Why You May Not Need a Wok

For many people, the image of someone cooking Chinese food usually has the person deftly tossing stir-fry ingredients in a gigantic wok as dramatic flames leap beneath it. But as someone who grew up regularly eating delicious stir-fries that my Taiwanese mom cooked in a beat-up nonstick frying pan on an electric range, I’ve always felt that woks were unnecessary.

Plenty of experts, such as J. Kenji López-Alt, Grace Young, and Fuchsia Dunlop, will tell you that stir-frying in a frying pan just isn’t the same as what you get from a wok—that you can’t get that wok hei, the evanescent smokiness you might find in the dishes at a Chinese restaurant. But then again, most people just don’t have a stove at home that can output enough heat to stir-fry properly in a wok. Among even high-end ranges you find in the US, the power burner puts out at most 20,000 to 25,000 Btu, while commercial wok ranges produce five times that. (And if you don’t have a flat-bottomed wok, you’ll need a wok ring as well.)

There are some hacks for getting your wok to perform the way it should: You could cook over a chimney starter on a grill, as López-Alt does, or you could use a turkey fryer or outdoor cooker. (As with all off-label use, we recommend exercising caution—especially where fire is concerned.)

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But you could also do what my mom does (and what I do), which is to stir-fry in batches using a skillet and combine it all at the end. Yes, it’s okay to do this in a nonstick pan at medium heat: you’re not going to get any closer to wok hei with stainless steel or cast iron, not without the requisite Btu. No, it’s not going to taste just like it does at a good Chinese restaurant, but that’s okay. I think of stir-frying without a wok the way I do about making pizza without a pizza oven: If you’re really committed to a certain outcome, investing the time, effort, and real estate can be worth it, but if you’re like me, having a pretty delicious stir-fry or pizza on my table is better than no stir-fry or pizza at all.