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wok

UK/wɒk/US/wɑk/
nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,398 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: woks

A wok is a deep round pan from China, made for fast, hot cooking. Heat the wok, stir-fry in a wok, a carbon steel wok.

The shape puts a very hot centre and cooler sides in one pan, so food can be moved off the heat without leaving it. It must be seasoned rather than washed with detergent, and a thin carbon steel one heats far better than any heavy pan.

Wok to Walk International, S.L. · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of wok

  1. 1nounwokA deep round pan from China, made for fast, hot cooking.B1+

    “Stir-fry the vegetables in a hot wok for just a couple of minutes.”

    • Said"Get the wok really hot before anything goes in; that's the whole secret."
    • WrittenThe woks flared and roared, and dinner was ready in the time it took to set the table.
    • UsedSeason a new wok with oil before its first use.
    • ContrastA wok, not a pan. A pan is flat and fries; a wok is curved so food is tossed through fierce heat. pan →
    • Not thisA deep saucepan is not a wok. A wok slopes, so everything slides to the middle.
    • SimplyCook the rice in the wok. It is fast.

    Patterna hot wok · stir-fry in a wok · a wok burner / lid · wok-fried

wok is a pan.

Remember it

WOK → a quick WALK round a hot pan

The food takes a quick walk round the deep round pan, never stopping, over a fire hotter than your stove.

hooks ontowalk

Where it comes from

  1. yue

    鑊

  2. English, today

    wok

Borrowed from yue 鑊.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen

Practise this word

wok in the wild

  • A wok is a deep round-bottomed cooking pan of either indigenous Chinese origin or derived from the South Asian karahi.

    Wok

  • Stir frying is a cooking technique in which ingredients are fried in a small amount of very hot oil while being stirred or tossed in a wok.

    Stir frying

  • There are competitions for one-person woksleds and four-person woksleds, the latter using four woks per sled.

    Wok racing

  • Traditionally press-formed from mild steel sheets or made of wrought iron, a karahi resembles a wok with steeper sides.

    Karahi

  • In a wok, oil is heated until almost smoking.

    Ants climbing a tree

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.