(mellow jazz music)
- Gotta be cool for the kids.
Not trying to be a couple old fogeys up here.
Hey there, folks,
I am humbled to have a very special guest.
In the kitchen here today,
something that took many years in the making.
We finally got you here,
the man who taught me how to cook,
and I'm not exaggerating, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt,
thank you so much for coming.
- Good to see you.
We realized the last time we were in the same room together
was like, 10 years ago.
- Yeah, I was trying to get
an internship at Serious Eats
and coming off probably way too strong.
I was like, "Guys, I'll work for free, 80 hours a week."
And they were probably like-
- I think things worked out okay for you.
- It worked out, yeah.
I focused those energies, you know,
not at strangers who were frightened of me.
Instead just by myself in my basement
and eventually it got you down here.
- Yeah.
- You're here to talk to me both about your new cookbook,
"The Wok."
- Yeah, "The Wok."
- Why'd you write a book about a wok?
- Well, so I was writing this book
and originally this book was gonna be a two volume box set
and we ended up cutting about half of it
because nobody was gonna buy it.
Is it that that big?
- Yeah, you know, you gotta keep it,
you know, travel size, right?
- Yeah, exactly.
- Nine hundred some odd pages?
How many pages you pullin' here?
900 and-
- 950. - 958.
- Well, so we basically ended up
taking everything that wasn't American,
or sort of American adjacent, out of it.
And so one of the chapters was a chapter on the wok.
- Clearly you were saving them for something.
- Well, saving some of them.
But then, you know, I started writing the book,
I started writing the second volume of "The Food Lab"
and this chapter started just growing and growing.
And I quickly sort of realized like, you know what,
there's enough about a wok
to write another, like, "Food Lab" length book.
- You wrote a book about one piece of cookware
that's bigger than my entire book about how to cook
that I'm writing right now.
So clearly I'm here to learn from you today.
I think we all know that.
'Cause I've learned a lot from you,
particularly that woks are versatile.
You think of them as just stir fry machines
as a white person.
We're very confused by this, by this device,
and by the metal that it is made of.
So I'm really excited,
not only to learn how to use it properly
for the things that we obviously know
it's supposed to be used for, like stir fries,
but also learn some not so obvious uses for it.
Because, like you've mentioned,
and the reason this book is so, so beautifully thick,
and so well-marbled
is because it's so chockfull of information
about such a versatile tool.
And I'm really excited to learn more.
- I was aiming for thick and marbled.
- Normally when I'm shooting stuff like this,
I got Kendall over there doing the prep for me
and also being somebody I can ask for knowledge.
In this case gonna be the opposite.
- Who does all the real work?
- Where I'm gonna just go chop vegetables
and you're still gonna be the knowledge over here.
So you're gonna have to do the double duty,
but I'm gonna try to be your assistant today over there.
I'm gonna do your mise.
Thanks so much for coming out, man.
- Awesome.
I'll see you, I'll see you right now.
- All right.
- [Andrew] Bye, hello.
- So the most important thing in a stir fry
is the prep work,
that takes by far the most time
and is the most important thing.
The reason it's so important is because with stir fries,
generally you're cutting your food
into the shape and size that you're going to be eating them.
'Cause people are gonna be eating these
with a chopstick, right?
And so that means cutting into bite size pieces.
And you also wanna make sure that they're all cut in a way
that they're gonna cook at the right rate.
So what we're doing today is
we're gonna cook a pork and cucumber stir fry.
If you've never tried hot cucumber,
stir frying is a great way to try it.
So these porks are gonna become the slivers.
So I'm starting my first, taking pork loin
and cutting it into sort of flat pieces like this.
So the meat now I'm gonna cut lengthwise
into these thin slivers
and this recipe, the recipe in this book,
it calls just for marinading.
But I was thinking that I would also
velvet the meat before cooking.
- [Andrew] What?
- So we can show you the technique,
but also just to show you that, you know,
a lot of these things
are really adaptable to your own personal taste.
So if you prefer the texture of velveted meat,
you can do that with virtually any recipe
and the recipe's still gonna work as written.
- [Andrew] Kenji, what in the sweet good god
is velveted meat?
- Oh, okay.
So velveting is a technique
where you sort of par cook your meat.
And essentially what you do is you marinate it
and the marinade include some egg white as well as a starch,
so egg white and corn starch.
