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(Sheellah) wrote in
:

> Thanks Debbie. My main concern is that a stainless clad, or thinner
> metal wok, would cool down too quickly once the food was added, and
> the food would be soggy. I wanted to go with the cast iron, as I felt
> that once heated, it would retain the heat when food was added, and
> keep the sizzle. I once had a carbon steel wok, and hated the rusting,
> and having to keep seasoning it. It also looked quite unsightly.
>

The way to keep a thin steel wok from cooling down when you add food is
to keep the burner cranked up high. It does no damage to the wok.

In discussing something like this, it is important to remember that
energy is conserved. When you heat a wok, you are storing energy in it.
When you add food, energy is transferred from the wok to the food. It's
the same amount energy no matter what the wok is made of, assuming a
given starting temperature for the wok and a given starting temperature
for the food.

If the burner temperature were the same, it would take the same amount of
time to re-add that energy to the wok. The only difference would be in
the size of the swing in temperatures. It would be larger for the thin
steel wok, since as you point out, it stores less heat.

However, this is not an accurate comparison. You can cook at a much
higher temperature using the thin steel wok. That means it will come
back up to temperature faster. In other words, while the thin steel wok
might briefly be cooler than the cast iron wok, after a while it would be
hotter, because you are cooking on a hotter burner and there is less
metal to heat.

Theory aside, there is also empirical evidence in favor of thin steel
woks. I've never had a problem "losing the sizzle". I have a nasty old
electric stove with one big burner. I turn it up all the way to high, so
the burner is glowing. It's probably not as good as a wok burner, but
everything sizzles away merrily.

(Of course I am cooking normal-sized recipes. I suppose that if you
threw in pounds of stuff into a wok so it was heaped up instead of all
the food being in contact with the surface, you would "lose the sizzle",
just like what happens when you crowd a western-style pan and gets
steamed food instead of nicely browned food. However I don't think cast
iron would solve that.)

If you just wipe out your steel wok there's no need to re-season it all
the time. it's the same principal as cast iron cookware (no enamel).

As for what my wok looks like, the food that goes on the table is more
important to me than the beauty of the pan that I use in the kitchen.
It's not that I don't care about appearances. My tableware looks nice;
the wok stays in the kitchen. Its somewhat funky appearance is like my
gray hairs - both speak to experience gained.

Debbie

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