10 Must Have Cooking Utensils (Asian Cooking)

There’s nothing like that moment when you taste an Asian cooking you made at home and pump your fist in the air because it tastes just like take-out! It’s not hard to get that authentic flavor; all it takes are the right ingredients and the right utensils.

If you wish to take up Asian cooking, you may want to have the following cooking utensils on hand.

1. A Chinese cleaver has a rectangular shape and can be made from wood, plastic, stainless steel or high carbon steel. It is heavy and thick and is designed to chop through bone.

2. A cutting board is used to protect your worktop when cutting vegetables and chopping meat. It is useful to help put your prepared ingredients into a bowl or wok. They are usually made from wood, bamboo or acrylic.

3. A wok can be found in the kitchen of almost every Chinese family. It is a multi-functional piece of cookware as they can be used for deep frying, stir frying, roasting, steaming, stewing, braising and even boiling. They are usually made from carbon steel or iron.

4. A wok shovel is designed for stir frying and scooping. They are usually made from metal, wood or bamboo.

5. A Chinese scoop strainer is used primarily for straining, skimming and deep frying. They usually have a round head made from wire or perforated stainless steel with a long bamboo or wooden handle.

6. A ladle is used for serving soup or stew from a pot or wok to a bowl. It can be made of many materials – stainless steel, aluminum, plastic, wood or bamboo.

7. Long chopsticks as well as ordinary chopsticks are used for either fishing food out of a wok or pot or eating noodles, rice and other food. They can also be used for stir frying, beating eggs and mixing ingredients.

8. A rice cooker is an electric cooker that is used for pressure boiling or steaming rice, and are much safer than pressure cookers. As rice is a staple food in Asian cooking, many people use their rice cooker every day. Now a days, rice cookers have multiple settings that will enable people to stew meat, cook porridge, steam eggs, heat milk, etc.

9. A pressure cooker is used to cook food faster than conventional methods. Some are electric, and work on the basic principle of using steam pressure created by boiling liquid inside the closed cooker to cook food quickly. You can cook many things in a pressure cooker such as rice, porridge and stew.

10. Steaming baskets are used a lot in Chinese cooking. Many different foods are steamed including dumplings, fish, meat and vegetables. They are often made of bamboo or metal and can usually be stacked in layers to save time and energy.