Introduction
I have been asked by many people how to stir fry Chinese food. I didn’t really know how to describe it; the only thing I could really say was ‘easy, very easy’.
I wasn’t joking, the basic method for stir frying Chinese food is not at all fancy or complicated. I know there are many different kinds of packed ready to cook ‘Chinese stir fry vegetables’ or sauces, or even stir fry oil on the shelves of the various supermarkets. But these are not my cup of tea. I agree that using these sauces might make cooking easy, but the taste will never be the same. In fact, it doesn’t take much effort to prepare everything yourself, and probably you can also save some money anyway. When you come back from work, tired, need to quickly fix dinner, Chinese stir frying is really not a bad idea.
The Basic Method
The stir fry that I understand is to quickly cook the food using a strong fire. This way, the very surface of the vegetables (if you are using vegetables) will get soft quickly, the salt and other seasonings will go in, but the vegetables will still keep their own juice and taste. Dishes cooked this way are generally very light, no thick sauce base, very different from, for instance, the ‘Cantonese OK sauce’. Thick sauces will mask the taste of the vegetables.
For the basic stir fry, all you need is a wok, oil, salt, and for most of the times, spring onions, ginger and garlic. You can even forget about all the other spices if you don’t have them at home. However, the spring onions, ginger and garlic, they’d better be fresh (do not use powders).
Then it goes like this: place the wok on the fire (normally a big strong fire), wait until the wok is dry from any water drop (otherwise it could cause oil spill, you can get hurt), then pour 2-4 table spoons of oil, let oil heat up, then put well chopped spring onions, ginger and garlic in (depends on what you are cooking).
When the nice smell of the spring onions, ginger and garlic starts coming out, put the things you want to cook in. Of course, leave things that get done quickly for the very end. Put salt when you stir fry everything together. In case the food gets too dry in the wok, put a few water drops, no need to use oil for that, if you don’t like it too oily.
That is it. It is simple, easy and healthy. Saying that, this kind of stir fry only works for easy to cook ingredients. Other ingredients (like meat) need to be pre-cooked first, and will need to be stir fried in the wok only very briefly.
