We started by prepping and seasoning each wok. All of them—including the nonstick or pre-seasoned woks—called for a good wash and at least some treatment with oil.
To get a proper seasoning started, the unseasoned carbon-steel woks required a few more steps. Some manufacturers’ instructions were more clear than others, so we defaulted to Grace Young’s basic oil method from The Breath of a Wok, across all of the models we tested. Then we took our woks to task on a number of everyday cooking trials:
Sautéing: For our first test, we sautéed a clutch of baby bok choy with garlic. The woks all heated rapidly and lent char to the vegetables as we tossed. Though all of the woks turned out a similar result in the end—crisp-tender bok choy, lightly kissed with wok hei—I began to notice how small details could help or hinder cooking.
For instance, some handles were secured with large rivets on the inside of the wok bowl, and those rivets clanged noisily and interrupted my flow whenever I hit one with the metal spatula. Some woks, like our picks, had small, unobtrusive rivets or no rivets at all. And some woks had much sharper angles where the flat bottom met the sides, which made them clunkier to stir-fry in when we were using the classic broad, rectangular wok spatula.
Stir-frying: The next task was stir-frying a classic combo: chicken with broccoli. We started by searing the marinated chicken (sliced breast meat, lean and prone to sticking), which was a challenge for fairly new woks.
Again, they all performed similarly, except for the nonstick wok, which didn’t sear as well. (To be fair, we didn’t heat the nonstick wok as high as the others, partly due to conventional nonstick-pan wisdom and partly because I was detecting a strange plasticky smell.)
By this stage, it was becoming much more noticeable how the contours of the bottoms could change the cooking experience. One wok had a much smaller base, which made for precarious stir-frying. I didn’t want to let go of the handle for one second, for fear the wok would tip over. The woks with a larger-diameter base felt much more stable.
In the woks with a sharper angle between the sides and bottom, chicken tended to get stuck in those crevices and tear rather than release cleanly. Per our recipe, once the chicken was seared, we scooped it out into a dish and added broccoli to the wok next.
In any woks where torn bits of chicken remained stuck in those crevices, we had to rinse them out before adding the broccoli so the leftover food wouldn’t burn. This was a pain, and it also made us lose out on layering the chicken flavor in the pan with the broccoli we were stir-frying next.
Fried eggs: When frying an egg in each model, I once again found that woks with sharp angles (where the flat bottom met the sides) were problematic. For one, they limited the number of eggs that could be fried at a time. And if the egg was not centered perfectly in the wok’s flat bottom, without touching those steep ridges around the sides, then its shape would be oddly molded to the circular rim (see the third photo below).
Deep-frying: We skipped the nonstick wok for this round because the standard temperature for deep-frying (375 °F) already surpassed the nonstick wok’s 350 °F oven-safe limit. We also skipped testing the wok with the too-small base, since a large, wobbly pan full of bubbling oil seemed like a bad idea.
Carbon-steel cookware is terrific for deep-frying because it responds to changes in heat much more quickly than, say, cast-iron cookware. When we dropped cold tofu cubes into the hot oil, we looked for the oil to come back up to its original temperature in good time.
The bowl-like shape of a wok also lets you use less oil to fry up a smaller batch of ingredients; this makes deep-frying on a weeknight more approachable and efficient than if you had to heat gallons of oil in a large pot. So we also observed how the shape of each wok’s bowl allowed for a spectrum of cooking volumes.
Steaming: For our last experiment, we steamed a bowl of egg custard, testing the fit and efficacy of a lid with each wok. Since most woks don’t come with a lid, you’ll likely have to buy one separately. We purchased a simple aluminum domed wok lid designed to fit 14-inch woks. (Unlike the lids of straight-sided pots and pans, which require an exact fit to function well, a wok lid can rest inside the pan’s edges and still work perfectly fine. A tall, domed lid provides adequate head space for whatever you’re steaming inside.) Each of the final woks worked well with the lid while steaming the egg custard.
Steaming with these fairly new carbon-steel woks also gave us a chance to observe how their burgeoning patinas held up to boiling liquids (this typically causes seasoning to lift off the pan’s surface). Naturally, most of the woks’ patinas began to slough off in spots. (I put them to use soon after with an oily sautéed dish, just to reinforce the seasoning on those areas.) However, the pre-seasoned wok withstood the boiling test better than the others, since its patina had been baked on by the manufacturer.
