If the stir fry is something like Pad Thai or stir fried rice, then I will use a fork. For any dish with long noodles or rice I use forks, but in other cases I will use chopsticks. I believe in making it as easy as possible for myself. I generally do not make rice that is sticky enough (except when I make sushi) for chopsticks to be practical, but if I am in a restaurant that serves sufficiently sticky rice with the food, then I will use chopsticks. If I am at a Thai or Vietnamese restaurant that sets the table with forks, then I generally will use the fork.

At Japanese restaurants I always use chopsticks, and if I have sushi at home, then I also use chopsticks, but that is not a stir fry, which is what you asked about. I also always use chopsticks for tempura, and I make this at home fairly frequently.

When you are at home, whatever utensil is easiest for you is the correct one.

I use a fork always.

I can use chopsticks in a pinch but am not consistently proficient going plate/bowl to mouth. Eating is very important to me - forks are my friends. 🙃

Depends on the food. Sir fry with noodles?Chopsticks.But over rice? Fork or it would never make it to my mouth.

I'm really good with chopsticks. I own a set of bamboo ones, with writing on them and silver tipped ends. But....unless I'm at a restaurant...I forget to use them. So...no. I don't stir fry with them.

If I'm given chop sticks I'll use them and I'm not half bad. I enjoy using them occasionally; it's quaint to be be "culturally correct" I suppose. But if you didn't grow up with them and aren't comfortable using them, I won't judge your lack of dexterity if you ask for a fork. Food's about nourishment and enjoyment, not stressing out about it. i'm with Miss Manners on this one.

Edit - Oops just realized the question was about home cooking. I'm not likely to dig out the chop sticks.

Chopsticks - I like the plain wooden kind.

Chopsticks. Somehow it just doesn't taste right with a fork.

Fork. I can use chopsticks, but prefer a fork.

I use both.

Chopsticks

We generally use chopsticks with stir fries at home and when we eat out. We were fairly good with them before our trip to Japan (many moons ago) and became expert while there for 2 weeks. We can even eat noodle soups with chopsticks (and pick up the bowl to slurp the broth, just as the Japanese do). Kind of fun!

I can use chopsticks but I do not serve my stir-fry in the small bowls that are what you use to pick the bowl up and scrape the food into your mouth Asian style so I use a fork at home.

" scrape the food into your mouth Asian style "

I don't think there's any such thing as "Asian style". Maybe if you're describing a sometimes Chinese pratice of putting cooked food on top of a small bowl of rice and eating from that. Non-Chinese eating in a restaurant usually put their food on a plate and eat from there. With chopsticks. And when eating sushi or sashimi, for instance, or the diversity of Asian non-stir fried food, the food remains on the plate and the plate on the table. With Vietnamese pho, you use a soup spoon and chopsticks; food pieces are picked out of the soup.

In a restaurant, I use whatever is presented. At home, forks are more often the implement of choice because the chopsticks are in a different, less used spot. It's not hard to use chopsticks - adults without the skill can use what's done for children - put a wooden match piece near the top between them and then put a rubber band at the top. This arrangement keeps them together and allows use of the sticks as if they were hinged tongs.

I've known how to use chopsticks since I was little, but do prefer a fork, since I'm more used to it, and I don't like the sensation of wood touching my teeth. I can't stand those little ice cream spoons/paddles too.

Matthias' idea is perfect if you're reading a hard cover and eating junk food. I had a library book last night I wanted to finish and it kept me honest, but here's the workaround, :D

I do like the keep fingers clean suggestion, very clever.

Food tastes the same no matter what's used as the transport to the mouth.

Elmer, I worked in a factory with many Asians....Vietnamese, Chinese, Laotians. They ate with chopsticks and picked the bowl up to drink from it.

If you're referring to pho, with a spoon in one hand and chopsticks in the other, how would one lift the bowl?

They ate with chopsticks and picked the bowl up to drink from it.

When I was perusing some cooking forums recently (since I am a relative noob at stir frying I have been reading hours of comments on cooking forums) I saw some people describing this also, that the stuff in the soup would be eaten with chopsticks (presumably set down after they were no longer needed) and the bowl picked up and the remaining soup sipped.

