Author: Anna Kusmer / Source: Atlas Obscura
Although it might look simple, cooking fried rice with a wok is a subtle art and an even subtler science. Rice grains need to be in constant motion, moving up and sideways, flying through the air without leaving the bowl.
The Mandarin word is chǎo, where ingredients are tossed in hot oil, cooking but never burning.“You can’t eat at a Chinese restaurant, at least a good one, without eating some kind of stir fry, usually made in a wok” says David Hu, a fluid dynamics scientist at Georgia Tech. “It’s been around for thousands of years and we still don’t know how they got it to work so well.”
Hu and his graduate student Hungtang Ko have been spending the past year trying to understand the science of the wok. Their expertise in fluid dynamics allows them to examine the liquid-like nature of thousands of rice grains circling the wok surface in constant motion. “It’s like a wave,” says Ko. “With certain movements you can control the trajectory of many rice grains at the same time.”
Before starting his Ph.D., Ko spent a year in rural Taiwan teaching English. He grew curious about the mechanics of the sizzling, churning woks being tossed in local restaurants, and Hu, his future Ph.D. advisor, encouraged him to take some videos that they could later examine in the lab.
Ko focused on two local chefs who learned how to cook at a Taiwanese culinary school and had been…
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