I have spent 18 months in Beijing without the most essential piece of Chinese cookware— not to mention all the years prior to China--, but on June 10, The Slow Chopper rectified my wokless condition. On my birthday, I received, among other things, a flat bottom, steel wok.
Over the past couple months, the Wokless Nomads have been experimenting with our new toy, but before we share our experiences with “wokful” cooking, I’d like to post a couple of things I learned about woks along the way.
Purchasing a Wok: “Do”s and “Don’t”s
The Slow Chopper picked out a flat bottom, steel wok. Traditionally, woks have a round bottom as to sit snuggly on the round mouth of an open-pit stove. Using this style stove and wok, the bottom of the wok maintains a high heat while the sides heat slower, allowing for a different style of cooking. Using a flat bottom wok is ideal for the typical gas range (also appropriate for use on an electric range, although stir-frying on an electric element is an exercise in folly). If your gas range has a circular wok-ring that can replace the existing grates, then a round-bottom wok can be considered. Nevertheless, we have had good results with the flat bottom wok—it heats quickly and the heat is evenly distributed.
If you are cooking on an electric range, be forewarned, electric elements do not produce heat quickly enough to maintain a high stir-frying heat. You can still braise, boil, deep fry, steam and stew—but you will not be able to achieve the characteristic stir-fry flavor produced over flame.
Another warning, some woks are sold with Teflon non-stick coatings. These woks should be avoided for health reasons. Given the high temperatures required by stir-frying and Teflon’s tendency to degrade at temperatures around 450F, a cast iron, steel, or carbon steel wok should be selected.
Seasoning your Wok
With our steel wok, we used the stove top seasoning method. Some others have used an oven to heat their wok. Caution: this will make your kitchen (and home if you don’t close the doors and open some windows) smell like a fast-food restaurant.
Materials:
Wok
Gas range
Clean scrap cloths
Pig fat, lard, or high-temperature cooking oil
1st – Clean the wok using hot water, a sponge, and soap. This will be the last time your wok will come into contact with soap, so for those of you who find the idea of never again using soap to clean your wok, make it special. Also, feel free to use a piece of steel wool to scrub off any residue left from the manufacturers. Wipe the wok dry and then heat over low heat to boil away any remaining moisture.
After cooling to room temperature, the wok has a copper colored sheen. A slight sweat of oil comes from the pores as they close.
2nd – Turn your stove burner to high and heat the wok. This high heat will open the pores within the steel. You might hear some faint tinkling or clanking coming from within the steel (we did). The goal is to heat the wok metal to around 450F, so as to open the pores and remain open after coming into contact with room temperature pork fat or cooking oil.
3rd - At this point, turn off the gas and grab a piece of pig fat (or cooking oil). Take the fat and, wrapping your hand in a rag or cloth, rub the fat across all up-facing surfaces. (Note: some methods call for cooking oil, but our Beijing friends recommend using pig fat). Because you heated the wok high enough to open the pores in its surface, the fat will lodge itself in giving your wok a homemade non-stick coating.
4th – Take another clean rag and rub the oil evenly across all the up-facing surfaces to ensure an even coating of oil.
5th – Let the wok cool to room temperature. This process will allow the pores to close and the oil to settle in. Once it has cooled, repeat the procedure 5-10 times, until your wok has a golden-brown shimmer.
Note: Seasoning can be done over multiple days, although if you have 5 hours to set aside at home one day, you could potentially start in the morning and be stir-frying by dinner.
Caring for your Wok
Seeing as you’ve been brainwashed by the public health workers to associate soap with cleanliness, I cannot emphasize enough: DO NOT use soap to clean your wok. Unlike the non-stick coating of Teflon pans, which are vulnerable to high heats, the Achilles-heel of your homemade non-stick coating is soap. Think of your wok as a pockmarked, oily teenage face, thousand of pores clogged with oil. Now imagine how useful Clearasil would be for helping that poor child.
Got it? Exactly. If you use soap, you will remove all that oil, effectively unclogging your wok’s pores and thus remove its non-stick coat.
To clean your wok properly, you will need a brush or scrubber of some kind (bamboo whisks are common in Beijing) and steel wool. After using your wok to stir-fry, take the bamboo whisk and scrub it to remove any larger items that would get stuck in steel wool. Then, take the steel wool and scrub the remaining, if any, harder to remove residues left from cooking. For those of you as fastidious as Howard Hughes in your bent for cleanliness and sanitation, feel free to fill your wok with water and bring it to a boil. The 212F of boiling water will not open the pores enough to remove significant amounts of oil.
Post Script
With every meal you prepare, new flavors will infuse your wok's oil coat. You can reseason your wok if it ever begins to lose its non-stick properties, but, that said, in two months of use, we have yet to season our wok a second time. Every time you stir-fry is a minor seasoning, especially if you first heat your wok before adding oil. The key is to heat the metal higher than the smoke point of your oil. If you first heat your wok in this way, the oil will naturally enter the pores and you will successfully maintain the non-stick coat on your wok.
Posted by The Camel
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