And then you briefly simmer them
for like a second or two, 10 seconds or so.
Whether you're gonna velvet or not,
and we'll get to that,
the most important step when you are working with meat
is to wash it.
And I know there's
all this stuff going on in the internet before
about washing chicken
and why you shouldn't wash your chicken.
It's true, in Western recipes,
when you're working with big cuts of meat,
you don't wash them.
Washing the meat for stir fries is what's going to give them
that really tender texture.
So I'm gonna take this over to sink.
Oh, and I'm gonna grab first.
So the way I'm doing this,
like, I'm being really, really rough with it.
I'm acting sort of like I'm wringing out clothes
and I'm trying to squeeze out as much of the,
the pigment and the sort of excess minerals
and stuff on the inside.
Those are the things that are gonna,
first of all, make it discolor.
But by squeezing it like this,
you're also loosening up the muscle fibers
so that they are A, more easily able to pick up marinade
and flavors.
And B, come out a lot more tender.
So you can see, I can bring this back,
but the last thing I was doing is
I'm really trying to get as much moisture as possible.
So I have it in a strainer
and you can see all this stuff that comes out of it,
but I'm really squeezing it,
like I'm wringing out the laundry.
- And then you're left with this pork
that has been, you know, you've got pigment out of it,
you've got fluids out of it
and you're left with pink lemonade.
A nice pink-
- Yeah, nice, pink slime, right?
- That looks delicious.
Oh yeah, sorry, sorry.
This is the last of our Shaoxing cooking wine,
if I'm saying that correctly.
- Okay, cool, cool.
- These are some pickled jalapenos that I made.
That's the only pickled chilies we have.
- Great, that'll work.
- The sesame oil, this is an egg.
- Is there any sugar?
- Sugar's there.
- Sugar.
All right, so now we're gonna marinate our pork.
I'm gonna start with the very basic marinade.
So we're gonna do a little bit of sugar,
about a 1/2 teaspoon of sugar.
This is for a pound of meat.
1/4 teaspoon of white pepper,
teaspoon of soy sauce,
this is light soy sauce, Chinese light soy sauce.
That's L-I-G-H-T not L-I-T-E.
There are two types of light soy sauce.
So L-I-G-H-T is regular Chinese light soy sauce
and it separates it from dark soy sauce,
which is sort of sweeter and darker in color.
L-I-T-E soy sauce is low sodium soy sauce,
and that's a very different product.
So what you're looking for
is Chinese style light soy sauce.
And if you can't find that
you can always use Japanese style shoyu,
like Kikkoman, something like that is fine.
Some soy sauce and
about a teaspoon of toasted sesame oil
and a teaspoon of Shaoxing wine.
If you can't find Shaoxing wine,
you can use dry sherry, dry vermouth, something like that.
Now the last ingredient I'm gonna add right here
is some baking soda.
So this is about a 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda.
Now baking soda is kind of the other secret ingredient
when it comes to a really getting that super tender,
almost slick texture in stir fried meats.
The alkalinity of baking soda
is what keeps muscle proteins from binding too tightly
so that you don't squeeze out excess moisture
and your meat say more tender as it cooks.
I'm actually also gonna add,
because we're gonna be velveting,
I'm also gonna add a egg white.
So an egg white is also alkaline,
so it will also enhance that sort of tenderizing effect.
In the case of velveting, what it's also gonna do is
it's going to combine with the cornstarch we're gonna add
and form a sort of coating,
about a teaspoon of cornstarch,
on the surface of the meat.
And this one I'm just gonna get get right in with my hands.
What we're gonna do is
we're gonna very briefly blanch this in water
and it forms a sort of very thin,
thin sort of slick coating on the surface
that, first of all, it helps retain
any moisture that's coming outta the pork,
it'll help retain it so it stays juicier.
But it'll also allow sauces and stuff to adhere.
It also makes the stir frying process much briefer.
So if you have a relatively weak stove top,
or if you're working with electric or induction
and can't get that really big flame,
velveting it before you stir fry
will allow you to make sure that it's fully cooked
before it goes into the pan.
And so you won't get that problem where
it starts to exude moisture and bubble and steam
instead of really fry.
All right, so this is what we're looking for.
Now, you could set this aside for, you know,
in the fridge overnight
and it will, the marinade will go in deeper.
