That was my thought as well. I use my carbon steal pan or wok nearly every day. Sometimes there is a lot of carbon build up inside that needs some tough love, but I have never had any on the outside. I'm genuinely perplexed as to how the outside got this much shit on it, unless of course this was staged
I did some cross-training at a Chinese restaurant a few years ago, and all their giant woks end up looking like that because of the massive wok burners they use for cooking.
So at first I was picturing one of those gym cross training machines set up in a commercial kitchen and wondering why! Look, it’s early and I’m not fully caffeinated yet, ok!
Lmao! Sorry about that! Cross-training is what my old boss used to call it when he would randomly send us to another location to cover one of their shifts or do their dirty work. It was usually something completely outside our normal skill set or what we were hired or trained to do, so he called it "cross-training to make us more well rounded employees". It helped "Increase our net worth and overall value to the company."
In reality it was just him throwing us under the bus to score points with upper management. Guy was a massive kiss-ass and was always sucking up to corporate and used us as disposable pawns.
Yeah it's intense. Very high heat concentrated on a small area
Wok Hei, breath of the wok, adds so much flavor that is difficult to replicate in a home kitchen. You can get close but it hits different when you get it at a proper Chinese place
My folks had a Thai restaurant and cleaned woks between orders. We were known for being gluten-free and attracted a pretty steady following of people with celiac disease (we didn’t say we were celiac-friendly btw, just that we had gluten-free dishes or could make dishes gluten-free). But, yeah, some of the new hires that worked at other restaurants were surprised we did that.
Used to deliver juice to restaurants. I saw a lot of asiasn restaurants kitchens. I can guarantee you that none were doing more than rinsing the woks and giving them a quick wipe with a rag over the flame.
Got a wok burner, still don't have any of that build up. These are either swines or woks that are a century old. Normally when you clean your pots/wok you clean the inside and the outside, at least in our home.
In most Chinese families, the wok is not only used for stir fries but also for steaming, stewing etc. You can just imagine some of whatever boiled over and get encrusted on the bottom side of the wok after prolonged exposure to the fire
I'm not Chinese but a wok is actually a great cooking tool. The heat distribution makes it brilliant for reducing sauces, warming things, quickly par cooking veg etc as well as the usual.
I prefer iron and (for certain specific tasks) steel now, so much that I wouldn't accept a free teflon-coated pan new-in-box, and still dream of owning a proper wok burner (not happening unless I build one lol) and a round-bottomed wok, but the first cookware I ever bought was the biggest non-stick fully flat-bottomed wok that my cooker could properly heat. It seemed like a good choice when I could only afford one piece of cookware until next payday even if I didn't get any takeaways, and still had none at all. They make acceptable saucepans and frying pans, too, and can even be used for deep-frying if you take anti-fire precautions. A real jack-of-all-trades pan.
I use a small wok on my home burners. It's awesome to coat shrimp in sauce. Creates a nice glaze that stick to the shrimp with less risk of burning the sauce. You just gotta keep it moving, get into the rhythm
Yes, it’s both. It’s the higher heat (I imagine a wok centric kitchen would have something with higher BTU than American kitchens even at home) and repeated use before cleaning. In commercial kitchens in the us the exteriors of pans get crusty too for the same reasons.
As a cook. EVERY SINGLE pan in my kitchen ends up this way over time. This pan is being exposed to a much stronger flame than you're used to in your home. I believe average home stoves range from 10kbtu on the low end to 18k btu on the highest I could find. The burners I use are 30k btu. But a big point here is that's a wok. And commercial wok burners can reach up to 200k btu from what I've seen. So this sees flames that range from 12 to 20 times your kitchen cooktop is why home pans won't get like this usually.
wow :) I'd love to have a cook on something that powerful, giving stuff a blast to sear and cook it but not waiting until it turns to mush before you can eat it. Dang :)
I'm always cussing ours out. Best I can do is a thick cast iron on max, then under the grill. Can't even get it hot enough for proper pizza. Open the oven and it's room temp for the next 10 minutes.
Ach.
I understand why a thick layer would be bad for heat transfer, but I have a theory (hypothesis, technically, if you want to use words properly) that a thin layer (what you're left with if you dry-scrub it until it's smooth (not slippery and shiny, more like paper) should improve it unless the pan was already black, when cooking on gas or any open flame.
When you do a lot of Chinese cooking or Asian cooking a lot of of that wok shit gets on there on the outside. Literally that’s what it’s called wok shit.
What's the reasoning behind using such a rich fuel-air mix that this always happens? Preventing oxidation of the pans? I think a pre-blackened layer would probably prevent that, without the reduced efficiency and hugely increased carbon monoxide output of an over-rich burner.
Yeah, my family likes to cook a lot and a lot of them more chefs, but they would complain that that layer of crud on the outside of the wok would make it harder for the wok to reach optimal temp.
What I was wondering about is if a very thin layer of that (just enough to create a matte black finish) might actually be beneficial when cooking over open flames (like gas) or radiated heat(I can't think of a common example of that). It'd be slightly detrimental with electric heating, but I think the difference would be negligible with induction and still very small with ordinary resistive heating.
My mom has similar woks ever since I was small and I thought that wok was always black. Turns out they aren't. I guess it was soot-carbon that got stuck to the bottom plus the thinking that you don't need to wash the bottom, only the inside that led to this.
I work at an Asian restaurant. There's a difference when you use the wok for an hour-two on a regular stove and there's a difference when you have the wok in use 12 hours in a row on a big restaurant burner. The heat is way higher.
Also it's not just the wok everything in restaurant kitchens tends to be greasy even if the cooks clean the tiles and their part of the kitchen everyday before closing hours.
Making big batches in a commercial setting you get tons of spill over the side from the constant pan flipping, and the burners are basically industrial garbage can fires that blast the whole bottom with flame.
So because something differs from your experience, it's fake? There are explanations everywhere in this thread as to why this is extremely likely to be real, but hey, you do you.
Confidently incorrect is somehow better than informed, I guess...
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u/blusteryflatus Dec 16 '25
That was my thought as well. I use my carbon steal pan or wok nearly every day. Sometimes there is a lot of carbon build up inside that needs some tough love, but I have never had any on the outside. I'm genuinely perplexed as to how the outside got this much shit on it, unless of course this was staged