How Carbon Steel Woks are Forged by Hand — Handmade

carbon steel wok is designed to cook things hot and fast flash searing and things like that carbon steel it's got a lower carbon content than cast iron which makes it less brittle so you could use a thinner piece of it and achieve the same results so you kind of get like all the same great cooking benefits that you get from cast iron and it's a little less weight when smithy approached us and asked if we could make them a walk that brought us to studying walkmakers primarily in china we don't have lots of craftsman available that can sit around you know doing this for hours and hours and hours so we landed on a machine that is primarily used in the making of one-off kind of sculptural sheet metal pieces it's reciprocating hammer is used in aerospace and it's used in the automotive industry and just super super precision sheet metal work the head is going up and down the same amount and then we can open and close that gap with the foot control so as it's pulsing you're able to get some really precise control to manage and measure what you're doing as you do it specifically with the walk the cold process that we do is bending that metal so as i'm starting and i'm starting with just that flat disc because i really want to move in a symmetrical pattern from there i'm making quick judgments with every single strike of the hammer to manipulate it and move it where i want it to be you're really paying attention to the surface and the surface changes how it's arcing what the radius is you need to know what it looked like before that blow what it looked like during that blow what it looked like after that blow and it slowly begins to create this hemisphere now we're going at 600 beats a minute that hammering motion is making the material stronger because it's planishing the surface of the steel this machine was designed for you know making a fender on like a 1965 ferrari or something and somebody's got to sit there and shape it by hand in my eye we adapted it to make walks i'd never really done a whole lot of sheet metal work before we began doing this cookware for smithy i came out with a lot of things that you know looked like wavy potato chips so as i began to experiment with the hammer and play with it until finally i got a little system down that was like ah this is this is it this is the piece carbon steel is just another way of describing steel carbon is one of the main alloys in it we don't mass produce iron anymore in america so this is you know kind of the closest thing it's going to be the most valuable for the handles that's what we're using is just a mild steel we're starting off with a blank of three-quarter inch round steel stock and we're going to shape it into the main handle [Music] so forming a handle we heat them up in the forge we start to draw out the neck of the handle if you will using one of our forging hammers now we've created an hourglass sort of shape we take that little nub and we put it in our bottom die under another larger forging hammer we splat out the cusp for the handle and that's the portion that then gets holes in it and gets riveted to the side of the pan then we stretch out the handle portion and we actually shape the part that your hand is going to hold this is all done using a technique called open die forging which is forging using a power hammer and it's all about how you hold the material in between those dies to get whatever result you want to get we get it to the shape we want and we want to leave some hammer marks in there we don't want to make it too smooth because it gives it a sense of comfort it gives the evidence of the hand work that went into it put it back in the fire heat it up and put it on the anvil and then we stamp the smithy quail logo into the end of of the handle [Music] so now we're just shaping the handle and this is just like old-fashioned way i started dabbling around in metal work when i was in high school i went to college you know i got a job in corporate america did that for a couple years absolutely hated it then the economy crashed i went to a school for blacksmithing in hereford england then i traveled around europe a little bit parts of the middle east just working for people learning the craft of blacksmithing and then when i felt i knew enough i opened up shop eight years now and we're making all sorts of different things on a molecular level when we heat it those those molecules relax more and then as you beat on it and as it lose heats those molecules come back together and get stronger so you got to move quick every blow of the hammer is sucking heat out of that the air around it is sucking heat out of it your body is absorbing some of that shock as well you want to do as little of that as possible we tell how hot it is by its color bright yellow almost a white heat that's going to be the hottest that it is and you want to work at that heat as much as you can because it's going to move a lot easier traditionally a blacksmith is someone who works in iron and steel smithing is someone who shapes metal and then the black part of blacksmithing refers to the black metals which are iron and steel called the black metals because at room temperature they appear black as you're lifting up that hammer you're looking to see where do i want to place this next blow how hard do i need to hit do i need to change the angle of my hammer how are you standing and you really have to pay attention to every moment and every second this tool here is called an arbor press then just give it a pull and it pops a hole in there there you have it got our holes ready all right so now that we've got our holes punched in we're ready for the final bit of shaping i'm getting in that last little bit of curve and that's what's going to allow it to attach to to the body of the walk at the right angle annie is is the head of the cookware department annie came through the american eligibility arts she was sort of a rising star in in the blacksmithing program at the college and she started with us as an intern [Music] all right so now we've got all our parts made we've got the body of the wok we've got the long handle and then we've got what we refer to as the helper handle i'm going to start here by making sure everything's lined up well she came through a path of classic blacksmithing training but what i soon found is that annie actually had a knack for organization and management and all the things that are really required to actually manage a large scale project i'm noticing it's a little bit crooked so i'm going to use a real fancy technique here whack it on the side of the table all right yeah so i got that nice and in line where i want it to make sure everything looks good and happy this way i want to make sure that the balance is fairly good and there it is there's your walk carbon steel wok is used in a really unique way that other pieces of cookware aren't because you're not just using the bottom you're using the sides you've got different heat zones as you're heating it up and cooling it down rapidly it is expanding and contracting but it's really forgiving and you can kind of use it and abuse it and it'll it'll still be okay after the walk is assembled the next step is it goes to seasoning it goes into a big commercial oven and it's heated up for like 30 to 40 minutes at about 500 degrees this changes the color really like deep bronze colors and grapeseed oils apply thin thin layer of grapeseed oil which adheres to the surface then it goes back into the oven gets heated back up for another hour comes out and does it does another cycle of that the purpose of the seasoning is it protects the cookware from rust and it provides a natural non-stick surface and through use the uh the layer of seasoning just gets gets deeper and deeper and richer and richer over years and years and years of use it contributes to the flavor profile of the things you cook in the pan our challenge for this product has been how to scale up a handmade process and not lose the artisan craftsmanship so the fact that we've been able to scale it up and i can still take a lot of pride in the fact that each piece is hand crafted i do love the act of blacksmithing i love the act of forging there's something about about working with an element of danger it kind of forces you to be present with what it is you're doing that for me is really sort of meditative

Channel: Eater

Views: 329,950

Keywords: wok, how to make a wok, how to season a wok, how woks are made, carbon steel wok, making a wok, carbon steel wok cooking, making a wok non stick, carbon steel, carbon steel pan, carbon steel skillet, carbon steel wok seasoning, cast iron wok, handmade wok, hand hammered wok, hand hammered cookware, cookware, blacksmithing, blacksmith, blacksmith shop, forge, blacksmith forge, hammer, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, handmade, eater handmade, smithey ironware, smithey cast iron

Id: rO_ORWYbcDo

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/alvarezg]

That's absurd. Sheet metal spinning is the logical process to make woks. I would bet the vast majority are made by spinning.

[u/[deleted]]

Nice handiwork, but a wok is meant to be cheap, effective, and versatile. Their pricing blows the "cheap" part out of the water.

[u/Magnifishot]

$325
https://smithey.com/collections/carbon-steel/products/carbon-steel-wok