I like stir frying and think I’m ready to move up from the flat bottom pan I’ve been using to something better. It’s not bad I suppose but the thin gauge metal doesn’t retain a lot of heat especially if I spash some water on my veggies. I was going to get a traditional wok but found a Lodge brand cast iron wok. I haven’t bought it yet but it makes a lot of sense. Iron will hold a better heat reserve while cooking and iron doesn’t have to be seasoned every time it’s used.
I do almost all my cooking with cast iron. The only thing you have to be careful about is letting it get too hot to start with, because it doesn’t cool off quickly. I don’t stir-fry a lot though, so I don’t know which would be better.
. . . Ike?
Ooooh, I LOVE cast iron! There is a Lodge cookware outlet somewhere near Chattanooga in TN if you’re close. Really good prices!
Wow, a cast iron wok. That suckers got to be as heavy as a mo-fo! What a mess of food you could cook up though!
…looks like it’s already been covered, Eve. Yup, cast iron is one of the best cookware materials out there, and it’s nice 'n cheap, too.
Downside: HEAVY. Really, really heavy. Bench press that wok a couple time a day, you’ll need to take no other exercise.
I’ve pretty much decided to buy it, around $35, just wanted to find out if anyone has used one like this. It’s smaller than a traditional wok, 12-3/4" diameter, but big enough for most purposes. I can’t imagine a full size wok in cast iron.
I have piles of cast iron cookware so I think this will be just the ticket. I like to use little oil and keep spalshing with water so the vegtables will sear but not stick to badly.
I used to get my Lodge cookware at a camping store in Tucson but it closed and the chains like Popular don’t carry much of a selection. I found this one at a Chicago Cutlery store in an outlet mall North of Phoenix. You know the one out on the badlands past the alkali flats near the cattle skull testing grounds.
Padeye, you actually don’t want a wok to stir fry in. You want a nice heavy bottomed fry pan. The reason is that a wok is designed to fit down into a fire, thus the curved sides. That way, it’s hot all the way up the sides of the pan. Next time you’re at a Chinese take out place, check it out - they often have funky stoves with concave thingamajiggies to put the woks in.
For the bulk of us westerners who have flat burners on our stoves, a flat frying pan produces much better results than a wok when it comes to stir frying. I think your problem is that you’re using a thing gauge metal pan. Go get a heavy cast iron pan, or splurge for a cook frying pan such as an All-Clad or some such high-falutin’ name. Trust me, you’ll get MUCH better results this way. PS - I use a nonstick All-Clad for my stir fries, and it works great for stir frying, especially if you don’t want to use a lot of oil. If you don’t care, then don’t worry about the non-stick, any fry pan will do.
Athena:
I got All-Clad cookware too. Rocks, don’t it?
Uke
No shit, ukeike. It kicks ass!
For geneal cookware I’m partial to Calphalon professional hard anodized, not the non-stick though. They make a flat bottom 12" wok but it costs twice as much as the cast iron Lodge and I bet it wouldn’t be as stable. The Lodge has a flat bottom on the underside of the pan but the inside is completely rounded like a real wok that has to be “in the fire” or resting on a fire ring.
I have my great-grandmother’s cast iron skillet, bought new no more recently than 1940. She probably used that thing to cook sausage gravy for the men before they went out to plow with an honest-to-God mule.
I use it daily. It is without a doubt the single most handy thing you can have in your kitchen.
Dr. J
Athena raises some good points but her answer fails to address another important quality a wok has: the rounded bottom allows liquids to collect in the center of the pan where they can more easily be reduced to sauce consistency. The solid foods are often scraped up against the sides of the pan to keep warm while the sauce liquids are thickened, then tossed back together at the last minute.
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
Okay chef, what’s your opinion of the cast iron wok as opposed to a traditional hammered one with a fire ring? I’ll probably buy it anyway. I’m as bad about kitchen stuff as I am with power tools. My next frivolous toy, scratch that say “wise investment,” is going to be one of those monster Kitchen Aid stand mixers that’s the size of an Bridgeport milling machine. While we’re at it what other implements of destruction might I consider to raise my cooking above caveman level?
Mmmmmm, fire make food good.
Cast Iron:
advantages: heats up fast, holds heat well, even heat distribution.
disavantages: takes forever to cool down, must be seasoned to prevent rust and sticking food, hernia-inducing weight; cast iron can be brittle and might break if the pan is dropped. Much more expensive.
Hammered steel:
advantages: light, easier to clean; indentations from hammering process help hold food against the sides of the wok while reducing liquids. Less expensive.
disadvantages:thinner construction means food is more likely to burn; uneven heating (not necessarily bad in a wok, where you want a “hot spot” in the middle); more likely to warp.
All things considered, I wouldn’t personally lay out a lot of cash for a wok because I rarely stir-fry things. Your priorities may be different.
