Along the highways cooks magic meals for travellers from the most meagre of ingredients, a skill close to alchemy. They don’t rely on expensive and difficult to find spices, opting instead for spices they can grow or forage.
Weighing is by far the most consistent and accurate way to measure ingredients for a recipe. All the recipes are done in metric and US pounds and ounces for your convenience. There isn’t really a rule other than to say you should choose the units of measurement you find the most comfortable with and stick with that.
Using cups is always a bit hit and miss, there are so many variables between weight and volume it’s difficult to be accurate every time. You won’t find cups used very often on this website simply because I stick to measurements that I know work.
Using teaspoons and tablespoons as measures makes sense, they’re easily to hand and as long as you give your ingredients a quick stir, before measuring them, you will be accurate enough. If you use measuring spoons then it’s always best to scrape the top flat, not pack your ingredients down.
If you’re a confident cook who shuns the scales, I’m with you. When I cook at home I don’t use any formal measuring. I’ve always cooked by eye and it wasn’t until I started writing recipes down for other people that I had to buy a set of scales so you will find nearly all the recipes very forgiving.
Heating oil is one of the most important skills in cookery, however, don’t be fooled into thinking that achieving the right temperature is tricky. You really don’t need perfect judgement, cooking that way would make even the most experienced chefs nervous.
The most accurate method of checking your oil temperature is a thermometer. If you don’t have a thermometer, and I don’t use one, here are my favourite methods.
The chopstick / wooden spoon method
To test the temperature of oil for stir-frying dip a wooden chopstick or the tip of a wooden spoon into the oil. You can use any wooden utensil, the important thing is that whatever you use it has to be food safe and unvarnished.
When you dip the chopstick into the oil, it will start to fry, and you can tell how hot the oil is by the bubbles.
The wok method
This method works with a steel or iron wok and when you are only heating a small amount of oil. It’s not suitable for pans with a nonstick coating or deep frying.
Heat your wok until the metal starts to change colour or smoke a little. Pour the oil into the pan and gently swirl it around to coat the bottom ⅓ of the pan. It’s ready to start stir frying straight away.
Deep frying
Using a thermometer really is best for this, testing the oil with a little batter does work but it’s by no means fail safe. All my recipes will tell you the cooking temperature for your oil.
The smoke method
Many recipes say to heat your oil until it’s smoking, this is woefully inaccurate and requires you to know the smoke point of different oils. Unless you are already comfortable with smoking oil I don’t recommend it. Smoke means your oil is burning so you have to rely on the food you add to bring the temperature down.