Similarly, the Zhen San Huan wok was virtually impossible to lift with one hand, so stirring was the only option (though it cooked greens much more evenly).

ounces, this wok was a wee bit heavy, and it was tough on the wrists when tossing or scraping out food. This wok comes pre-seasoned, has a wide base for extra stability, and comes with a wok spatula and a flat, wooden lid for easy tossing and steaming. Impress friends and family with a variety of oriental-inspired culinary delights, introducing them to the truth. Not only are they extremely heavy and difficult to maneuver, they also take a long time to heat up and cool down—a fatal flaw for anything that requires rapid, on-the-fly heat adjustments—like a stir-fry.Food felt cramped in the pan, and tossing was difficult given the smaller area and the weight for the wok’s size. The wooden handle is also tricky to remove if you’re trying to season the wok in the oven (a little gentle heating expands the metal, which helps release the handle). We also recently re-tested our favorite wok (from Yosukata) alongside several new woks, to see if there were any others we could recommend. Heat the wok wiping it with the oil on medium-low heat for about 3-5 minutes or until there is no liquid oil left. What we liked: After a thorough scrubbing and seasoning, this wok was quite nonstick: it was the only wok that produced clean, unbroken, unstuck fried eggs.

After roughly 40 hours of testing, several pounds of fried rice, and smoking out our kitchen almost daily, here are some reliable options for great flat-bottomed, carbon steel woks. Craft Wok Flat Hand-Hammered Carbon Steel Pow Wok: Though attractive, this wok performed poorly in fried egg and stir-frying tests: Food tended to stick to the surface, and eggs needed a lot of scraping to release.Unless you can find a thin-walled cast iron model, in general cast iron woks are a bit heavier than carbon steel versions, so motions like flipping when stir-frying are cumbersome. Our range of branded products is 100% authentic traditional carbon steel woks, 8 years on the market. We also noticed the metal bowl was bent a little bit near the handle, which made the shape more of an oval than a circle. Featuring a flat base, the wok is ideal for maximum balance, comfort, and control, and the hard-wearing, non-stick coating makes for easy cleaning once you've finished with your oriental-inspired masterpiece. Fried rice and vegetables slid effortlessly across the surface, and despite its smaller lip-to-lip diameter, there was still enough room to toss food.

Your GreenPan has a limited lifetime warranty that protects against defects in the material and the finishing of the product and its non-stick layer with normal, non-professional use, in accordance with GreenPan's maintenance and usage instructions. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Our PFOA-free items are washed with reduced quantities of water and detergent thus respecting the planet’s resources and the environment. When using or seasoning a flat bottomed wok on an induction stove, it's important to gradually heat it on medium heat and avoid using high heat settings during the heating-up process to prevent the wok's bottom from warping.

And if you want to season your wok in the oven, you're out of luck because of the wooden helper handle. Underperformers like the model from Craft Wok showed some signs of rice sticking and were generally a bit too heavy to toss food easily with the non-dominant hand. Despite its heavy gauge and considerable weight, the Zhen San Huan wok boiled water in about 10 minutes, which was pretty fast compared to other models.

Note: We also recently re-tested all of our favorite woks—to make sure they're still the best out there. Conductivity is key here, too, and correlates roughly with the thickness of the metal: According to Kenji in The Wok: Recipes and Techniques, “it will take about twice as long for a 2-millimeter-thick pan to conduct heat from the burner to the food than a 1-millimeter-thick pan. We standardized each batch of vegetables by weight, using a measured amount of cooking oil, salt, and garlic as a simple aromatic. Plus, the wok basin was very shallow (it's around three inches deep), and we accidentally flung grains onto our cooktop when making fried rice.

Imusa USA WPAN-10018 Non-coated Wok: While this was a perfectly serviceable wok, we found the angular wooden handle difficult to grip.