Chopsticks - I like the plain wooden kind.

Up until now that is what I have used. But I did not currently have any on hand so I ordered from Amazon and got dishwasher safe fiberglass. Hopefully that was an OK choice?

When I'm really hungry I'll use a fork ;-)

I was taught to use chopsticks, and still can, adroitly.

But I won't, most of the time. I even use a fork and knife when we go to our local sushi place. Dunno know why.

I respect all cultures, and try to adhere to what people are doing around me. I want them to feel comfortable. Who knows why I go back and forth between the two??? Humans are strange creatures.

Fork at home unless we're having Sushi and then chopsticks. But when we're out it's always chopsticks.

At our two favorite Pho restaurants, in two different cities but both in predominantly Vietnamese neighborhoods, it's eaten how I described. Here's a video to watch, you can advance to the 2:00 point:

Eat Pho Like This

I have chopsticks, but use them in sewing!

I also use a chopstick in sewing - especially when turning spaghetti straps right side out, but also for belt loops.

I use a soup spoon when eating popcorn, and I put powdered cheddar cheese on my popcorn, which makes it taste like Cheetos, but I do not buy Cheetos.

I do not like the slurping sound that I hear in the Pho video. I have also seen people in a Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver lift their rice bowls up to their face to shovel food in with their chopsticks so that it would not fall on the table. I personally do not want to eat like that, whether it is traditional or not. I would rather use a utensil that does not drop food on its way from the bowl to my mouth. I also do not want to suck noodles up into my mouth from chopsticks, which is why I use a fork and spoon and twist the noodles on the fork so that they will fit into my mouth without requiring slurping and sucking. Those sounds really bother me. I will never eat Pho the way shown in the video, and as far as I am concerned, her way is not the right way for me. She can eat it her way, and I will eat it my way. I am not fond of Pho anyway. The right way for me is with a fork and spoon. If anyone is offended by that, then that offends me.

I deliberatly used the vague term of Asian because it is impossible to be specific when talking how people eat their food. China for instance is an immense country with a whole bunch of food way and other countries in Asia as well. Still people do tend to pick up bowls and either grab gobs and slurp or just push packets of food into their mouths when using chop sticks. I think you swallow a lot of air that way but apparently that is the point to tasting the food. I am not such a fan of the noise but I would never critique their ways in their own country or even here. Not my place. Still I think it is noisy. My family valued silence in eating perhaps to an almost toxic point. I really think a fork is efficient when eating the OP food of stir fry. In the Philippines when our maid cooked stir fry which was my experience with that food for the yardboy-actually her fiancé though that was a secret because they would not be allowed to work in the same household- he ate her offerings with a fork. Presumably because we had no chop sticks? He ate anyway.

When I make a stir fry, I use a fork. When I eat out in a Chinese or Japanese restaurant, I use chopsticks.

lars, you should know from your own study and travels that table and eating habits vary geographically and sometimes by country. Europeans view the American practice of transferring a fork from one hand to the other when eating to be crass. Americans, in contrast, at one time viewed the two-handed fork in one hand, knife in the other, with the fork brought to the mouth usually pointed down, to appear snooty and snobbish.

In Japan, it's bad manners to not slurp noodles when eating them. Doing so expresses enjoyment of the food. Here, that same action is considered bad manners.

I don't know what the Vietnamese practice about noise when eating noodles, but as it's closer to Japan than to the US, they may follow their practice. Or they may not.

My intent was simply to say that what factory workers have for eating habits in a foreign country ( Canada, as jasdip mentioned) is not necessarily useful to refer to. The Vietnamese people I've seen eating pho in my area do so as a two-handed endeavor. I'll add that picking up a soup bowl to drink from it is poor manners in the US so maybe the two-handed pho approach is because of it. I don't know.

Edit to add:

Please note that the author of the Youtube video is a Vietnamese woman. I suspect she knows what the prevailing practice is.

It depends ;-)

For Pad Thai, I use a fork.

