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Kenji López-Alt devotes an entire book to a single piece of cookware and somehow manages not to make it feel excessive, the equivalent on our bookshelf of talking about The Perfect Spoon with Jonas, our store manager in Stockholm. The first 100-odd pages are about heat, oil, cookware and technique before a single recipe appears.
Wok hei means roughly the breath of the wok and is the smoky aroma created when oil vaporises and meets the flame at very high heat. Kenji is honest about the fact that an ordinary domestic hob comes nowhere near a restaurant burner, and then devotes the book to what you can actually do about it. Cook in smaller batches, heat the wok for longer than you think and stop stirring everything all the time.
He also argues for carbon steel over non-stick coatings and for a flat-bottomed wok if you cook on a Western-style hob. That is advice that costs less than the book and makes a bigger difference.
Nor is the content exclusively Chinese. There is Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Indian food here, in other words the whole part of the world that cooks with a wok.
The follow-up to The Food Lab, and every bit its equal.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 672
Language: English
First published: 2022
