When to use a wok and when to use a frying pan

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cooking_guy

Assistant Cook
Joined
Feb 16, 2008
Messages
38
hello,

i am trying to understand when to use a wok and when to use a frying pan.

my feeling is that one uses a wok when you have lots of small things to fry (e.g. mushroom, peas, noodles, shrimps) and one uses a pan when you have few big pieces to fry (strips of meat..)

additionally when you need to deep fry, a wok is better.

to fry cottage cheese, the round wok would not work, but the flat bottom wok would work.

what do you guys/gals think?
 
hello,

i am trying to understand when to use a wok and when to use a frying pan.

my feeling is that one uses a wok when you have lots of small things to fry (e.g. mushroom, peas, noodles, shrimps) and one uses a pan when you have few big pieces to fry (strips of meat..)

additionally when you need to deep fry, a wok is better.

to fry cottage cheese, the round wok would not work, but the flat bottom wok would work.

what do you guys/gals think?

Pretty much anything you can prepare in wok, you can prepare in a frying pan. The advantage of a wok, is that it is deeper, and holds more ingreds. Have not deep-fried anything in a wok, so can't help you there. If you get the oil hot enough, using the right frying pan, you can stir-fry most anything. Never heard of frying cottage cheese. Can you share? TIA
 
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Amy is right. A wok is just a specialized frying pan.

If you want to deep fry cottage cheese or anything else, leave both the wok and frying pan in the cabinet nad use a dutch oven.
 
frying cottage cheese is part of a south asian recipe.
after frying the cheese, you cook it in tomatoes, pepper, salt, green chillies.

let me dig up the recipe, should be online, ah here is a nice video

tried to share the link, but the board does not allow me, i have got less than 20 posts. if you google paneer, it is one of the videojug links, in my case it was the 4th link from the top
 
I use a wok for deep frying and large stir fry/pan fry recipes. Like someone said earlier, a wok is, in actuality, a very large frying pan.
 
thanks for the replies,

i used the wok for deep frying prawn toast. turned out quite well
 
You'll need a commercial range to get the wok up to the PROPER btus. With that kind of heat, you'd also need a commerical exhaust hood. A great solution is to use your wok on a grill as it can get hot enough and is open air.

With that being said, obviouly you can use the wok on any surface.
 
While a wok and a frying pan can generally be used interchangeably, the shape of the wok is what gives it a lot more functionality.

Most woks you see in in America have a small flat-bottomed area so that they dont tip/slide around on the stove. That flat part will work just the same as a frying pan does. As for the rest of the wok, the heat dissipates more quickly the as you go higher up on the side of it. The way to take advantage of this is by doing whats known as stir fry, where basically, your longest-cooking ingredients go in first into a super-hot wok, get mostly cooked, and then you begin adding your quicker-cooking ingredients. As you add your quicker-cooking ingredients, you stir the longer-cooking food out of the middle of the pan and up the sloping sides. With practice, this allows you to have a lot more temperature control in preparing 1 pot/ 1 pan style meals than you would with a normal frying pan, and if it's super hot like its intended to be, most of those meals will be completed in less than 5 minutes.
 
I think College Cook has pretty much nailed it.

If I am going to pan fry a steak, or anything relatively large, I am going to grab a frying pan. The heat will be 'relatively' uniform over the surface.

The wok's beauty is the differential in heat as one goes from the bottom upwards.

Have a number of woks and was never able to use them successfully on a regular electric stove. Maybe it was just me. And bought an electric wok and it just was no go. Again, maybe me. Now have a gas stove and the woks are great.

You can do anything in a frying pan that you can do in a wok. It may take a bit of maneuvering but it can be done. But not the other way around. I would not want to pan fry a T-bone in a wok.

But woks are great tools and a lot of fun to use.
 
You can do anything in a frying pan that you can do in a wok. It may take a bit of maneuvering but it can be done. But not the other way around. I would not want to pan fry a T-bone in a wok.
Not true. You can make soup in a wok. You can not do that in a fry pan. You can also deep fry in a wok, but not a fry pan.
 
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