On Wednesday, May 28, 2014 1:02:44 AM UTC+10, bigwheel wrote:
>
> I dont mess with many woks but have owned enough pots and pans to know
> SS is a real poor heat conductor but maybe no more so than regular old
> carbon steel which suffers from the same bad habits. Copper or Aluminum
> has much better heat transfer characteristics.

For typically cookware alloys, stainless steel is three times worse than carbon steel or cast iron (i.e., 1/3 of the thermal conductivity). Aluminium is about 4-5 times better than carbon steel or cast iron, so much, much better than SS. If SS didn't suck so badly thermally, people wouldn't bother with SS-Al-SS composites.