I recently purchased my very first wok. I learned a lot from talking to Jing, and reading wok experts like Grace Young. I picked out the best wok for home use, based on their recommendations. I seasoned it carefully, and always keep it clean and oiled. Yet recently when making a multi-course Chinese dinner, I was frying some chicken wings and they were sticking to the wok so badly that the skin and some of the meat was torn off of each wing. I had done everything correctly and carefully, so what was wrong? Let’s learn from my mistake.
My wok lost its seasoning
I was cooking a multi-course dinner. Before cooking the spicy Chinese wings, I had cooked Fujian Salted Rice (Hokkien Salted Rice). The last stage in the wok is to add Shaoxing wine and chicken broth to the carrots, mushrooms, pork, and rice. Wine is acidic, and water can act as an acid too–the boiling water and wine stripped the seasoning from the well of the wok. So even though the wings were frying in oil, they were sticking to the wok.
Learning the hard way
In many of her recipes, Jing has a step to heat the wok to smoking, swirl some oil in the wok and then pour it off to a heat-proof container. Then a little oil is added and she proceeds with the recipe. She does this whenever the prior step might have stripped the seasoning, or when cooking things like eggs.
Grace Young talks about having two woks: one for water-based cooking (steaming, simmering, blanching), and one for stir-frying. To stir-fry successfully, a carbon-steel or cast-iron wok must be well seasoned.
What did I learn from my mistake? My mistake was that I had stripped the seasoning by simmering the ingredients for the Fujian salty rice. Had I simply rinsed the wok, dried it, heated it, and oiled it using Jing’s technique I would have restored the wok’s seasoning. I thought that cooking the chicken wings in oil would suffice.
How seasoning works (Hot wok, cold oil)
Carbon-steel and cast iron have pores. When the metal is heated, these pores open, and the cold oil bonds with the metal and gets into those pores. (Hot wok, cold oil.) I have read this over and over: heat the wok, add the oil cold (room temperature) when you are ready to start cooking. Starting with a cold wok and cold oil does not work for stir-frying, and it only works for deep-frying or pan-frying, as I was trying to do with the chicken wings, if the pan is already seasoned.
Recovery from my mistake
When I realized the chicken wings were sticking, I removed them from the wok. Then I removed the oil by pouring it off into a large Pyrex measuring cup. Next, I took steel wool, without soap, and scrubbed the chicken from the wok under running water.
After cleaning and drying the wok, I heated it to the point where it was just starting to smoke. Then I swirled a few tablespoons of oil in the wok to thoroughly coat the well and sides. Then I poured that oil off into a separate container to be discarded.
Finally, I was ready to resume browning the chicken wings. The mistake did keep me from completing my goal of having all the dishes ready to serve simultaneously, and the chicken wings did lose some quality. Rather than browning previously, and sealing the skin, the oil permeated the meat. They were edible, but not of a quality I would serve to guests.
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