[HighHeat]

Greetings All!

I love to cook and find myself doing it at least once daily... as such I'm seeking the finest wok onthe planet to prepare meals for my family. Of couse as a true believer in excess I'm looking for a wok to enure the highest of heats and never warp so it sits irregularly on my stove. I need the wok to have the most durable non-stick surface so I can keep cooking oils to a minimum and be so resistant to scratches that for the not infrequent times that I approach the pan with a metal utensil, it suffers not at all. Does such a wok exist?

Thanks so much,

HighHeat

[Headless Chicken]

Buy a regular chinese wok, season it, and your good to go

[phatch]

High heat and nonstick don't generally share the same pan.

Some of the new ceramic coatings are pretty good for this though.

But Wok cooking can be very low oil A standard carbon steel wok will take a nice seasoning and be at least low stick and killer heat (assuming you have the burner to provide it). Most home stoves don't have the heat output to really make it work right.

Besides, non stick pans don't create that nice sear that an uncoated pan will and they don't support the low heat wok cooking where you move food up the sides to slow the cooking while you finish something in the center. In a nonstick pan, the food slides back down.

Scanpan and Pro-HG are the ones with the spiffy coating, but they actually don't get great reviews.

http://www.s-t.com/daily/12-99/12-22-99/c04ho097.htm

is an interesting page on non stick pans that includes comments Scanpan and Pro-HG.

[mudbug]

If you're wanting one that already exists... find an Asian grandma who's been cooking all her life and see if you can somehow end up with the family heirloom in your kitchen.

Otherwise, get carbon steel wok preferrably from an Asian grocer or kitchen supplier. You can get excellent ones for $14 - $20 in Chinatowns that will last you the rest of your life.

Season it yourself.

Think of it much like a well used, well cared for cast iron skillet that has developed it's own nonstick coating over time.

Search this forum for previous threads which go into detail on buying and seasoning woks and seasoning cast iron skillets.

[kuan]

I would also suggest buying the smallest wok you can get away with which fits your needs. Household burners unfortunately aren't equipped to handle wok cooking. You need that inferno underneath to get that "Chinese restaurant taste" You could also buy one of those 80,000 btu burners I guess.

How would you describe stirfry technique in textbook terms? Combination of saute and convection roasting?

[MikeLM]

You might take a look at the Bodrum cast-iron wok. It has a flat bottom and a non-stick interior. I use it on a ceramic-top home cooktop with pretty good results.

It's probably not going to give you the blast-furnace performance, though.

It's about $90 at Williams-Sonoma, but I found it on the Internet for about $52. It has a nice glass lid, also- though that doesn't seem to figure prominently in the Chinese restaurants I've been in.

Mike

[steveh]

The weird thing I found about chinese cooking is that quality is inversely proportional to price, unlike most other cuisines. such frugalness.

For example, I bought a non-stick wok a few years back that I ended up burning the teflon off of. ieeeh. they just can't handle the heat. I then graduated to a carbon steel beijing style pao wok (long handle). all you gotta do is season it correctly (pork fat & chives).

Nothing beats a traditional wok, whether it be cast iron or carbon steel. The quality depends on how you treat it, rather than how much you paid for it.

one suggestion I have though is the wok ring. I have seen two types, one made out of I guess sheet metal or something with large air holes in it. The other type looks like it's made out of rods welded together to form a wire frame. It's been my experience that the wire frame design allows the wok to get much much hotter.

a book just came out dedicated to the wok called "The Breath of the Wok"... pretty interesting. it goes into the history and lore of the wok...

[jpdchef]

http://www.wokshop.com/HTML/products/woks/woks.html good place to look.