The Breath Of A Wok: Unlocking The Spirit Of Chinese Wok Cooking Through Recipes And Lore (1/2)

By Claudia Kousoulas To be honest, it’s not a good book that makes you a good cook. It’s repetition, observation, and no small amount of passion. It is a rare recipe that can convey pas?sion. But every once in a while, a cookbook can. By following her passion, Grace Young has enlightened readers and home cooks about Chinese food–its history, and traditions. More than any collection of recipes Breath of a Wok is the story of a dying cultural tradition. Young captures that tradition with carefully recorded explorations and widely gathered recipes, combined with inspiring photographs by Alan Richardson. Standing at the elbows of uncles and aunties as they cook, teasing secrets from chefs, and venturing into the gritty quarters where woks are hand-forged, Young’s book rings with au?thenticity. She searches out the tiny variations that make big differences in flavor. Young begins the book with a fundamental quality of wok cooking–wok hay–the hard to describe, but you know it when you taste its flavor of food fresh from the wok. The western equivalent might be a pancake fresh from the griddle or a still-sputtering fried oyster. To create wok hay, she starts with the wok it?self, how they were made and used, how they are made and used today, and which ones work best in an American kitchen. Gratefully, and unlike so many things, it’s not expense that will guarantee results, but relatively simple techniques. Young gives advice on choosing the wok that will set properly on your stove and how to season it with an inaugural stir-fry of Chinese chives and vegetable oil. But then Young ranges far beyond your anemic, first-apartment stir fried vegetables and chicken to introduce dishes that are often very simple but deeply flavorful, and closer to authentic than you’ve managed to get so far. Stir-fried garlic and lettuce can come together from the pantry, but with some forethought, Spicy Garlic Eggplant, flavored with a sharp mix of ginger and red pepper flakes with the echoing depth of sesame oil, will take you far beyond Parmesan. After cooking a few of the recipes you’ll see a repeated pattern of flavoring and technique. Lee Wan Ching’s Chinese Broccoli with Ginger Sauce follows that pattern, dicing the vegeta?bles to a similar size, initially cooking them to soften and infuse flavor, then finishing with a sauce. In this recipe, the sauce is lightly cornstarched mix of salt, sugar, vegetable oil, ginger juice, chicken broth, and cooking wine. In other recipes, the pattern will be the same, but the sauce may be an equally balanced mix of sweet and salty flavors–a varying mixture of soy, sugar, wine, and Chinese vinegar swirled into the pan and spiked with garlic, ginger, or red pepper flakes. Even though the techniques and ingredients are similar, the flavors are distinct. Eggplant is tart like a mellowed vinegar. The Chinese Broccoli is musky and deep. Each selection of flavorings is perfectly pitched to the character of its vegeta?ble. Given a slightly more blank canvas like tofu or chicken, the possibilities are endless. But a wok is far more than an ethnic frying pan, and in a chapter called Eight Treasured Tastes, Young provides lessons and recipes for smoking, pan-frying, braising, boiling and poaching, steaming, and deep frying in a wok. Florence Lin’s Tofu with Cilantro Relish will banish tofu’s bland reputation. The strips of tofu are pan-fried with ginger and soy sauce and still sizzling from the pan, are topped with a simple relish of cilantro, salt, sugar, and oil. It’s hard to believe so much flavor can be imparted in such a short time to such a notori?ously bland ingredient.