A Wok in the Park? Lumix M4/3 14mm
My Editor and I feel that we should include more vegetables in our diet, but they have to be tasty and interesting. Cucumber salad will only get one so far...
With this in mind, I bought a carbon steel flat-bottomed wok last week. It came from the store coated in machine oil and wrapped in plastic, an unlovely thing. First, a good scrub and a thorough drying; carbon steel will start to rust if you look at it funny. Then some online research about how to season the metal. The best way is to crank up the oven to about 450°F, coat the metal with the thinnest possible layer of peanut or grape seed oil, and bake it for about 30 minutes. As the oil heats up, it starts to smoke, and then polymerizes, forming a strong bond with the metal. I repeated this process four times, and here is the result. The wok took on this lovely rich, brown hue, and it now feels like it was enameled inside. It's smooth and shiny with no hint of oiliness. The ultimate test for non-stick, is frying eggs. In order to bake the wok, I had to remove its wooden handle, secured with one rusty screw. To make this process easily repeatable, I drilled out for another screw and inserted two nice, substantial stainless steel square-drive replacements. The test drive is tonight...
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