Woks are durable and versatile, often a one-time purchase. After expert advice and testing, the Sur La Table Professional Carbon Steel Wok emerged as the top choice. Its curved design mimics a professional round-bottom wok, while a lightweight build and comfortable wooden handle make it easy to lift, toss, and pour.
Everything we recommend
Sur La Table Professional Carbon Steel Wok
A best all-around wok
This wok excels in cooking tasks, offering lightweight stability and a perfect slope for frying. While it requires seasoning, the results are well worth the effort.
The Sur La Table Professional Carbon Steel Wok matched the performance of our previous favorite from The Wok Shop, surpassing all other woks we’ve tested. Its flat bottom ensures stovetop stability, while gently sloped sides allow a spatula to glide effortlessly during stir-frying.
Seasoning the wok proved to be the most challenging part—a necessary and ongoing process with unseasoned carbon steel. However, it developed a more even seasoning with each use. Durable enough to last for decades, this wok also offers outstanding value.
Yosukata Flat Bottom 13.5-inch Pre-Seasoned Blue Carbon Steel Wok
A prettier, heavier pre-seasoned wok
This pre-seasoned wok offers a quick start to a slick surface but still needs some prep. It’s stable yet heavy, requiring strength and often both hands to lift.
The Yosukata Flat Bottom 13.5-inch Pre-Seasoned Blue Carbon Steel Wok minimizes seasoning effort but still needs some prep. Its hand-hammered teal-tinted bowl is stable and slightly lighter than larger woks, though 5 ounces heavier than our top pick. Ideal for those valuing style and convenience, it suits users comfortable with its heavier weight.
How we picked
14-inch size
Experts agree a 14-inch wok is ideal for versatility, offering enough space for larger portions and easy stir-frying. A 12-inch wok suits smaller meals or those needing a lighter option, while larger woks can be harder to handle. Slight size variations, like 13.5 or 14.5 inches, are perfectly fine.
Carbon steel
While we considered woks made of cast iron, stainless steel, and nonstick-coated metals, carbon steel stood out as the top choice for its quick heating, light weight, and natural seasoning that improves with use. Nonstick woks aren’t ideal for high-heat cooking and vigorous stirring, key to wok techniques. Cast iron heats slowly and is too heavy to toss easily, while stainless steel is too grippy, hindering stir-frying.
Flat, stable bottoms
We focused on flat-bottom woks for their stovetop stability but noted that smaller flat surfaces can make stir-frying tricky. The Yosukata 14-inch round-bottom wok, with its wide, flat base, works on gas ranges without a wok ring. While wok rings support round-bottom woks on gas ranges, they require storage and setup and don’t work with electric or induction stovetops. We tested our woks on gas, portable induction, and full induction ranges, finding them stable and efficient across surfaces.
Comfortable-to-hold handles
We tested woks with a stick handle for tossing and a helper handle for lifting, as this combination offers the best comfort and convenience for home cooking.
Care and seasoning instructions
The seasoning process didn’t vary much between woks, but we appreciated those that included cardboard sleeves with instructions or links to helpful resources, as the quality of communication stood out.
How we tested
We began by prepping and seasoning each wok, including nonstick and pre-seasoned models, all of which needed washing and oil treatment. For unseasoned carbon-steel woks, we followed Grace Young’s basic oil method from The Breath of a Wok.
In our cooking trials, we started with sautéing baby bok choy with garlic. All woks heated quickly and charred the vegetables well, but small details like rivet placement and sharper angles affected performance. Some woks had large rivets that interrupted my flow, while others had unobtrusive rivets or none at all. Woks with sharper angles at the bottom were clunkier to stir-fry with.
Next, we stir-fried chicken and broccoli. The nonstick wok didn’t sear well, and smaller-base woks were unstable, making stir-frying precarious. Woks with sharp angles caused chicken to tear and stick, which required cleaning before adding broccoli, disrupting the cooking process.
Finally, when frying eggs, woks with sharp angles limited the number of eggs that could be fried at once, and eggs not perfectly centered would take on odd shapes, making them difficult to manage.
Deep-frying: We excluded the nonstick wok since its 350°F oven-safe limit is too low for deep-frying at 375°F. We also avoided the wok with the small base, as a wobbly pan of hot oil seemed unsafe. Carbon-steel woks are ideal for deep-frying due to their quick heat responsiveness. When frying tofu, we observed how well the oil returned to temperature after adding cold ingredients. The wok’s bowl shape also allowed for smaller batches, using less oil and making weeknight deep-frying more efficient than large pots.
Steaming: For steaming, we tested a simple aluminum domed lid on each wok with an egg custard. Most woks performed well with the lid, as the tall, domed shape provided ample space. We also noticed how the woks’ patinas held up under boiling liquids. Most woks saw some seasoning slough off, but the pre-seasoned wok fared better due to its factory-baked patina, which resisted the boiling test.
Our pick: Sur La Table Professional Carbon Steel Wok
The Sur La Table Professional Carbon Steel Wok stands out for several reasons. Its stable, rounded shape is perfect for stir-frying, and at 4 pounds, it’s one of the lightest woks we tested, making it easy to lift. The flat 5.75-inch-wide bottom ensures stability on all cooktops, while the smooth, rounded edges prevent food from getting stuck, allowing for easy release. The small rivets don’t interfere with the spatula.
The slim wooden handle is comfortable and features a loop for hanging, while many other woks, like the Yosukata, have thicker handles that can be harder to grip. The contoured wooden helper handle on the other side makes lifting and pouring easier when using both hands.
The care and seasoning instructions are clear and easy to follow, all provided on the wok’s cardboard packaging. In contrast, many other brands required us to search online for videos or guides.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The seasoning and patina take time to develop, a characteristic of all unseasoned carbon-steel woks. The Sur La Table wok shown here had been tested, showing a developing patina, while it arrives smooth and silver. Maintaining the seasoning is a long-term process, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not difficult.
The wooden helper handle is prone to scorching.
Also great: Yosukata Flat Bottom 13.5-inch Pre-Seasoned Blue Carbon Steel Wok
If you want to skip the seasoning process, the Yosukata 13.5-inch Pre-Seasoned Blue Carbon Steel Wok comes with a ready-to-use patina. While the exact seasoning method isn’t fully explained, it offers a smoother, more nonstick surface right from the start. The seasoning resists flaking better than others we tested, with less wear during steaming.
Additionally, this wok is visually striking, featuring a hand-hammered bowl with a dark teal hue created through a “bluing” process, which enhances its resistance to rust and corrosion.
The shape of the Yosukata wok is stable and smooth, making stir-frying easy. Its flat circular base is 6.75 inches wide, even wider than the Sur La Table wok, and remains steady on both gas and glass-top ranges. Like our top pick, it subtly curves up the sides, allowing a spatula to glide smoothly, similar to a round-bottom wok.
However, the wide basin requires more oil for deep-frying, which isn’t ideal for small batches. The advantage, though, is the ability to fry larger quantities at once. The hand-hammered design also causes oil to pool slightly in some areas, but it didn’t impact performance much during use.
This wok is 5 ounces heavier than our top pick but still lighter than the Yosukata round-bottom version, placing it in the middle weight-wise compared to the other models we tested.
Its thick handle is more difficult to grip, and it’s wrapped in metal for a few inches at the base. If you need to adjust your grip to lift the hot wok, you’ll have to cover the metal with a thick towel. The metal does have a distinct band where it meets the wooden handle, which helps avoid burns, unlike some other woks where the wood transitions seamlessly, making it easier to accidentally touch the metal.
