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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

> Setting 4 / 10 (slightly below medium) is the default heat setting, and you have to really have something specific in mind to ever go above 5

Do you do any chinese cooking with a carbon steel wok?

For stir frying you generally want things as hot as you can get them. I only have a Teflon wok, and my biggest problem with it is that it just doesn't get hot enough. The other problem is that Teflon really doesn't like very high temperatures, so I'm lucky if a wok lasts a year before bits are peeling off. I've always been put off a carbon steel wok though, because of all the faffing about with seasoning, but reading some of the comments here it might be simpler just to wash and oil it after every use.

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Heating Teflon to high temperatures and preparing food on it is a good way to get Teflon into your bloodstream.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever

You have to get to really high temperatures though. Like over 300 Celsius.

A stovetop cranked high should be able to achieve that though shouldn't it? Not something you can discount entirely.

300C is pretty damn high... that's like 500F. I generally cook on my grill to get to really high heat, and that is definitely at the high end of what I'd even do with the heat.

At that's the low-point for the effect. I'm not sure that commercial products necessarily all experience that reaction at that temperature.

That's above the smoke point of any oil I could imagine cooking with. While I'm sure you can't discount it entirely, I would not consider it something you would need to worry about unless you were throwing caution to the wind with your cooking process, or perhaps left your stove unattended.

I recently bought my first carbon steel wok and just today I put in the time to properly season it. Naturally, this evening I did my first stir fry with it and it was a blast! Cleaning was pretty simple. After I had finished eating I put some water into it, got it boiling, and used the spatula to scrape of the crusty bits. Then I cleaned and rinsed it under running hot water with some support of a brush. After a bit of drying off back onto the stove set to high to dry - and to polymerise the remaining traces of cooking oil to reinforce the seasoning. Cool off a bit and then apply a very thin layer of oil for protection.

That might sound a lot, but it really only takes a few minutes!

I'll do this every time after using the wok. I expect it to be good for a very long time. There might be easier ways to achieve this, but that's what extensive research has taught me to do.

We had a non-stick wok that showed up one day somehow (now there's a dichotomy and abomination rolled into one) and it's starting to flake. I'm really strongly considering carbon steel as a replacement, I've hardly used cast iron either and think it's time to take the plunge and convert.

One tip to add that the cast iron griddle maker gave me in the manual was to avoid putting lots of cold water on it while it's hot. You can wash soon after cooking, but use hot water. Otherwise it can warp.

Right, I've read the same thing about avoiding that!

Talking about additional gotchas: Acidic foods will apparently eat into the seasoning, so one should be careful with those.

Yes I read about the acidic foods, I did see a test saying it's not a huge problem but you will need to re-season more often. It can also leech iron which is actually a good thing for most of us.

Anyway I took the plunge, carbon steel wok and cast iron pan are on their way. At least if I ruin them I can get a do-over unlike non-stick!

We have a Lodge cast iron wok [0].

That said, I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone as we rarely use it.

I read somewhere that unless you have a commercial-grade gas range, you are unlikely to hit the temperatures needed to really properly cook with a thinner metal wok. Cast iron is supposed to be a bit of a compromise because it can hold the heat better, but you can't toss it around the way you would with a normal wok.

As to carbon steel, I'd say go for it. I think you'll find it a lot less fussy than you have been told.

Also, I'd say stir fry definitely qualifies under the "something specific" where you would want to use the high heat settings on the stove.

[0] https://www.lodgecastiron.com/product/cast-iron-wok?sku=P14W...

Even with a gas range, you really need a wok burner for example I have an older Viking range and the wok is pretty much useless without this burner: https://pisces.bbystatic.com/image2/BestBuy_US/images/produc...

but you summation is pretty much correct, a wok is useless for most home ranges. The heat has to be directed up the walls of the wok for it to cook correctly.

We have that Lodge cast iron wok too, but don't use it for stir-frying... very clumsy. Instead we use it for deep frying - a task for which it's better suited than any-other our other vessels.

We do our stir-frying on a regular 14 in carbon steel wok, nothing fancy. It does take a bit more oomph than most American gas stoves provide, but we've had good results by ponying up for a Bluestar range [0] which outputs 25K BTU/h ... well short of what you see in Chinese restaurants, but on par with Western commercial stoves.

Actual Asian households don't generally cook on fancy restaurant stoves, and yet somehow manage to stir-fry satisfactorily. The trick is they use propane, which has about twice the energy density of natural gas. So it's a lot more effective (and cost-effective) to use a turkey fryer/crab boil burner to do your stir-frying, if you can swing it.

[0] https://www.bluestarcooking.com/cooking/rangetops/36-platinu...

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