You’ve been cooking fried rice wrong! Flip it out of the wok like pancakes every 0.32 seconds for the best flavour, say scientists
- Perfect wok technique involves pulling pan towards you before pushing it away
- Another is using a ‘seesaw’ motion to tilt the pan backwards and forwards
- This should be done every 0.32 seconds, without removing wok from the stove
It is bad news for lazy cooks or those without much upper arm strength.
Scientists have discovered the secret of the perfect stir-fry and it means tossing the rice every third of a second.
The best wok technique involves two motions – pulling the pan towards you before pushing it away, and a ‘seesaw’ motion to tilt it backwards and forwards. This should be done rapidly every 0.32 seconds, without ever removing the wok from the stove.
Scientists say secret of the perfect stir-fry is tossing rice every third of a second
To work out the physics of a stir-fry, researchers filmed two Taiwanese cooks with more than 20 years of experience.
The technique has been worked out by mechanical engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology and could be used to programme a new generation of cooking robots to make egg-fried rice.
This might help the 60 per cent of Asian cooks who suffer muscular problems in their shoulders from cooking with woks each year.
But the findings may dismay home cooks who prefer to leave their wok for minutes at a time with only occasional stirring.