And anyone that uses a cast iron wok at home will tell you that you're wrong. Unless you have a professional stove or specialized wok stove, your residential stove is not going to get hot enough for your carbon steal wok to stay hot. With cast iron, you let it heat-up for 10+ minutes and the heat is retained for even/searing cooking.
If it works for you great, but the only thing I've ever used which did not lose significant heat while using were slabs for pizza or bread, the best being 1" aluminum plate. Cast iron itself? I have a modest set of Griswold pans of excellent quality and condition which I use on a frequent basis.
The wonderful thing is that they have high thermal mass for searing, but that is a two edge sword as it also means that once the heat is gone then we're done for a while.
I cook for my family and one of them is a mid-teenage boy. He's a separate family to himself
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There is no pan I can think of which would work for the quantity of food I prepare, and yes I am limited by BTU output, but the flame itself comes from the same kind of fuel that wok stoves use and so the pros don't use higher temperatures, but have access to burners which produce greater amounts of heat. More heat means more metal can be heated to a given temperature and so cook a greater volume of food properly that's why they are "hotter".
So I select a material and shape which allows the heat I have available to be concentrated over a fairly small surface and work with that and it would be nice if I had an area in the pan I could move away from the hottest spot for more control. Smaller batches cook better and the food cooks hot when I need it.
And here Howard enters with Serious Eats.
When looking at a the comparison we have three variables, the shape of the pan, the material, and the thickness. Flame remains constant.
For our purposes we can reduce those variables to two because we haven't a disagreement about shape. A wok it is.
So let's think about cast iron. It absorbs heat like a sponge because it has a high specific heat AND density. Better than carbon steel, right? No, not at all. The latter is slightly higher in specific heat and anywhere from slightly to considerably denser depending on the particular formulation of cast iron, which varies a lot. See
The EngineeringToolbox
So we have to materials which are similar in terms of how much heat they can absorb. For practical purposes carbon steel is superior to all but the best cast iron which isn't even made anymore.
So why did they even bother to make cast iron to begin with? Because back in the day it was cheap and high quality. The materials we take for granted in our modern world were fantastically expensive or unobtanium. All Clad? Not a chance.
Why do we use it now? Because our grandmothers did, and it's still relatively cheap in terms of thermal mass per dollar.
Well if carbon steel is so great why don't they make it too?
They do, and I intend to get a set of De Buyer pans, which are mostly iron with low carbon content. They are either #1 or #2 on my "to buy" list.
There's another factor to consider with both carbon steel AND cast iron and that is they absolutely suck in terms of thermal conductivity. Yes they absorb vast amounts of heat however they do not transfer it, acting as partial insulators compared to aluminum or copper. That's why that aluminum plate was awesome. It was thick enough to store a good deal of thermal energy AND was able to transfer it to the pizza, something those who make NYC style and neo-neopolitan pizzas can appreciate. With cast iron and carbon steel the surface will get exceedingly hot BUT the remaining heat does not transfer to replace it quickly. I haven't seen seen studies which quantify the effect, but it's real and significant relative to other metals used in cooking. You can look up values on the site I linked to.
And so we have to make compromises. You can have thermal mass, but that requires a great deal of material and that sucks away the heat from the area around the flame reducing the highest temperature than can be had, and the heat you have isn't transferred to the cooking surface as quickly as we'd like.
We can compensate by making the wok thinner. Less material means less time to reach a given temperature, a hot spot we actually and less wasted heat we can't access because of conductivity since there's not as much locked up. But then we aren't storing as much total heat.
For me the latter scenario works best. I cook at higher temperatures in smaller batches.
Ok, so if that's what one wants and the thermal characteristics are similar, then why not cast iron? No reason at all except it's like cooking with eggshell. It's entirely too brittle for my tastes, an advantage of greater thickness.
Now I'm not trying to convert you or those who are happy with their cast iron woks, but based on physical properties of the material one can see they have their problems. "Lightweight" cast iron woks would seem to have the worst of both worlds, retaining less heat like a thinner carbon steel model and being relatively fragile. My wok bounces if dropped.
