high cooking temperatures can be achieved with a relatively small amount of fuel.

Wok can

A wok can function in a number of different capacities. You can use it as the base for steaming, pan or deep-frying and to make soups or stews. Woks developed as multipurpose cooking tools because of China's limited resources. Unlike in the west, a myriad of different pans would have been impossible for the average Chinese household to afford. Necessity though is a theme throughout cuisine around the world. Whether cookware or individual the peasants are the innovators when it comes to food. Dishes such as Louisiana gumbo or stir-fried rice find their roots in desperation and then develop into emblematic delicacies.

Wok fan

As a firm believer in the versatility of wok cooking I must warn you of some of the problems, and maybe some advantages, of westernized versions of the eponymous Chinese cooking pan. Some purists rail against stainless steel or somewhat flat bottoms on woks. These do not present the problems that the furor of their detractors implies.

Whether or not you have a problem with the use of electric woks can be debated. What cannot be debated are the problems that arise from the non-stick coatings that are often an aspect of these devices. Wok cooking takes place at very high temperatures. Most non-stick coatings tend to begin to chemically break down at typical stir-frying temperatures, about 450f degrees.

Similar to traditional American skillets and frying pans most chefs consider the seasoned cast iron or similarly spun high carbon steel wok to be the ideal. Seasoned cast or spun high carbon steel woks are usually what are found in the Chinese countryside. This is because of the materials durability at high temperatures and the gentle way in which it evens out heat. Indeed the focal point in many Chinese kitchens is the seasoned iron wok in the middle of the room, that in most cases is in excess of 100 years old.

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