Yep. I just measured hand hammered carbon steel wok (36 cm diameter) and it is 1.8 kg.
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Sorry it’s now bestsale.be, then choose English (unless you speak flamish or as you most likely do, French)
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If I make fried rice with the obligatory eggs I’ll use my Demeyere Alu pro 30 cm wok (which is made by the also Zwilling owned company Ballarini) or my newly purchased Mauviel M’Steel 30 cm Carbon steel wok.
Non stick and wok don’t match, but it still works surprisingly well - my Demeyere Alu Pro wok is now 4 years old and have been used 50+ times and no visible scratch marks in it.
But I do experience sticking issues with delicate types of meat in my Apollo ply wok, but that’s a benefit and a plus since that’ll help create extra taste to my dish once I deglaze it during cooking.
I always use half a glass of dry vermouth in my stir fry to deglaze the wok, and that gives you extra taste to the dish.
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That reminds me that I need to figure out how to bugger the safety/lock on my home oven’s cleaning cycle. I get that licked and I can make pizza at 900°F instead of 585°F like I do now.
As for
I mentioned in the thread Claus references in his OP that, to the extent wok hei is getting the oil vapors inside the pan flaming, I do this at home on my regular stove. But as I said there, there may be other certain things about wok hei that I’m not achieving merely by getting the flames.
Edit - I should also add that the flames I get are transitory, just the vapors going up and maybe lasting 2 seconds. If you watch the video in @Claus’s OP and the video @damiano posted, there is at least one time in each vid where the whole wok is aflame and the liquid oil itself seems to be burning for something like 8-10 seconds or more. I don’t get that much flame.
Despite the comments above, I am 100% on board with your overall thinking.
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I remember looking at the same Mauviel M’Steel wok a few years back. Never pulled the trigger. How do you like it?
So far it has been performing fantastic.
I bought the 30 cm De Buyer Mineral B 30 cm carbon steel wok first.
A DISASTER !
It has a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny flat bottom and is in my view useless as a wok and as a pan unless you have a dedicated wok burner and wok ring.
I didn’t sell it. I couldn’t. I gave it a way. I couldn’t charge people money for such a garbage wok with this design.
The Mauviel M’Steel wok is far better designed.
I love it so far. Highly recommended.
Cheers, Claus
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I just got around to watching the video in the OP - only to feel like the restaurant and view looked familiar. Sure enough it’s from a restaurant called Summer Palace at the Regent Hotel in Singapore 
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If you succeed in being able to use cleaning cycle heat for pizza making, be prepared for a mother board failure. Very high heat + digital electronics = eventual costly repairs.
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No, you cannot reproduce the extremely high heat cooking conditions of a commercial stove or an outdoor cooker on the typical home stove. However, many home gas stoves produce pretty fine heat, and using a cheap carbon steel wok on one you can get pretty darned hot, certainly hot enough for good maillard reaction that can, with suitable oil and sauce sugars, lead to charring. I think that in addition to the messiness, a big limiting factor is that most home cooks get freaked out by using that much heat and dial it back too soon.
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Yeah, and you saw my messy vent hood thread. I’m wondering how much of that gunk was built up over the 12 years, or whether the bulk of it was actually from the past several months when I started seriously high-heat cooking, and flaming the oil vapors in the wok or other pans.
I take this to mean that the stove is built to withstand that kind of temp on occasion (maybe an annual self-clean) but even then only for so many cycles. But if I do it routinely (e.g., 1/month pizza) I’ll kill it much, much sooner? This makes sense.
I am half way joking about doing this, but only half way. I’ve got a bit of Tim The Toolman Taylor in me. I just don’t end up in the E.R. as much as he did.
But I guess it’d be silly to waste $4K on what amounts to a vanity experiment.
4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Modernist Pizza / Bread, your opinion
Including your DeBuyer wok, then you have three woks, right? Do you keep them all? Or you mean at some points you have had them?
Note the use of the gas pedal at about 2:22 onward.
A frying pan or a saucier can absorb at least equal if not more heat than a wok at home stovetop. In fact, that is even true for many restaurant stove too. One can heat up a frying pan as burning red hot from a professional stove. Blacken a steak on a cast iron skillet is done at a high cooking temperature. Yet, it will be a challenge to make many stir fry dishes in a 12" cast iron skillet. I think the real argument for a wok is our ability to move foods very fast in it. Just this week I saute/stir fry some green peppers in my frying pan. It works, but it is just not as fast and easy to move the food around.
Bring up a cookware to high temperature is one aspect. Ability to quickly move them around (cook more evenly and prevent burning) in another thing. Fried rice is a classic example. These two videos are pretty good at illustrating this point, and I have shared at the ~1:00 min mark and 1:50 min mark, respectively.
I do have a wok. I have been cooking less stir fry and more simmering these days, but I still use a wok from time to time, especially for foods which I need to move very fast. For example, I would prefer to make scramble egg with tomatoes in a wok which is not a very high temperature cooking dish.
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Don’t overthink it.
Wok hei is just the culinary equivalent of the G spot.
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Don’t forget that high heat/ wok hei cooking at Chinese restaurants is a serious health hazard for the cooks- testicular cancer is a real professional hazard for them, that some wear heat shielding clothing to avoid this problem.
Home cooks don’t really want or need to fry their nuts…
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What you are saying is that women should be in the kitchens, right? 
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I am sure there is an equivalent cancer heat can cause in women…
That, and the shape is more conducive to tossing, especially in quantity.
Thermally, a wok on a high-output gas burner doesn’t need to hold much heat because it is instantly replenished, and even lifting the wok to toss doesn’t reduce heat very much. With Low-output or surface-only (induction and other electrics), there’s not enough heat to fully replicate gas, and lifting the pan to toss interrupts replenishment. The workarounds are choosing a flat bottom wok, sticking with the hand tools to “toss”, and resorting to a cast iron version…
