Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge

Young’s most ambitious book and the winner of the 2011 James Beard Foundation Award for International Cooking. Where The Breath of a Wok focuses on traditional Chinese wok cooking, this book follows stir-frying through the Chinese diaspora, documenting how the technique transformed as Chinese cooks built new lives in Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, Peru, India, France, and America.

Why Read This Next

After you have learned the fundamentals of wok cooking from The Breath of a Wok, this book expands your understanding of what stir-frying can be. The more than 100 recipes include Jamaican stir-fried chicken with chayote, Cuban fried rice, Peruvian stir-fried filet mignon, and Indian Chinese chili chicken, alongside traditional Cantonese, Sichuan, Hunan, Shanghai, and Fujianese dishes.

Young organizes the book around different stir-frying styles: dry, moist, clear, and velvet. Understanding these categories changes how you approach the wok, giving you a framework for improvisation rather than just a list of recipes to follow. Over eighty full-color photographs illustrate the different techniques.

The human stories are as compelling as the food. Young interviewed exceptional Chinese cooks from around the world, and their accounts of adapting traditional skills to new ingredients and new cultures add a dimension you will not find in any other cookbook.

What to Expect

A 313-page hardcover that is roughly 80 percent recipes and 20 percent technique and cultural context. The writing is warmer and more narrative than The Breath of a Wok. If you appreciate food writing that connects cooking to history and community, this book delivers on every page.