Techniques: How to choose and use a wok

Ching: I'm going to arm you with an essential, which is the wok. There are so many to choose from. If you don't have gas, you can get electric woks. For gas hobs, there are non-stick varieties and, the sort I'd most recommend, the wooden-handled carbon steel wok. Long wooden handle, that's unseasoned. And seasoning the wok just means that you want to create a blackened effect on the wok. It's a coating and that is going to give it a gorgeous 'wokai' flavour.

Katherine: You prefer that over these ones?

Ching: I like seasoning a wok. It's very traditional. It takes me back to my grandparents and to, you know, my mother teaching me how to cook for the first time. But nowadays time is short and I appreciate that. So I actually have two, I also have a non-stick wok. To really get the wok to sit on your gas stove, get a wok stand.

Katherine: Where do you get wok stands from? I've never even seen a wok stand.

Ching: Well they look like this and you can get them in any cook shop. And then just place that over there. Be careful, obviously, of the flames. And this just helps to sit the wok nicely.

Katherine: Ok, clever

Ching: Because otherwise, you know, the food will go everywhere. It's a hazard. We want to get some oil in there. So you could use groundnut oil or vegetable oil and I'm just going to give that a swirl. Can you see how it's automatically changed colour? I haven't done anything and it's that fast, because we've got a good gas burner.

Just a little bit of kitchen paper and some wooden tongs - you don't want to burn your hands. And then just keep rubbing it like that. You see the blackened effect? One of these woks, when you start seasoning them, they're going to look like this. That's been done, you see, and this has got this 'wokai' coating. The smoky, blackened effect, the 'breath' of the wok, the 'chi'. When you cook food - you like barbequed food? - it's a lot of the smokiness. That's what you want.

Katherine: Same thing. Wow I'd never heard of that.

Ching: Smoke is good. So ten or fifteen minutes of doing this and your wok will be ready.