this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I do a lot of foodposting on my account. Like Mao said, talk on things that you're well educated on and you'll never make an ass of yourself. Nobody will argue with me over olive oil frying because there's very little to challenge on well informed takes built from empirically testing books and experiencing things first hand. I'm very well educated on food, and can write at length about history, techniques, and unique flavors I've gotten to try.
Do you happen to know anything about stir frying? I've been reading up on it a bit recently and it seems like traditional stir frying would smoke the shit out of the oils available in China at the time.
Not as much as I'd like, I will give that as a primer. However, I do know general food history and can extrapolate. So from what I do know, Seasame and Tea Seed oil probably would have been the choices. These have higher smokepoints of 450-500 degrees, if they were cooked outside, smoke wouldn't have been an issue. Many stir fries are based on SE asian spring veggies, aka when you wouldn't want a fire running in your house the whole day. We cook inside now, so smoke is way bigger of an issue. Plus, modern Chinese cuisine also creates a shit ton of smoke inside. Fried rice and stir fries requires a smoking hot piece of carbon steel. If it was cold enough to put a fire inside, they probably just made soup from their leftovers instead of a stir fry to avoid the smoke, because nobody wants their house full of smoke.
So yeah, they were probably creating an obscene amount of smoke and didn't care because they were outside. Many modern home cooks suggest cooking stir fries using their wok over the grill to avoid the indoor smoke. If they weren't, it's because Stir Fry doesn't necessarily require the super high heat we associate it with
So I shouldn't worry too much about my oil smoking, at least in terms of flavor?
Sesame oil is weird because a lot of people insist it shouldn't be used as a cooking oil but that seems to be completely untrue.
Yep, smoke usually equals burning, but this isn't the case with all oils. Trust your taste buds
I thought "real" stir fry required more heat than what a typical western stove can give. I've kind of used that as an excuse for my attempts at stir-frys being mid at best.
To be fair, the "you can't stir fry in a western kitchen" is a half-remembered claim from an old book about Chinese cuisine written by an English woman, so I'm not hard to convince otherwise.
I've heard this before, but I've also heard the counterpoint that a modern Chinese home isn't going to have a high BTU stove either. My next step is to watch a bunch of cooking videos on Youku to see what modern Chinese people are doing.
To this day, there are outdoor kitchens in China.
Here's Wang Gang, a world class Chinese chef, cooking literally next to a rice paddy. He normally works in a professional kitchen in Sichuan but for some of his vids he's at home with his family and they have an outdoor stove setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxpCVrwwF-g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgYXRuQcniw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIsLgYy03YM
This is really cool, thanks!
hey i went on this journey a few years ago with fuscha dunlops cookbooks as a starting point and eventually machine translated recipies and leylalove is pretty much dead on. a combination of high smoke point oils, doing it fast and doing it outside are how you dont smoke yourself out.
iirc there's a section in every grain of rice about stir frying. i'll see if i can dig it up.
I'm now a little tempted to try using my induction cooktop outdoors...
Here it is!
I’ve never used induction burners with a wok. Be careful tossing it?
From some more reading, a wok probably isn't worth using with a standard induction cooktop. Might be better off getting a carbon steel pan and accepting that it won't be the same.
If you’re having to buy crap anyway, they make wok + burner combos that are either induction or gas.
No matter what you can use a normal thin walled, uncoated aluminum or stainless (or carbon steel if you can find it) to figure out if you even like stir frying and it suits your life.
I already have a stainless steel pan so that's what I'll be experimenting with for now. The wok-burner combos are cool but definitely not worth it for me. Right now my money is better spent on more vegetables to cook than on hardware.