Okay, I can’t believe I’m starting entry with such a lame pun, but my tribute to the Chinese domestic kitchen continues. Next exhibit: the best two-burner gas stoves on the planet! You may be able to guess this from the picture: the Chinese believe in focusing some serious heat on their food. We’re talking some serious kilocalories here. (Joules? BTUs? Sorry if I’m not feeling very scientific right now.)
A further digression: some of you may know that my first job after college was as a stir-fry cook at LeeAnn Chin’s Carryout Chinese Cuisine in St. Paul, MN. While the food there wasn’t anything special, (okay, the polar opposite of special) I did come away from that job with the illusion that I knew how to stir-fry stuff. Every time I invited people over to my house for Chinese food, though, I always was secretly disappointed. People would like what I cooked, but there was always something missing.
Now I know - that missing something was heat. Lots and lots of it. Enough to get that cube of tofu perfectly brown on the outside and piping hot in the middle. If our microwave worked, it would lose the leftover reheating race to our wok every time. No wonder it stopped working after our second week here. “Ah, but what about the oven?”, you ask. Well, there, um, isn’t any. Zippo, zero. They don’t believe in ‘em, I guess. We do have a small electric “oven” on our tabletop that looks like a toaster oven on steroids, but that’s the subject of another post.
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