There are two good tools you will need in addition to a wok, a steamer and a cleaver. It is a good idea to have a large skimmer, preferably with a wooden or plastic handle, and a long pair of cooking chopsticks for handling the food. Once you can handle chopsticks you will find them better than an ordinary metal fork when you are cooking in hot oil, for they do not conduct heat as metal does and they keep your hand a long way from the heat.
In general chopsticks are extraordinarily useful; at a Chinese meal they are employed for eating everything but soup, for which porcelain spoons are provided. You can even cut tender meat with chopsticks and, if you are very adept, remove shreds that cling to a bone. The Chinese word for these tools is kuai-tse, which sounds like the word for "quick little boys", and that presumably is where we get our term, because in pidgin English a foreigner says "Chop, chop" when he means "Quick, quick!"-possibly a corruption of a Cantonese phrase, "kop, kop", that means the same thing.
It's a funny thing but most westerners when trying to learn to eat with chopsticks, wonder why on earth they aren't used to pierce your food. Well that is what led to the invention of the fork, because our ancestors used pointed sticks exactly for that purpose.
It may well be that the Chinese chopsticks remained in use because of the problems of making a fire, and keeping it going. Fuel was always in short supply in old China, so to cook the food quicker it was cut up, diced, shredded, before it was cooked to shorten the cooking process. If the food is cut up before cooking then that takes away the need to use a fork and knife.
If you then add to this that the way Chinese use their chopsticks like a shovel, is much more efficient anyway than using a fork, and in fact you can eat that much quicker. Eating Chinese food with a fork is just like trying to eat peas off a fork, very difficult indeed.
Put another way, if you want to cook and eat Chinese food, then learn to use chopsticks!!
Ian has been researching Chinese Food for a long time now. Come and visit his newest website over at http://www.digitalkitchenscalesinfo.com, which helps everyone find the best Digital Kitchen Scales and information about the best prices
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