Over the years, my experiences with home-cooked Chinese food have been less than ideal.
During the '70s stir-fry craze, my mother -- otherwise an excellent cook -- regularly served wokfuls of soggy snow peas and chicken swimming in soy sauce. Even then, my naive taste buds sensed that things were awry. Over the years, my own occasional wok attempts haven't turned out much better.
After reading Grace Young's new primer, The Breath of a Wok: Unlocking the Spirit of Chinese Wok Cooking Through Recipes and Lore (Simon and Schuster, $35, 2004), I may finally be on the right path.
The book offers more than just recipes. It is a history of the wok (which has been around for 2,000 years), a practical guide to its care and an adoring meditation on its beauty and utility.
Young, who previously wrote The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, introduces readers to wok makers, food anthropologists, street-vendor wok wizards and master chefs across China and the United States. She considers the debate over shape and material (flat-bottom vs. round, steel vs. iron vs. nonstick), as well as technique (many top chefs forgo tongs and instead advocate swirling food around the wok).
The book has a range of dishes, from simple fare like garlic spinach to more involved concoctions such as braised spareribs and asparagus. Young also includes a glossary of Chinese ingredients, with attached photos. The images proved useful when I shopped at Asian markets (the only place to get a lot of the ingredients); store employees often didn't speak much English, and the shelves were stocked with a confusing array of similarly named -- but quite different -- items.
Breath of a Wok emphasizes the importance of cooking at extremely high temperatures, which sear the food and infuse it with flavor. According to Young, it is this short burst of blazing heat that produces wok hay, the ineffable essence, both spiritual and gustatory, that defines the best wok-made fare.
Unfortunately, the typical American stove is much less powerful than the Chinese variety, which creates a problem for a cook not using a turbo-charged, restaurant-quality 35,000-British-thermal-unit range (restaurant stoves in China are five times more powerful than even these).
To get around this dilemma, Young advises using a flat-bottom wok, which rests directly on the burner, rather than the more traditional, round-bottom variety, which requires a stand that places it farther from the heat. She also suggests cooking smaller quantities of food, because inundating the wok lowers its temperature.
