Once I’m in restaurant critic mode, I usually look across the eating room to find out the perfect seat in the home. But it surely’s not apparent. Consider the cookbook writer Grace Younger, who grew up eating round San Francisco’s Chinatown along with her father: They at all times sat as near the kitchen as they probably might, so they might eat their meals nonetheless scorching from the wok.
They had been looking for out wok hei, a Cantonese phrase for the mouthwatering aroma of wok-seared meals — deeply savory and smoky. The irresistible, ephemeral aroma comes from the wok itself, or, extra exactly, from the flames curling up and across the wok, and tickling the fats inside it. So the smokiness of wok hei is simply as vivid, habit-forming and powerfully scrumptious in vegetarian dishes.
Cantonese restaurant cooks produce it utilizing extremely highly effective wok ranges, however even if you happen to don’t have that type of arrange, you possibly can nonetheless get a few of that smokiness at house. Belief Genevieve Ko, who has a easy, sensible approach for stir-frying with no wok — cooking brussels sprouts and garlic in a extremely popular skillet — which ends up in what she describes to her daughter as “sort-of wok hei.” Ha!
A blow torch will help do the job, too. J. Kenji López-Alt writes about hacking the approach to make lo mein with shiitake mushrooms and greens, together with mung bean sprouts, Napa cabbage and carrots. And the identical approach can apply to a dish of single-subject, smoky stir-fried greens, like bok choy, choy sum or gai lan. It’s a simple, foundational facet dish, and it may be endlessly rewarding: smoky greens with scrambled eggs on rice, smoky greens and beans on buttered toast, smoky greens with rice noodles and chile crisp. Smoky greens perpetually.
Should you do have a wok — one in every of my favourite items of kitchen gear — you possibly can in fact use it to comply with these recipes. And if you happen to nonetheless want a little bit of convincing, learn Grace Younger’s great 2004 cookbook, “The Breath of a Wok” and J. Kenji López-Alt’s latest ebook, “The Wok: Recipes and Strategies.”
