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The Wok
Appears in
By Yan-Kit So
Published 1997
The last three decades saw such an increased interest all over the world in Chinese cooking that in the late 1970s “wok” appeared in the Collins English Dictionary. Wok is the Cantonese pronunciation, while guo is the pinyin Chinese. But in China today, as in the rest of the world, this thin-walled, hemispherical pan, made more often than not of carbon iron than of cast iron, is known as the wok.
The wok’s virtues cannot be extolled in sufficient superlatives. It is the most economical and versatile cooking utensil in the world, and its efficacy is difficult to exaggerate. Its wall, as thin as a metal sheet, makes for the quickest transmission of heat, resulting in the best economy in fuel consumption and the shortest duration of cooking time. In this one utensil, the whole spectrum of Chinese cooking techniques—stir-frying, sautéing, deep-frying, boiling, steaming, and even braising, to name but the major ones—can be executed. When called upon to perform beyond its Chinese duties, like tossing spaghetti with carbonara sauce or frying Chicken Kiev, it does equally well. So well established is its universal usage in the 1990s that it is not a question of listing which country under the umbrella of the United Nations uses the wok, but rather one of asking which country does not. So popular has it become, especially among the young and health conscious, that department stores vie with each other at Christmas time to sell the largest number of gift wok sets, complete with dome covers, rings, scoops and sometimes even brushes and chopsticks.