Flag of the People’s Republic of China. Flag of the Republic of China. Chinese cooking technique in which ingredients are fried in a small amount of very chinese stir fry oil while being stirred or tossed in a wok.
The technique originated in China and in recent centuries has spread into other parts of Asia and the West. Stir frying and Chinese food have been recommended as both healthy and appealing for their skillful use of vegetables, meats, and fish which are moderate in their fat content and sauces which are not overly rich, provided calories are kept at a reasonable level. The term chao appears for the first time in the sense of “stir frying” in the Qimin Yaoshu, a sixth-century agricultural manual, including in a recipe for scrambled eggs. Historically, stir frying was not as important a technique as boiling or steaming, since the oil needed for stir frying was expensive. Stir frying was brought to America by early Chinese immigrants, and has been used in non-Asian cuisine. The term “stir fry” as a translation for “chao” was coined in the 1945 book How To Cook and Eat in Chinese, by the linguist Yuen Ren Chao.
Roughly speaking, ch’ao may be defined as a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning. We shall call it ‘stir-fry’ or ‘stir’ for short. The nearest to this in western cooking is sauté. Because stir-frying has such critical timing and is done so quickly, it can be called ‘blitz-cooking. Broadly speaking, there are two primary techniques: chao and bao. Both techniques use high heat, but chao adds a liquid and the ingredients are softer, where as bao stir fries are more crispy because of the Maillard reaction.
