I turned on the burner of my gas stove to full blast and set the wok on it in order to start cooking off the residue oils from production (which released an incredible amount of vapor and made my apartment immediately smell insane, so make sure to open a window for this step). First, I rinsed down the wok with warm water and soap, drying it fully then, I covered the wooden handles with foil, so as not to scorch them. Culling info from a number of sources, I came to the following process. I read a number of articles-including a section of López-Alt’s book-about how important it is to season woks and how to do it. When my new wok arrived, it was a dull factory gray with a weird, sticky film all over it. I do plan to get a fully-Kenji-approved wok down the line, but for now, I’m thrilled with the Joyce Chen. Full disclosure: I’d tried to order a slightly more compliant wok previously from a specialty store in San Francisco and the order never showed up, so I decided to go with Amazon on this one, mostly just to ensure that it’d actually arrive quickly on my doorstep. I’d read a lot of positive things about Joyce Chen’s woks, so I found one that mostly met López-Alt’s specifications: 14 inches, carbon steel, flat bottom, and two handles it was 1.5 millimeters rather than 2 millimeters thick, but I felt it was close enough. He explains, “get yourself a 14-inch, flat-bottomed, carbon steel wok made with material around 2 (14 gauge) thick, with a single long handle and a helper-handle on the opposite side.” The ensuing section broke down these recs even further and addressed potential questions, and after reading it, I had a sense of what kind of wok to pick up. In his most recent book, effectively titled The Wok: Recipes and Techniques (an amazingly concise title for a 672-page tome), López-Alt offers “quick and dirty” recommendations for picking up a wok to use at home. Kenji López-Alt, i.e., one of the sage philosophers at the intersection of food science and popular cooking. Whereas ancient civilizations had people like Socrates and Nostradamus to tell them what to do, we have J. My wok wasn’t seasoned, didn’t really heat evenly, and the lid had been lost long ago it just screamed “entry-level wok from Target.” It made decent food, but in my universe-brained, 20/20-hindsight 30s, I know that most of that food would have been better using a good skillet or pan, like the now-beloved Always Pan or a beautiful Caraway option.Īs an adult interested in making high-quality Chinese food and other high-heat cooking beyond (and, now, knowing enough to prepare arrabbiata in different cookware), I decided to invest in an actually-good wok, thus graduating to become the second kind of wok owner: the person who takes it seriously, finds a solid wok, keeps it seasoned properly, and-most importantly-turns out excellent food again and again. In my college years and throughout my 20s, I was the first kind-I knew woks were generally reliable, and I had a very basic, low-quality, non-stick wok that I used for everything from stir fry and arrabbiata pasta to tofu scrambles and, yes, even reheated pizza (side note: the Balmuda toaster, which I recently reviewed here, is my new favorite tool for reheating ‘za). In my experience, there are two kinds of home cooks that use woks: People who happen to grab a wok as an addition to their pots and pans collection, and those who want to develop and take care of a great cooking tool.
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