It'll get more tender and more juicy.
We're just gonna set it aside
while we prep the remaining ingredients
and it's still gonna come out fine.
All right, so now we have our meat marinated.
We're gonna be velveting that in a second,
so now we're gonna get our other ingredients going.
So I'm gonna start with the sauce.
This recipe is a very, very simple sauce.
So it's about 1 1/2 tablespoons of light soy sauce,
1 1/2 tablespoons of water,
if you had it, you could also use chicken stock.
Andrew, you have chicken stock?
- [Andrew] Yeah, I got chicken stock.
- I already poured the water so it doesn't matter.
- [Andrew] Actually, you know,
I made some really gorgeous shrimp stock
if you're interested in that.
- Oh yeah?
- [Andrew] I don't know if that's helpful.
- Sure.
Do you have more soy sauce?
Yeah, let's use your shrimp shrimp stock,
hide shellfish in dishes where you don't expect it.
So we're doing a very simple sauce of shrimp stock.
If you don't have shrimp stock at home,
you can ask Andrew to make it for you.
So about a tablespoon and a half of shrimp stock
and an equal amount of soy sauce,
and then a teeny bit of white pepper again.
All right, so we got our sauce.
We're gonna make a little cornstarch slurry,
and this is what we're gonna use
to thicken up the dish at the end
and make sure that the sauce is adhering to the meat.
So we're gonna be about a tablespoon of water
and a teaspoon of corn starch.
So one of the things I did in my book
for any of the stir fry recipes was I,
before you start, I have this like, list
of all the different bowls that you should have,
including all the empty bowls, all the empty plates,
all the things that, every single thing you should have
by your station before you start stir frying,
because that is the most important step in stir frying
is being sure that you got everything ready before you go.
So let's see, I've got my marinated pork,
I'm gonna finish velveting that.
Ginger, garlic, and chilies.
I love cutting garlic.
I really like doing this, which is when you have
a nice, flat Chinese style cleaver, like this
is just whacking the garlic.
So you whack it firm,
and then you give it a little slide,
that way the garlic doesn't go flying everywhere.
All right, now, ginger,
we're just gonna be slicing these.
so these are actually gonna end up
sort of as whole slices in the dish.
This is some very young ginger
so the skin is the nice and soft, tender,
so you don't have to peel it.
So you can do it exactly the same as the garlic.
You cut it into a coin and then you just,
give it a little smash
and you can see it's basically minced itself already.
You just kind of gotta break it up a little bit.
Garlic, ginger, and pickled chilies in a bowl.
The recipe calls for these Thai-style chickled pillies,
(all laughing) pickled chilies.
What we're using today is these pickled jalapenos
that Andrew did himself.
All right, so moving to the cucumber now.
Wanna get the seeds out.
When you're prepping vegetables, especially for stir fries,
you want to get rid of
any of the sort of really watery bits.
So particularly for cucumber, you know,
sometimes you want to take these out
just for the sake of presentation
or concentrating flavor or whatever.
With the stir fry it's really essential
because the seeds have a ton of water
and water is sort of the enemy of high heat.
All the energy that it takes to take a drop of water
from zero degrees to a hundred degrees Celsius,
so from freezing to boiling,
it takes five times more energy
to take it from there to evaporating.
So any kind of excess liquid that's in your pan
is gonna really rapidly drop the heat.
And we're gonna
cut 'em into kind of 1/4 inch-ish slices.
Okay, so the recipe calls for putting the cucumbers
and the scallions in one bowl
as those are going to go into the wok at the same time.
So I'm cutting these scallions into
a sort of one inch segments here.
So we got our sauce, we got our pork,
we got our cornstarch slurry.
We got our cucumbers and scallions,
we got our garlic, ginger and pickled chilies.
All right, so this is where I'm gonna start
the velveting process.
So this is our meat that's been marinated.
Remember it has egg whites and cornstarch in the marinade,
egg whites, baking soda, and corn starch in the marinade,
along with a few other things,
but those egg whites and the corn starch
are the important part when we're talking about velveting.
So got a wok full of simmering water here.
I'm basically just gonna put the meat in,
Break it up with some chopsticks.
The idea is that you want everything to be
in individual pieces.
Because we had that sesame oil in there,
that's gonna actually help it separate quite easily
so you shouldn't have like a big clump of meat.