For a stir fry like Chinese blistered dry fried green beans, I like using Chinese chopsticks.

When I make ramen-seafood-vegetable soup,

I eat it with a scoop spoon, like this:

For potstickers, I like to use chopsticks.

In general, noises can bug me. I do not like to hear cutlery clangling on china plates, or forks grinding on plates. I’m not wild about slurping sounds or lips smacking (cultural prohibitions,) but I understand how it can aerate the noodles and broth or show one’s appreciation.

For Pad Thai, I use a fork.

I only learned about the Asian cultures which use forks recently.

If I haad to depend on chopsticks to eat I'd probably lose 20 pounds . I just can't get the hang of it,

Petalique's comments reminded me of my dad reprimanding and lecturing us as kids for clinking our cutlery on our plates when we ate. That idea really stuck with me - probably because it was something I hadn't even noticed up til then.

But tbh, I think he may have been hungover 😃

And I've come to be repulsed by slurping, lip-smacking noises in my old age. I don't think it used to bother me much at all, but now it does.

So many of our USA ideas of proper manners seem to stem from the intricate rules of the Victorian upper classes, IMO.

" So many of our USA ideas of proper manners seem to stem from the intricate rules of the Victorian upper classes "

Why would that be when so few Americans come from that background? How do such practices differ from what was done at the time in other European countries like, France, or Germany, or Italy, where so many more Americans trace their roots to? Or Africa, Central Am or Asia?

Another factor to consider - most immigrants to the US over the centuries came because their lives and socioeconomic circumstances in their home countries were terrible, they were at the bottom of the ladders where they came from. Those that came hardly brought with them even middle class practices.

" Why would that be when so few Americans come from that background? "

Because that's where a lot of the first Americans came from, and newcomers from other cultures wanted to fit in, and so adopted the customs of the people already here. And those that didn't come from upper classes could adopt some of the "airs" that upper classes had, because no one could call them out for it. Because newcomers with strange customs have never been particularly welcomed, and so they'd try to minimize the differences others see, and also try to adopt the practices of the richer and more established.

I am going to pretty much agree with Toronto Veterinarian. People do tend to upscale. You teach your kids to act the class you want them to be. Still American utensil use is different from Victorians.

First I have to say that British people taking exception to American utensil use are being vulgar and rude. No one is requiring them to eat the way we do. If I were being critical I would say that packing, where they mash food on the back of their forks with a knife or spoon, is a strange thing to do at best but far be it from me to say they cant, nor that the fast snapping up of food before it can fall off is exactly elegant but such techniques came about in freezing cold houses with women wearing scanty clothing. We are critiqued for using our fork as a "shovel" but it is in fact shovel shaped and I dont get the idea of using the back of a shovel shaped thing to hold food any more than I dig a hole and move dirt with the back of an actual shovel. Forks were originally straight tined. That changed in the late 1600's for reasons I do not know.

I once read that the American style was more elegant because it is inefficient, inefficiency being more elegant because people with more food than they could ever possible eat did not need to be efficient in their food conveyance. I rather like that thought.

Chop sticks are a combination of inefficiency and efficiency depending on how you use them. It does dictate using the bowl as a utensil as well which is efficient. There is no way to cut up your food at the table which dictates it all being in small bits. That is a limit for the way you can cook. But it uses less fuel and so on.

Elmer, what ever on earth are you talking about?

I've never mastered chopsticks but never felt I had to. There is a large and diverse population of Asian people and culture in the PNW. Chinese restaurants have always provided forks along with chopsticks because with only a few exceptions in Chinatown in Seattle, the majority of patrons are non-Chinese. When large numbers of Thai and Vietnamese immigrants arrived after the Vietnam war, many restaurants from those cultures sprang up everywhere. I was surprised to learn that in Thailand chopsticks are not usually used, but non-Thai people in the US requested chopsticks at their restaurants because....well...Asian food. So you sometimes will find chopsticks on the tables.

I can manage to pop a piece of sushi into my mouth with chopsticks, but fingers are more often used in Japan and that works for me.

fork.

