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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Personally I strongly prefer an induction stove to gas, partly because it’s faster to heat up, partly because it’s easier to clean.

But I can’t imagine professional chefs being told they have to switch to electric or induction. You can’t effectively cook in a wok with induction, since the sides of the wok don’t heat up nearly enough.

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Commercial induction wok burners are a solved problem, just slope the edges of the burner to fit a wok: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/15055/countertop-induction-...

There are induction woks now:

https://nuwavenow.com/NuWaveWok

No idea how well the concept would work in a commercial asian kitchen though.

That's cool, and better pricing than I expected ($159). If it works well, it could help convince some of my relatives that have been on the fence about switching to induction, partly because they cook a lot of Chinese food.

Thats only about 1500w or 5000 btu. The typical asian kitchen wok jet is about 2-3x that at 10k-15k btu.

Maybe a good equivalent replacement:

https://www.plantbasedpros.com/product/cooktek-605501-drop-i...

edit: @ 2000 dollars

Speaking on behalf of a family that's run Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai restaurants - It's just not a wok if there are no flames shooting around the sides of it that can sear the food as it get tossed about.

On the one hand, you do really need to be dumping a bunch of heat into the pan, and on a gas stove "flames shooting around the edge" is probably a good thing to look for.

But I don't expect the flames themselves actually interact with the food in a meaning way compared with the hot metal.

>But I don't expect the flames themselves actually interact with the food in a meaning way compared with the hot metal.

Maybe not as much as the hot metal, but they absolutely can (and should, under the right circumstances). See how these noodles are tossed over the flame? https://youtu.be/oX62hKkcb6s

You can't directly compare power output from induction vs. gas. On an induction stove that 1500 W is nearly all useful heat with little or no variance. With gas a highly variable amount of that is lost to the air, dependent on cooking vessel size/shape.

That's true, all of that wattage is being turned into heat in the metal of the wok itself. But, like the other commenter to my post alluded to, a common wok cooking method in restaurants involves tossing the food up into the air, where presumably the food is being heated directly by the heat of the flames. In a home-cooking environment that would likely not be the case, and heat conduction even on a gas stove is primarily through contact with the wok.

> But, like the other commenter to my post alluded to, a common wok cooking method in restaurants involves tossing the food up into the air, where presumably the food is being heated directly by the heat of the flames.

Tossing is to interrupt cooking to prevent burning not to cook with direct heat from flames. To the extent it might do some slower cooking from the heated air when tossed, that’ll still happen from radiated/convected heat from the pan heating the air when the pan instead of flames are the heating element.

Seems like some adapter or induction-specific wok would be trivial to create, no?

The issue isn't that woks aren't compatible with induction stoves. I have a flat-bottomed wok that works with induction, but only the bottom heats up. I don't know how you would create an adaptor that would sit on the stove and somehow pull the heat up to the sides of the wok for even cooking.

Not to dismiss the concern, but how many chefs are cooking in woks on a regular basis?

Have you ever seen the kitchen in a Chinese restaurant?

Obviously, but if single digit percentage of total cooking is done in a wok, it seems like we should just exempt Chinese restaurants and move on.

That would satisfy Chinese restaurants, though I wonder if other restaurants would also ask for exceptions, if for no other reason because they don't want to put in expensive new equipment. Are there other types of cuisine that strongly benefit from gas?

Are you asking for a precise number? Sorry but what kind of question is that? I couldn't even give you an order of magnitude but it's a lot. Basically every person who is cooking an Asian cuisine.

And many who aren't. Woks are incredibly useful for frying anything mixed.

Woks are not commonplace in probably at least half of Asia, but your point otherwise stands given the popularity of wok-using cuisines alone.

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