The Wok: Part III

So you're getting a carbon steel wok. Good choice. But there's more to carbon steel woks than just round or flat bottom. 

Most of the local purveyors of inexpensive carbon woks have  gone to carrying Peking Pans. I don't like these particular pans. They're very thin metal, have an unknown coating on them for low stick, a handle that will get hot. And they're most often flat bottomed as well. 




You shouldn't be able to flex the wok when pressing from the sides. Well, an average person shouldn't be able to. This is a surprisingly difficult trait to find in carbon steel wok. It's completely about the thickness of the steel too.  

My first wok is a bit flexible. I've had it 19 years now though I've not cooked on in probably 3 or 4 years. If you were watching informercials back then you'd see one about "Hand Hammered Wok" with a British guy telling you all the myths about woks and why they need to be hand hammered. I bought this when the infomercial had run its course and the extra stock was in the discount kitchen stores.

If you click the picture below, you'll see a pattern of overlapping circular marks in the wok. It's really quite a pretty effect in person though a bit hard to photograph with my skills. Has a nice patination to it as well.


 

It's OK as a wok. I've had to replace the screws in the handle with the aggressive thread dry wall type screws. Holds much better since that upgrade.  Beyond being thin, it's pretty well constructed otherwise. 

My next wok was the cast iron wok This is not in the the traditional Chinese style. It's much thicker and is actually flat on the bottom, though round inside.



 

I haven't used it a lot, mostly on my 30,000 BTU outdoor stove for some meals where I was stir frying multiple dishes for simultaneous service. 

I can't recommend it for indoor cooking unless you're just cooking for one or two people. Yes, it gets quite hot, but it's slow to get to that point. And while it creates an awesome initial sear, it's slow to recover heat as well. So it doesn't hold the right heat level except with fairly small amounts of food. 

I mostly keep it because I enjoy cast iron of all types. And you can't flex it. 

I didn't think I was in the market for more woks. But one day at Vinh Long, a local asian grocer,  I found this one. 





Aggressively hammered and called a "Pow" Wok, I couldn't flex it. And if you compare the pictures, you'll see it's thicker steel. The Wok Shop carries these still though I've never again seen one locally. This one too has the handle screws upgraded as they were loose from the start.  

Amazon has them too.

Does it cook better than my other woks? I think it does a little. Mostly in that it delivers heat a little more evenly and doesn't flex when I lift a full wok to plate the contents for serving. That always unnerved me about my first wok.  And good woks are surprisingly inexpensive so it's not much of a cost to add another one to the collection.


I picked up my most recent wok 9 months ago. This is a 12" flat bottomed wok I picked up at Kim Heang, a Laotian market. It was the only carbon steel flat bottom wok I could find with minimal flex and uncoated at the time.  The wok market is definitely changing and not for the better in my opinion.

 

I bought this one because I was so impressed with the performance of my induction burner. I knew it would be better for Wok cooking than standing outside at my high output stove all through the bad weather as I'd been doing. 

Better is probably too strong a word. Preferable. That's the right word. 

The outdoor stove still beats induction in sheer performance, but the added hassles of cooking outdoors loses out to the convenience and good performance of induction. 

And it works really well. But after all those years of stir frying in a round bottom wok, I just couldn't make the adaptation to a flat bottom wok. It takes more oil. The stir fry action is sloppy with more chasing ingredients around to get them all flipped and cooked evenly. It's better than not stir frying but...

And so I monitored the market for an affordable induction wok unit. Last year, all that was available were units costing thousands of dollars. So I was excited to see the Adcraft this fall and be back cooking in a round bottom wok the way it's supposed to be done. 

Update 5/16/2013: I recently came across a high-quality flat-bottom carbon-steel wok from IMUSA.  Good handles, good steel thickness, seasoned up beautifully.  So add yet another wok to my collection.