Wok, Kadhai, Or Are They The Same Thing?

Cooking Discussions Cookware
21

Hi. I bought one and even wrote a review on Chowhound. I don’t think it is all bad, but a couple of things.

  1. It has a little rough on the edge. I do mean that. It is not so sharp that it can cut my hand, but the wok edge is a not smooth
  2. It is not hand hammered in the tradition sense. Misleading if you will. Most of the time, when people say hand hammered or at least hammered is that, the woks were made from a piece of carbon steel and slowly hammered into shape. I saw this one from a shop:
    image
    image1083×796 90.5 KB
    image
    image1077×798 126 KB

    This one is the machine hammered Yamada work.
    image
    image728×626 28.4 KB

The Wokshop hand hammerd woks are regular stamped woks, and then then have someone hammered some uniform circle patterns on them.

image
image917×526 22.4 KB

22

The wokshop may have some real hand hammered woks too. I don’t know for sure, but they do have these fake/misleading hand hammered woks.

23

“Hand finished”!

24

Yeah. I remember one time I saw a documentary about a hand-made sauce (maybe soy sauce or hot sauce… ). The video shows the processes, and they are mostly automated… except the last step… pouring the hot sauce in the bottles and putting the paper labels on the bottle – thus are hand done/manual labor.

You should see all the sarcastic comments.

1 Like
25

I made shoyu from scratch once. Never again, per Mrs. ricepad’s decree.

2 Likes
26

Real planishing to make the wok would have been lovely to behold, but I understand that practice is extremely bad for the maker’s ears. A smooth wok is ok by me.

1 Like