posted
These are all things you can make in a wok:
Ramen noodles. (Varelse noodles require western cooking apparatus.)
Scrambled eggs.
Toast.
Hot dogs.
Now that I'm done being annoying, woks are general-purpose pans so you can make anything. However, kitchens equipped with the more common set of saucepans and pots usually use the wok for stir-fry.
You need some wok oil (peanut oil might do), something to stir fry, and something to flavor it with.
Easy/cheap: Cut up broccoli and bell peppers thin-sliced beef or chicken meat (no bones or skin)
Get those frying in the wok over high heat in a little oil.
When they are nearly done, add an oriental stir fry sauce from a bottle, get the whole thing really hot (but not for a long time, this is quick cooking) and then serve it with rice or noodles.
Rather than use ready-made stir fry sauce you can use your choice of flavorings, such as soy sauce, hot sauce, vegetable or chicken stock, fruit juices with spices or herbs, and thicken as needed with cornstarch.
You could just eat the stuff with salt and pepper after you cook it, or squeeze some fresh lemon juice over it and garnish with basil or cilantro. It'd all be pretty good.
Experiment.
Have a fire extinguisher handy.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
you can make stir fry easily, using whatever meat/tofu/veggies you want. I like to use Chicken, broccoli, carrot, and onion.
Cut everything up into relatively bite-size pieces. Put a little oil in the wok. I like to use sesame, but anything will work. Cook the meat first, if you're using any, then add the veggies in order of most dense > least dense. There should only be a minute or two between ingredients. Keep things moving! That's why it's called a stir fry.
Black bean sauce makes for a good stir fry sauce, but it's fairly salty, so I like to add some brown sugar to balance that. Add a little of your mixture every time you add a new ingredient to keep things evenly flavored.
Eat over white rice (or however you want). The whole thing, including cooking the rice, can be done in a half-hour or so.
EDIT - Other good, fairly easy to obtain ingredients for stir fry sauces are soy sauce, oyster sauce, garlic, ginger, Sriracha (The bright red hot sauce with the rooster on the bottle).
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Besides stir frys (which are awesome and cheap) you can make soups, some sauces (Asian sauces usually more suited than many Western sauces, mainly because things with milk or cream will not do as well in a wok), fried dishes, and a lot of other things in a wok. If you get a steamer (the bamboo kind you find for $5 at a Chinese market) you can also steam vegetables, dumplings, etc.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
Just be sure to clean and dry well when you're done. A lot of woks I've seen rust, given half a chance.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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I always use molasses in my stir fry. It's a handy thickener, and the sweetness pairs with the salt in soy sauce nicely.
Also, it gives me a use for molasses that isn't ginger cookies, which means the bottle gets open slightly more often. This is good. Unsticking lids from molasses bottles that have been sitting around for months is seldom fun.
Posts: 650 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Sterling: Just be sure to clean and dry well when you're done. A lot of woks I've seen rust, given half a chance.
Depends what they're made of; my dad's are all either teflon-coated stainless or adonized aluminum or something like that.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
I'll have you know that Google knows of only one prior usage of the phrase "varelse noodles". Although there are a number of hits that include the words ramen, noodle, and varelse, so I guess I shouldn't get too smug.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Or if you weren't looking for cooking advice, there are any number of things you could make with your wok. A bucker might be a possibility. If you've got a welding torch you could probably turn it into a custom trashcan lid. I can imaging that it might be useful as part of a small satellite dish. If you get another wok, you could weld handles to the bottom and see what kind of a sound they produce when used as cymbals. In a pinch you could use it as either a chamberpot or a spitoon, although it's probably a less than ideal vessel for either of those purposes. You could go an entirely different route and use it as a planter for an herb garden. The possibilities are virtually endless.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
If you polish the inside of the wok to a high sheen, I suspect it would make an excellent solar focusing mirror. You could then use it as a solar cooker or to start fires.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:If you polish the inside of the wok to a high sheen
My brain is not working today and for some reason I read that as "if you Polish the inside of a wok..." And I thought, "Wow, that's kind of bigoted" without even figuring out how you would Polish a wok or what that would mean... (I'll have you know I do NOT usually jump to those conclusions but somehow I read it that way three times before I went on and read the rest of a sentence and kicked my brain over from "Polish" to "polish"...) Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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