Most non-Asian cooks aren't aware that chopsticks are more than just an eating utensil. They also make great cooking tools. In fact, there are special cooking chopsticks (saibashi in Japanese) that are a little longer and sometimes joined at the end with a string for just that purpose.
Faith recently wrote about how chopsticks are a preferred tool for making scrambled eggs, but there are many other reasons for keeping a pair of chopsticks near your stove. They are excellent for turning and lifting fried foods from a pot of hot fat, stirring noodles and soups, and they make great stir-fry tool, too.
Basically almost anything you can do with tongs, you can also do with chopsticks, and often you can do them better. Of course, you must feel comfortable and skilled with chopsticks before you use them for cooking, especially when working with the deep-fryer!
Julia Child was known for her love of chopsticks in the kitchen and would use them to fish a vegetable from a pot of boiling water to see if it was done. Other uses are grabbing olives and pickles from jars, mixing sauces, fluffing rice, flipping things in the oven. They even make great grilling implements.
Many people keep a variety of sizes on hand to customize according to need, from the larger, made-for-cooking chopsticks to smaller, child-sized versions. Plastic chopsticks would melt and metal ones will conduct the heat, so be careful about adopting just any old pair as your kitchen tool. The best material is obviously wood, with bamboo taking top marks.
Do you cook with chopsticks? What's your favorite use for chopsticks in the kitchen?
Related: No Cherry Pitter? Use a Chop Stick
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Chopsticks are almost a natural extension of my fingers. A good portion of my utensil bin by the stove is comprised of chopsticks of different lengths. I'm more comfortable using them for beating eggs than a fork. The super long chopsticks are great as mentioned above: deep-frying, fishing out the last morsel from a tall jar, stirring pots, grabbing pinches of condiments from jars, etc. I also love the fact that my bamboo ones can be used on all surfaces.
I think the times I reach for my tongs are when I need to grab at something pretty bulky or unwieldy, like a large steak.
As an aside, I also prefer to eat leafy salads with chopsticks rather than a fork. I can grab at leaves a lot easier than stabbing them with a fork.
My go-to utensil for cooking bacon!
I use it for absolutely everything! But just make sure to get a quality pair, maybe without any kind of painting or lacquer - it'll flake right off when it goes in hot cooking oil.
We use plastic chopsticks to create a 'grate' of sorts when adding spices to meat - that way, the plate doesn't steal the spices when we flip the meat over.
We've got the kind with the little string connector. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but they're just right for quickly flipping veggies for tempura and for scrambling eggs for iritamago (or rolling up a tamagoyaki). And yeah--you want plain wood, not anything with lacquer.
I forgot to mention: cheap and short bamboo chopsticks plus some kitchen twine = excellent McGuyvered steaming racks. Growing up, my grandma had all these tic tac toes of chopsticks for use in woks or pans for steaming.