And this only takes about 20 seconds or so,
10 to 20 seconds.
And we're done, that's it.
So here I'm gonna pick 'em up,
transfer 'em onto a tray.
And the idea, when we put 'em on this tray,
we wanna spread it out.
And the idea is that they're gonna steam dry
while we get everything else ready.
And so by the time we're ready to stir fry,
the pork will be nice and dry.
- So this is being velveted here.
- Yes, so this has already been velveted,
so it'd be what's called passing through.
So essentially would just pass it through the hot liquid.
- Just like in life. - Yep.
(gentle music)
- Okay, so we are ready to cook.
So I'm gonna have my ingredients here
in the order that I'm going to be adding them to the pan.
So I'm using chicken fat to cook with,
but any kind of oil will work.
The recipe in the book calls for
stir frying the pork, raw, first, in a couple of batches.
Because we're doing this velveting process,
we don't have to do that step.
So it's already cooked.
So now we're gonna cook the other ingredients
and then add the pork back in at the end.
So when you're cooking in a wok,
you want to always heat it over high heat like this,
just until it starts to smoke.
I mean, you're basically just using that
as a temperature gauge.
So once it starts smoking, you know,
you're at like, 500 plus degrees or so.
And then, depending on what you're cooking,
you're gonna lower the temperature.
I'm gonna lower this down just a little bit.
Some recipe will lower it a lot.
But you lower it, you add your fat,
you swirl it in.
And then you wanna basically immediately start cooking.
So I've got my aromatics going in.
Those are just to infuse the oil with flavor.
That's gonna take about 15 seconds.
And then I have my vegetables going in.
So that's my cucumbers, my scallions here.
So you can see it's a, yeah, it's a toss fry
and I do drop some things sometimes.
- [Andrew] You gotta be comfortable with dropping-
- The dog course. - Yeah.
- And now my meat is gonna go right back in.
And then finally, my sauce is gonna go in.
And when I add my sauce, what I'm gonna do
is add it around,
so there's a couple ways you can do it, right?
You can pour it right over the center,
or you can pour it around the edges.
And when you pour over the center what happens is
it basically stays raw.
It kind of trickles down slowly and it reduces slowly.
Whereas if you pour around the sides,
it hits that hot metal first,
and you're sort of searing it
and you develop these different flavors than,
so you wanna hear that sizzle when you add your sauce.
- It's almost as if the pan is a steel drum
when you're using different parts of it
to make different-
- Different effects, exactly.
So now we're just gonna add
about 1/2 of our corn starch slurry to start,
and this is just to thicken it up to the right texture.
So what I'm looking for is for it
to basically just coat the ingredients
in a sort of glossy sheen.
So, to me, that still looks a little bit
like there's a little bit too much sauce,
I'll let reduce slightly,
and then I'll also add a little bit more thickener to it.
All right, so that's the level of sauce I'm looking for.
Where I pull my spatula forward
and a little trickle comes down,
but it's not like, swimming in it.
(mellow music)
Hot cucumbers, right?
- I love hot cucumbers, I never-
You think like, ugh, hot cucumbers,
but then you're like, ooh, hot cucumbers.
- Yeah, and especially when you cook 'em,
stir fry 'em like that,
they stay crunchy in the middle,
but they pick up just a little bit of that
kind of shiny flavor on the outside.
- Something that's so hard to get over
when you're a new cook is like,
a lot of flavor, not all flavor,
but a lot of flavor comes from blasting stuff with heat.
- Yeah.
- You can only do that if you properly mise.
- Right.
- You need everything chopped,
you need everything in a bowl ready to dump.
Otherwise it's gonna burn by the time you-
- I mean, yeah, like with my garlic
and chilies and ginger at the beginning,
like, even in like the 10 seconds I was talking,
you could see it starting to turn just a little,
like, if I had left it there
for literally three seconds longer, it would've been burnt.
- So everything, you are incapable of making this dish
unless everything is ready to go in that pan
by the time the heat kisses it.
- Yeah, you don't wanna have to move from your,
you want your hand to always be on here,
like, within hands reach.
- This is what you want, folks.
You're cooking at home for any recipe virtually,
as long as you're starting out,
get everything looking like this.
- Yeah.
- Measure it out.
Speaking of which-
- Rock out with your wok out?
- I want to eat, ugh. (both laughing)
(mellow electronic music)