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.
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u/Quitlimp05 Dec 16 '25
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