Since you asked, I feel that if you have some money you want to spend on kitchen stuff, don’t waste it on gadgets like automatic garlic peelers and other gizmos you’ll use once and then throw in a drawer. The one item that can improve your kitchen experience more than anything else is to get the very best knives you can afford. I personally use Wusthof-Trident (dreizack) brand knives; Henckels and Global are other excellent brands. I give trident the slight edge (no pun intended) over Henckels because trident knives have a full tank and Henckels knives don’t. Both are of German manufacture; Global, whose knives I’ve never used but come recommended by a professional chef I know, are from Japan. Premium knives are expensive (expect to pay $60-$80 US for a Trident chef’s knife) but they are SO worth it. You’ll be mentioning these knives in your will.
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
Well, I don’t cook like you all do but I do have some cast iron that I use now and then. When I was up in the back woods of Kentucky some years back, I met some cool ‘mountain folk’ who kind of liked to live 'way back there by themselves and used cast iron for everything.
That’s where I learned that you never really wash the stuff but allow it to ‘season’ and age and how preheating it gets rid of any left over things like germs. Now, once a year, these people would build a big fire in their yard of leafs and twigs and stuff to make it burn fast and HOT and throw all of their cast iron into it.
When everything burned down, all of their cookware would be burned clean and shiny and they would reseason it and start cooking all over again.
I have a bit of a problem with cast iron and that is that everything starts to taste the same when cooked in the seasoned pans. Plus, if I don’t use the pans for a while, they either start rusting or get ‘sticky.’ So, I mainly use stainless steel.
I don’t like to use aluminum, ever since I washed out an old, favorite aluminum heavy pot and dried it and my cloth came up covered with ‘silver.’ After several washings and dryings, the cloth still came up coated with aluminum and I realized that the metal was degrading. I checked several other old ‘expensive’ aluminum pots and pans that were over 10 years old and found the same thing, and some had pitted bottoms.
Now, I have read about the possible link between Alzheimer’s and an increased aluminum content in the brain, and I figured that with the obvious deteoriation of the aluminum cookware, all of that consumption of the metal could NOT be good for one. So, I use cast iron, copper and stainless steel now.
I used a steel pot in a big fire to melt down all of my aluminum cookware, poured it into wet sand molds and sold it to a salvage yard at a pretty good price.
I got one of those for Christmas!! Got the grinder and sausage stuffer attatchments too!! As far as other tools you need, I second Chef Troy’s knife suggestions.
I have an All-Clad (small) sauce pan that I love. Nice and heavy like cast iron but not brittle.
With my cast iron (which I use ALL the time), I don’t wash it, per se. I let the sink water get real hot and then use a scrub brush and super hot running water to wash it out. If you do it while the pan is still warm, it comes cleaner, and pretty much dries itself from the residual heat of the pan and the stove, if you set it on the burner. My pans aren’t sticky, don’t have any yuck stuck in the bottom and I haven’t had to reseason them in the 2 years I’ve had them.
Sentinel, it sounds like your pans aren’t being cleaned enough. I know some folks never let soap touch cast iron cookware but I don’t hold with that. Proper seasoning gets down in the pores but a sticky surface coat is just cooked oil that will go rancid.
I season my pans by wiping on a thin coat of melted crisco then baking the pan upside down for at least an hour at 350º. After it cools and after use I wash in normal dish liquid with a maroon scotchbrite. I don’t hae sticky pans, no oil or metallic taste and they don’t rust. Then again I do live in Arizona.
Sounds like you need to start fresh and reseason. If you don’t want to build a bonfire in the yard you can use ordinary oven cleaner on a warm pan to get to clean gray metal.
Seconding the Chef’s recommendation regarding good knives, and the Wuesthof (too lazy to try to figure out how to generate the umlaut at the moment) and Henckel brands in particular. You really won’t believe how much difference it’ll make in your cooking, and your enjoyment of it.
Love my KitchenAid too, though the main effect it’s had has been to get me to cook more as an excuse to use it – my wife especially appreciates the chocolate chip cookies, and we used the strainer to make a lot of baby food for my son.
I’m very attached to my cast-iron skillets also, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me to get a cast-iron wok, I’ve certainly heard of worse ideas (electric ranges, for instance).
As far as cheap things that are even more useful than you might imagine, I bought a package of six or eight large (36" x 48") flour sack towels a couple of years ago that work great as pastry cloths, for covering rising doughs (moistened slightly), for wiping up prep areas, etc. Cheap and effective, and it’s nice to have enough of them that I can use one, wipe up with it, and just throw it in to wash and grab another.
A couple kitchen basics that I don’t know how I did without is an instant read thermometer, and a kitchen scale. Funny how many home cooks never use these. I think they’re essential. The thermometer takes the guesswork out of cooking meat & breads, and the scale is handy for measuring out portions of anything (especially for baking). They’re both cheap - the thermometer is maybe $5 and a scale can be had for $10-$15 - and they’ll make your life much easier.
Also, a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated is a must. It’s the ultimate anal cooking magazine.
Chef Troy, you bring up good points on the wok thing, but for me, the home cook, the benefits of the frying pan always have outweighed the wok. I used a wok for years, then read about using a frying pan, and once I tried it I’ll never go back. I just can’t get the wok hot enough to really stir fry, even with my fancy high btu gas burners. Hey, maybe when you’re out here you can swing by and fix a dinner to show me what I’m doing wrong.