Over the years, I did not pay much attention to the precise amount of cooking oil that I use in stir-fry. When people ask me how much cooking oil that they should use in stir-fry, I just told them to use enough to coat the food ingredients that you are cooking. It was not until I started to keep track of calories of the individual ingredients that I used to cook my dishes. I was surprised by how much cooking oil contributed to the total calories of a dish. I was surprised to find that for 2 tablespoons of cooking oil, the calories contribution could be about 65% of the total calories of the dish. The mass of the cooking oil is probably less than 5%. Therefore, I started to ask the question of how I could reduce cooking oil usage in stir-fry, and I found a large body of literature on this topic, as well as a friend who has been using this technique for sometime. The technique is known as the water frying technique. This technique uses a small amount of water during frying to keep the temperature of the cooking surface low to prevent food from burning. However, it keeps the temperature high enough so that the Maillard reaction could still take place in generating flavor molecules. After testing the method numerous times under different conditions, I am convinced that the method works well and provides a viable option for reducing cooking oil usage in stir-fry. This video presents one of my tests in cooking a dish with broccoli and carrots.
