Stir-Frying

As a technique in Chinese cooking, stir-frying came later than boiling, steaming, stewing, and roasting on a spit. Yet it is this ingenious technique that has captured the imagination of the whole world, so much so that many people regard it as synonymous with Chinese cuisine.

The technique consists of adding cut-up ingredients to an intensely heated wok containing a small amount of oil, then turning and tossing them around the curved sides until they are cooked just to a turn, with most of the vitamins still intact. This method can be used for cooking any foodstuff, be it vegetable, meat, seafood, rice, or noodles. Vegetables stir-fried are crisp and crunchy, meat and seafood are tender and juicy, but above all, they are impregnated down to the last morsel with a special fragrance the Chinese unashamedly term “wok fragrance.”