I was trivializing the the cookware forum. One of many hints to leave me out of this absurd conversation.
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I guess your previous hints were too subtle!
I hit refresh twenty times. It still says I’ve reached my free article limit which is odd because I haven’t read the New York Times in many months due to the paywall.
You can clear nyt cookies and try again
Or if you search an article title there is usually a repost via another source
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I think the traditional wok shape you guys are discussing has one very large advantage over regular frying pans for stir fry in general and attaining wok hei in particular: The bell-shaped bottom collects the oil in somewhat of a deep, narrow pool that can be efficiently swirled to fry on the “walls” above. This shape makes it easy to control how much oil contact/immersion the food is given. Not so much with frypans, where the oil drains/spreads across the entire floor. IMO, this is why flat-bottomed woks are not a good choice unless your cooktop is flat and/or you can’t use a ring. `
And the size, relative to the food portion(s) being fired is important for ease and facility of tossing. My 2 cents.
Hey, shifting gears, does anyone here know the history of high-power wok cookery? Obviously there was no natural gas at a Tang emperor’s court. The peasantry likely used dung or wood for fuel, but what of their betters? Was charcoal made for them, or were deposits of coal available? Were their cooking fires stoked with bellows borrowed from their armorers or the Haka?
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I’m not concerned about reading the article. I’ve already read it and I know how feel about gas vs induction.
I was simply pointing out that the article isn’t readily accessible.
(post deleted by author)
This didn’t work with this article… even with an incognito window (which never saves any cookies), AND a different IP address via a VPN. So it would seem the NYT is lying to us about the number of free reads available regarding this article.
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Wow. I don’t know, b/c I have a sub, but for Tribune-owned sites turning off JavaScript does defeat the paywall - plus a lot of other functions.
Leaving aside whether the NYT is lying or not, my other suggestion was to use the title of an article to find a reprint.
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/dayton-daily-news/20220323/282114935070903
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Weird. I use incognito (generally without VPN because it screws up my bellsouth email) and did my normal refresh-stop-refresh-stop and got that NYT article to load for free.
And yes, it told me I was over my 5 freebies for the month (because I’m always over my 5 freebies from NYTimes for any given month!).
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Didn’t try that.
Hi ipsedixit,
My Chinese friends here refer to restaurants like these described in the article as “Chinese Greasy Spoon” and take me to other places. I’ve never had gastro-intestinal distress after eating at a Chinese place in the United States.
Thanks.
“When a surge in heat was required an assistant, acting on the shouted instructions of the cook, fanned the stoking hole at the back of the range.”
That’s a strange article though. I don’t think of Chinese food or stirfry as being overly oily. And it may be that home wok ranges caught on in the Qing, but woks are thought to have originated in the Han, 1800 years earlier. Even more odd is that the single source cited in the article, E. Wilkinson, is the same source cited in Wiki for the wok’s much earlier origin.
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I can explain later – if I have time. In short, woks was invented much earlier as a vessel. However, woks as a vessel to stir fry came much later. The original woks were used more like pots.
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Wok’s Chinese name is 鑊. It is a cooking vessel with thousand years of history. To understand its history, one must understand the other cookware: Ding.(鼎.)
Based on ancient text, woks are often mentioned along with ding, and it is said the difference is that a wok is a ding without the feet. You can directly google the following text to know these were in fact from ancient text
掌共鼎鑊
鼎大而無足曰鑊
鼎鑊甘如飴，求之不可得。
In ancient time, both wok and ding are for boiling meat and fish for cooking foods or even use them as a capital punishment… which I am sure you know what that means. They were not for anything like stir frying. In short, there is the wok as in its very origin (different look and different purpose), and there is the wok as we know today.
Now, the woks as you know for stir fry come much later. And then the wok for high flame Bao 爆 comes later still. The term Bao stir fry was mentioned in Qing Dynasty. Now of course one can argue that Bao in Qing as hot as today Bao in modern day. Most probably not. In fact, the Bao back then maybe more like the regular stir fry of today.
What is a race car in 1950 and what is a race car today… are not the same thing.
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Now this is interesting. Thanks.
My next, related question, is when, in Chinese history, did vegetable oils become available in cooking? I ask because so much of food sleuthing depends too much on surviving texts mentioning whatever’s being researched.
I can’t help but think some Chinese people were stir frying in oil before 1658. If they had the wok/ding in the 4th Century BCE, and they had oil, my bet is someone was frying.
I want to answer these questions with some reservations and some conditions. We simply do not know what sure if ancient people use the same words for different definition. Case in point, there are a lot of debates about ancient word “blue” color does not mean today’s “blue” color
One of the earliest finding of stir fry (炒) is from a book calls Qimin Yaoshu (齊民要術) dated in 544 AD.
In it, it mentioned the word stri-fry (炒) and described the following dish
炒雞子法：打破，著銅鐺中，攪令黃白相雜。細擘蔥白，下鹽米、渾豉，麻油炒之，甚香美。
The translation goes something:
炒雞子法 = Method for Stir-fry Chicken Egg:
打破 = Break open (almost certainly means the eggs)
著銅鐺中 = Put in a copper/brozen 鐺. 鐺 is like a small Ding -a cookware with feet. Looks like this:
攪令黃白相雜 = stir the yellow and the white to mix
細擘蔥白 = small cut green onion white
下鹽米 = Add salt (or salt with rice)
渾豉 = Mix fermented soy bean or possibly fermented soy sauce, but less likely.
麻油炒之 = sesame oil and “stir fry” these
甚香美。 = its fragrance is wonderful
What does stir fry here exactly mean? There probably some lower temperature frying.
There is also description of poaching an egg right before this text.
瀹雞子法：打破，著沸湯中，浮出，即掠取，生熟正得，即加鹽醋也。
Break open. Add to boiling water/soup. When it floats. Take it out. Half raw, half cooked is correct. Add salt and vinegar.
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We can be sure this isn’t cooking over multi-ring gas jets.
These footed pots don’t necessarily mean low heat frying, though. Over enough live charcoal, and with enough airflow through it, you can smelt metal. That’s why I asked about bellows.
Wiki indicates that a Chinese engineer is credited with making the first bellows powered by falling water, I believe around 500 AD (Warring States period?).
