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Stir-frying

Stir-frying is an order-of-operations problem that happens to use fire. The whole cook takes two to four minutes; everything that matters — what goes in when, at what heat, and which flavorings go on top at the very end — is decided before the wok is lit.

The mise en place is the recipe

The food spends seconds to minutes in the wok, so if you're reaching for a container, mincing garlic, or diluting the sauce while the vegetables cook, the vegetables are already overdone and the oil is already cold. Every element is prepped in order, in small bowls, and staged at arm's reach: hard vegetables, the protein, the aromatics (scallion whites, garlic, ginger, dried chili), the tender vegetables, then the sauce. A small dish of finished flavorings — fresh herbs, sesame oil, a squeeze of vinegar, the scallion greens — goes on the very last seat, because that's where they go in.

The sauce is mixed in a bowl before cooking starts: soy or fish sauce, a little sugar or sweetener, a splash of stock or water, and a spoon of cornflour in cold liquid if the recipe wants it glossy. Stirred sauce in the bowl is thirty seconds; thickened sauce cooked out of the wok while you look for the cornflour is a dish in trouble, because you can't fix the vegetables after that.

The order of the cook

Read as a line, the dish is built from the outside in, from what can take the most heat to what takes the least:

Get the oil to temperature and confirm with a test (shimmer, a scallion bit) — the setup in Wok & heat.
The longest cook first. Hard vegetables — carrot, broccoli, cabbage, root things — or a protein that needs time. These take the longest at the given heat, and they can take the most of it. If the protein is a thin cut or already seared / velveted, it goes in its own step, quickly, and comes back out so the oil isn't diluted.
Mid-cook vegetables. The rest of the vegetables that don't need full heat — leafy things that wilt, stem-and-leaf greens, bean sprouts. Thirty seconds to a couple of minutes.
The aromatics — now, at medium heat. Garlic, shallot, ginger, scallion white, dried chili. These burn in seconds at high heat, so the flame drops to medium and they go in for their ten to twenty seconds — just until they're fragrant and their raw edges are cooked off. This is where most stir-fry flavor actually lives.
The sauce. Into the middle of the wok, off the direct heat, then back onto it, tipping the wok so the sauce glazes the food. Thirty seconds — until it's glossy, moves off the food a touch at a time, and the liquid has mostly evaporated into steam rather than puddling.
Off the heat. Into the bowl of finished flavorings: fresh herbs, sesame oil, lime, the remaining scallion green. These are done for a minute, and they're volatile — their whole job is to be bright and fresh on top of what's already cooked. Stir and serve immediately.

Why the aromatics and the top-dressings are at the end

Garlic, shallot, ginger, fresh chili, basil, mint, lime leaf — everything with a fresh, volatile edge — is built out of sulfur- and terpene compounds that burn fast at high heat and turn bitter, and lose their bright character if they simmer at low heat for a long time. Their flavor peaks in the ten to twenty seconds after they touch hot fat, and the volatile top-dressings (sesame oil, vinegar, fresh herbs) peak in the seconds after they're added off the heat. The wok is the engine; those flavorings are the thing you're putting on it, and they go in where the temperature is doing what they need to do — hot enough to wake them up, not hot enough to burn them.

Motion: tilt, don't flip

"Tossing" a wok looks like a flip, but at home you don't flip the wok — you tilt it and let the food slide. The wok handle is in your non-dominant hand, the utensil (or the second handle, if the wok has one) in the dominant, and the move is: tip the bowl back over the fire to let the oil and food run down, straighten, repeat. The food gets turned over and re-oiled without anyone having to flip a two-liter pot of hot oil. It's the same heat control, the same "food in the oil, not on the metal" principle as in Wok & heat.

Failure modes

Steamed, grey, watery vegetables. The batch was too big, the food was wet, or the heat dropped when it went in. Batch it, dry it, bring the heat back up between rounds (see Wok & heat). The wok will come back to temperature between batches; the food's texture won't come back.
Bitter garlic or scorched aromatics. They went in at full heat, too early. Aromatics are the last thing in the wok, added at medium heat for ten to twenty seconds — their job is to be fragrant, not to caramelize or burn.
Pale, flat dish, no "wok" to it. The pyrolytic, smoky note is missing because the heat never reached the oil and the water on the food didn't flash off and let the oil break down a little. More heat, less food at once, and let the oil shimmer before committing.
Sauce pooling, food sitting in a puddle. The sauce went in too early or too thick. Add the sauce near the end, let it glaze and reduce for about thirty seconds, and serve while the wok is still moving — a stir-fry should be on the plate within seconds of coming off the heat.

In practice

Once the heat and the order are settled, the dish is whatever you put in the wok: a bean-sprout-and-minced-egg stir-fry, a scallion-and-noodle cook, a vegetable-and-fish sauce dish. The Chinese and Japanese sections build most of their everyday plates on this exact sequence, and the Thai curries and pad dishes are the same order with a different paste and a different finish — Curry & pastes is where those flavor bases come from.