Wok this way
'Oh, that's beautiful, we don't get such nice pak choi in the States, do you mind if I take a picture of this?' asks Grace Young as she peers into a colander where the delicate vegetable stalks are rinsed and ready for her cooking demonstration. She's less enamoured of the wizened ginger in the vegetable basket, but she's happy to use some nice, plump cloves of garlic instead.
Over a high gas flame, Young heats the carbon-steel wok that she always travels with - she takes it on the plane in her carry-on luggage. When the wok is hot, she pours in a little cooking oil, heats it, adds the garlic then the pak choi, which she has patted dry with paper towels.
A few deft moves with the metal spatula, then in goes a sprinkling of salt and sugar. A little more spatula action and the dish is ready - to the consternation of the photographer, who needed more time.
Young is considered an authority on woks and wok cooking. Born in San Francisco to immigrant Chinese parents, she took a degree in art history then worked as a test kitchen developer and director of food photography for Time-Life books before becoming interested in Chinese cuisine. Her first book, The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, focused on home-style dishes of the type cooked by her parents. Her second, The Breath of the Wok, refers to wok hei - the ineffable, elusive fragrance and taste that comes from a properly made stir-fried dish. Young's third cookbook, Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge, was published earlier this year.
''To the sky's edge' refers to an old Cantonese saying that means that mastery comes through repetition - from the exercise of an art form,' Young explains. 'I liked the meaning. Also, Chinese people ended up everywhere - 'the sky's edge' can also mean as far as you can get from China.
'The idea for the book is about Chinese diaspora cooking. Chinese people went to places such as Vietnam, Japan, Jamaica, Cuba and India. Wherever they went, they took their woks. They might not have been able to make dim sum or Peking duck in their new homes, but if they had a wok they could make a stir-fry.'
Young says the food she grew up with was traditional Cantonese, because in San Francisco her parents were able to buy the right ingredients.
Emigrants to other countries without access to the same ingredients had to improvise, Young adds. She became interested in the different Chinese-influenced dishes after exploring the wealth of different cuisines available in New York, where she now lives. Examining the menus, she came across Jamaican jerk chicken fried rice, and Chinese-Indian dishes made with a lot more spice and sauce than would be considered traditional.
'With the diaspora, food became simplified. You couldn't always marinate the meat [as with traditional Chinese cooking], and you might not find certain ingredients. With Chinese Trinidadians, they cooked with dark rum instead of rice wine, and adopted the Trinidadian custom of cleaning shrimp with lime juice. From that comes the dish of stir-fried shrimp with rum, where the shrimp are cooked with ginger, garlic, tomatoes, ketchup, soy sauce and, of course, rum.
'Chinese went to Peru in the 19th century. Peruvians love Chinese food. But there's a dish that's so popular that Peruvians cook it at home and it's not considered a Chinese dish anymore - lomo saltado. It's stir-fried filet mignon. With Chinese cuisine, if you're using beef, it's usually marinated in soy sauce, rice wine, etc, and it's an inexpensive cut such as flank steak. With lomo saltado, filet is used and it's not marinated. It's cooked with garlic, red onion, tomatoes, cilantro and a chilli called aji amarillo. At the end you add soy sauce, rice wine and vinegar, then French fries are mixed in, or the ingredients are poured over French fries.'
Not all the cooking is as good, she admits. The diaspora either adapted by improvising, as with Trinidadian shrimp, or for survival - if the people in their adopted land didn't like the food they altered it to local tastes so they could sell it to them.
'Like chop suey: it has bean sprouts, celery, onion, thickly sliced meat, a thick gloopy sauce and overcooked vegetables - sometimes canned vegetables, such as bean sprouts and water chestnuts. If it's overcooked, it's not a true stir-fry.'
Young says she focused on stir-frying because 'it's a culinary term that people understand, but it's misunderstood. Most Americans have never tasted a really good stir-fry. It's common to have stir-fry recipes, but they call for non-stick or stainless-steel cookware heated over a medium flame, and using extra virgin olive oil. They don't tell you to dry the vegetables before cooking them or they braise with all that liquid and become soggy, and that you have to limit the amount of food you put into a wok.'
The right way to do it, she says, is to use a high flame to heat a wok - made from cast iron or carbon steel (she prefers the latter) - then add oil. Meat (which should be marinated) or seafood is stir-fried quickly over high heat, then removed before the vegetables are stir-fried. The meat or seafood returns to the wok with the vegetables and everything is cooked together briefly before serving. A properly made stir-fry should take just a few minutes to cook.
Young worries that traditional Chinese cooking techniques will be lost, not just as Chinese emigrate to other countries, but also on the mainland, where increasing wealth means that people eat out more, rather than learning to cook from their parents.
'For younger Chinese, cooking is lost,' she says. 'It's not just recipes, there are stories that are almost as important as the recipes. If the recipes are not recorded, no one will know.'
For those about to wok
'It's all about the ingredients,' says Grace Young. 'High heat cooks the food quickly, so the ingredients must be fresh and in season - if they have no intrinsic flavour, there won't be any flavour in the dish. Stir-frying accentuates the natural flavour of ingredients - it's traditional not to use much seasoning.
'The right way to stir-fry is to use a hot wok then add oil. Most recipes call for the wok and oil to be heated together, but this makes the meat stick - the wok should be heated first. You have to limit the amount of ingredients you put into a wok. With meat, it's about 450 grams of pork or lamb, or 335 grams of beef. And you need to dry the vegetables before stir-frying them, or they become soggy. Don't cook the meat and vegetables together - stir-fry the meat, take it out of the wok, cook the vegetables then add the meat at the end.'
Season to taste
Buy a wok with a diameter of 35cm to 40cm. 'I would never recommend anything less than 35cm. It crowds the ingredients. If you use a round-bottom wok, you need to put it on a ring,' says Grace Young.
Buy a wok made of either cast iron or carbon steel. 'I like carbon steel - my travelling wok is carbon steel. It heats quickly and cools quickly - the advantage is that it's lighter and easier to manoeuvre. Cast iron warms up more slowly but the heat is more even, and it retains the heat. At the end of cooking, you must remove the food immediately or it overcooks. Chinese cast iron is thin and delicate - if you bang it on a hard surface, it can shatter. But the Chinese think cast iron gives more wok hei. With both cast-iron and carbon-steel woks, the more you cook with it the better - it develops a patina and becomes non-stick.
'A brand-new wok always has the factory oil in it, to prevent it from rusting. Scrub it off with stainless steel, detergent and elbow grease in hot water. Scrub it inside and out - do this two or three times. Place it on a burner over low heat until dry. Heat it until a drop of water evaporates within a second, but don't overheat it.
'Season the wok by cooking half a cup of sliced ginger or a bunch of Chinese chives cut into 10cm segments with spoonfuls of high-heat oil such as peanut, canola or rapeseed. Cook over a medium flame for 15 to 20 minutes, using the spatula to spread the mixture to the edge of the wok and smear it into the metal. If the pan gets dry, add more oil. After 15 to 20 minutes, in a carbon-steel wok you'll see discolouration, while a cast-iron wok will get darker. Carbon steel goes through this awkward stage where it looks ugly, but it's not ruined. After 'washing' the wok with the ginger or chives and oil, throw out the mixture. Wash the wok with hot water and a sponge - no detergent - then heat it over a low flame for one to two minutes or until dry. Then start cooking with it and it will continue to season. The fat gets infused into the porous metal and creates a patina - it's a natural non-stick.