Szechwan Eggplant, cooked on Big Kahuna Burner

[pepperhead212]

I made a triple recipe of Szechwan eggplant on the Bug Kahuna Burner today. I decided to use this because even a 20k burner on my range would not hold a candle to this, with the 65k burner, and I did not want to heat up my house!

Here's that Big Kahuna Burner, that is the best thing I have ever found for wok cooking!
Big Kahuna burner, with 20 inch wok. by pepperhead212, on Flickr

This is one of my favorite dishes of all time, with all that garlic in it - I used 24 cloves today! Also used almost 5 cups of chopped scallions - the last ones from my garden, so I planted the 3/4" root I cut off of each of them. I did something different, which turned out really good - as one friend said "You outdid yourself today!" I wanted to put this on something besides white rice, and I often put it on pasta, but I added some more stuff, for more nutrition. I cooked 12 oz of black chickpeas (kala jeera) in the IP, first for about 6 hours, then 50 min on pressure cook, but then I still wanted to add more, so I found a jar with about 7/8 c of whole oats, and dumped that in with the chick peas, and cooked 12 min, and let it reduce naturally. That, plus a pound of pasta was just about the right amount for this large dish.

Here's the photo of the final dish, plus an album of a bunch of photos, taken while I was cooking it.
Finished dish. by pepperhead212, on Flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/91097628@N06/albums/72157710189600757

While making this, we also made a batch of that favorite lentil salad of mine. Funny thing was, when a guy came in early, and I was cooking those chick peas, he wanted to know what "meat" I was cooking in there! And later, when cooking those lentils, with freekeh and black cardamom in it, somebody else came in, and thought that I had sausage in the pot, even when he looked at it! Funny how you can fool people with these unusual ingredients, even when you're not trying to.

I put a friend to work to cut up all the cherry tomatoes I had, for the lentil salad, since he looked bored, just sitting there. He kept finding another bowl with more cherries in it, and I'd say something like "yeah, cut those up too!" We didn't even touch the lentil salad (well, except for all the tasting I had to do! lol), but some went home with them.

We didn't even touch the lentil salad (well, except for all the tasting I had to do! lol), but some went home with them.

 

[bbqcoder]

Looks impressive! So you don’t find that the burner puts out too much heat for wok cooking?

I agree that it does look like you have sausage in the pot. LOL!

 

[pepperhead212]

You didn't see the pot with the lentils, BBQ, but that did sort of look like meat in the pot. That had channa dal yellow lentils, and freekeh - a type of cracked wheat - looked sort of like ground meat on the lentils!

The 65k output definitely isn't too high for wok cooking. Those burners you see in Chinese restaurants are around 100k, sometimes even more! When I was setting up my kitchen, back in '83, I was actually looking into a range with a wok hole and 4 other burners, and that burner was 85k. I really wanted a convection oven - relatively unheard of in retail ranges back then, and even in commercial ranges Wolf was the only one that I could get a convection oven in. The 20k burners were about 3 times the output of what I had in any kitchen previously, but even that is not enough to increase a stir fry recipe, like I did today.

I remember a show, I think one of Anthony Bourdain's, in a Hong Kong restaurant, where the wok burner was 130k, and you could see the chef had to move that food incredibly fast, and add things faster than most of us could think about what we had to add next! He said that it gave the food more of that incredible wok hei flavor than he had ever had before. One drawback - the extreme heat of the burner made it necessary to replace the wok about once a month! The metal was so hot that it was slowly worn away on the bottom - something you and I will never see!