Ancient Chinese Wok Secret!

Okay, it’s really not that ancient, but the Chinese guy I bought my wok from shared this with me.

If you have a standard gas stove, take the flame ring you (hopefully) got with your wok, and take a pair of tin snips to it (tin snips look like a pair of scissors and garden loppers got busy).  They’re designed to cut thin bits of metal, and are available at any hardware store you’d want to spend money at.

Roughly, align the holes in the flame ring with the tines on your burner and cut slots in the ring so it settles down nicely.  It’s so obvious I firmly affixed my palm to my head when it was shared with me.

The advantages of this are that the wok sits down much closer to the flame, giving you a better cooking surface, and more importantly the flame ring doesn’t try and wander off in the opposite direction of what you’d like it to do.

Now, personally, I leave my ring in place.  I use the wok just enough that it’s not worth the effort, the edges are really sharp so you don’t want to jam your fingers in there too much, and besides, a standard 1.5qt sauce pan fits inside the ring so it never really gets in the way.

I did a post on woks in the past, but if you’d like my thoughts in real-time, and what I may think would work best for you, drop me a comment here.