Grace Young

Cookbook author, The Breath of a Wok and Stir-Frying to the
Sky’s Edge
New York, New York

Rarely is a bite of food so revelatory that it changes the way you

think about an entire cuisine. Such was the case, though, when

renowned Chinese cookbook author Grace Young offered me,

straight from the wok, a spoonful of her fried rice.

“Chinese restaurant food is horrific,” she tells me as I eat

spoonful after spoonful of her rice. “They oil-blanch their meat

and use MSG to camouflage funky flavors. Chinese home cooking

is all about pure flavors.”

And that’s precisely what’s so remarkable about this rice: the

flavors are crystal clear. There’s dried scallop, shiitake

mushrooms, and Chinese sausage, each like a buried treasure of

flavor. And the rice itself is perfectly cooked, the grains firm and

not at all gummy or greasy, the whole thing light as air and yet

wonderfully filling.

Credit goes to Young, of course, but more important, credit

goes to her instrument of choice: the wok.

Young’s wok is not expensive: it costs twelve dollars at K. K.

Discount on Mulberry Street in New York. It’s a fourteen-inch

carbon-steel flat-bottomed wok, and those are details you should