López-Alt’s recommendation comes from San Francisco’s Wok Shop, which has many options for sizes (as small as 12 inches and as big as 16) and handles (wood, metal, loop, extended), should you want to customize. Material: Carbon steel | Shape: Flat or round bottom | Handle: Mandarin style with wood or metal handles
You can add everything in and then move them around easily as they shrink.” She notes that the ring at the top of the handle allows it to hang nicely in her kitchen. “I especially like it for greens that start so giant in volume. “It can handle a ton of vegetables,” she says. Kim, meanwhile, has had her Joyce Chen wok - a fairly standard 14-inch size that comfortably feeds two to four people - for over two decades and doesn’t see herself ever having to replace it.
“The loops on metal woks get superhot and you need pot holders to handle,” says Matt Rodbard, founder of Taste and co-author of Koreatown: A Cookbook. The carbon steel makes it perfectly sensitive to heating up and cooling down, while the comfortable wood handles grip well and stay cooler than the body of the wok. “Introduced by Joyce Chen, flat-bottomed woks allowed the cookware to be used on any stove and made stir-fry a far more common dish in American households,” says Taylor Erkkinen, co-owner of the Brooklyn Kitchen cooking school. Material: Carbon steel | Shape: Flat bottom | Handle: Mandarin style with wood handles Every time you add in an ingredient, it brings down the overall temperature, and “the high heat is crucial.” We chatted with López-Alt, Jew, and other chefs and cookware experts to get their recommendations for their favorite woks. “The process goes fast.” Calvin Eng, owner of Bonnie’s in Brooklyn, also suggests not overcrowding. “If you are quick-cooking, make sure you have all your ingredients portioned out and ready to go,” advises Brandon Jew, owner of Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco. Bottom line: Woks seamlessly cook large quantities of vegetables, meat, noodles, and whatever else you like in a matter of minutes. What’s more, the bottom is hotter than the sides because of the V shape, further assisting each component of a given dish to get to the temperature it should be. This means they get hot really fast and stay that way if you want them to - but also cool down quickly as needed. Kenji López-Alt, whose most recent book is dedicated to cooking with woks, explains that while Western skillets are more concerned with heat retention, woks are built to dial in on heat reactivity. Woks can be used to steam fish, make fried rice, boil stew, and even pop popcorn - but there’s a reason you see them employed most ubiquitously for stir-fries.
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