" Elmer, what ever on earth are you talking about? "

That was a comment to me, not you.......Fudd doesn't like it when anyone challenges her supposed knowledge on a subject, or seems to know more than she does. Apparently, a very fragile ego that can be crushed by strangers on the internet.

I wish that perfectly benign threads didn't deteriorate into spats. TV I appreciate your chopstick post. If others want to disagree that is fine, but they should do so courteously. I would wish that Elmer would delete his post, and then after that TV you could delete your response to it. Leaving all the other chopstick posts for all to enjoy.

I have read historically that the use of forks in Europe and eventually Britain was already a fraught sort of thing being thought of as snooty though I personally doubt this tidbit of 'history'. I have read that the utensils of choice for everyone was for a long time a knife and a spoon but of course that is hardly credible because of the enormous numbers of people too poor to own a personal knife. People were rich or they were very poor and very few in between. Still social historians say that even poor people had manners. They being free. There were tons of rules of how you ate, who choose first, whether or not you could dip a used spoon into the common bowl and so forth. Really interesting stuff to me. I was interest to read hear that lots of souteast Asia did not routinely use chopsticks and read while looking into that that the people of the Philippines did not use chopsticks either which might account for me not seeing them there but of course we were living in the shadows of a great American air base. Our maid would take us to see her friends and they would feed us things we weren't supposed to eat and it was always finger food or spoons.

I have chopsticks, but use them in sewing!

I used some in the garden this spring to identify newly sown seeds.

I eat with a fork -- American style. I don't slurp my ramen.

I followed your reasonable request, Lucille. Unfortunately, what used to be a bright line between facts versus assumptions or fiction or opinions or wishes no longer exists for many.

A good book to plug in to factual background of the European migration to North America is Island At The Center Of The World, by Russell Shorto. Based on documents in the NY State Archives, it sheds light on daily life and major happenings in the largest European settlement in North America during the 1600s, that of the Dutch (not English) at Nieuw Amsterdam (later changed to New York).

I think it's kind of funny how some folks never seem to notice the qualifiers I use - like 'IMO', 'seem', 'might', 'may', and 'I think', for example.

IMO, they might benefit themselves by using more qualifiers when expressing their own opinions and thoughts.

I’m a bit late in getting back to this thread, so skimming.

Thanks for the book link, Elmer.

Oly, I could enroll in a PNW Chopsticks Remediation workshop. I am probably holding them in an inelegant way.

Cyn? , my solution*and it shows) or learning how to hold and eat w chopsricks is to be very hungry and presented with delicious food and only a pair od wooden, unglazed Chinese chopsticks. You’ll figure it out. Hahahaha

My parents used to have a few Japanese things from WWII. One was a small, fragile Japanese flag of very fine silk. You coud look right through it. My father was in the Pacific and was on a ship that had Japanese officers next to him as the J officials pointed out the location of mines. My dad’s ship was one that was charged with escorting the American ship into the harbor where the official surrender was signed.

My sibs have the high quality photos, I need to gwt the one of my father. In the photo, he is in officer khakis, cap, and firearm at his side, looking thin, pale and exhausted as a well dressed and rested looking Japanese official sits overlooking a map and marking where the mines were. Everybody smoked a lot in those tears, On the desk over which the Japanese commander delineated the mine fields, was one of those Navy re-purposed ash trays, ubiquitous at the time, Fashion from a large mortat shell. So casual in those war years, but sends chills up my spine when I look at them now.

Those poor men, so many lives lost. An enormous waste, generations of heartbreak as sequelae. But, of course, a lot of money made for others. It is always that way, isn’t it?

The other (that I recall) was a sma;; collection of lacquered Japanese chopsticks. I wish I had them (and the silk). I have no idea what became of them. I would have taken extra good care of them, but not everyone is like me. A lot of peope are cavalier about caring for such things and for respection the property of others.

That brought back a memory - my dad had a shell end for an ashtray on his desk for many years. He was in the Army in WWII, not the Navy. I'm not sure where it is right now.

A fork, never mastered chopsticks. Did not eat much in the way of Asian food until I was in my 30's, no excuse after that. Need to take the opportunity to learn this skill