Since the unification of the northern and southern dynasties in China 1,500 years ago, Chinese chefs have been making fried rice. And if you have never stopped to watch a master chef go to work preparing this dish, you are missing out.
Fried rice is prepared in a wok using a tossing technique that enables food to cook without burning at temperatures of 1,200 degrees Celsius — that’s 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
And there is a deep, beautiful, ancient art to this. But as our guest will explain, there’s a whole lot of science, too.
HungTang Ko is a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech University and his research is gorgeously interdisciplinary. His major research interest is in biophysics and he has published a whole bunch of stuff on fire ants, but he’s gotten a lot of attention lately on his work examining the physics of wok tossing, which was recently published on the cover of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.