How to season a carbon steel wok? The Easy Method!

How to season a carbon steel wok? 

A lot of people apply the technique the wrong way and end up ruining the wok. 

So I am showing how to do the process step by step the right way. 

I've got a new wok and guess what I have to do I have to season it and I thought this would be a great opportunity to show you how to seasonal wok as well.

Seasoning is not grease seasoning is definitely not flavor or salt or anything like that that you're putting on the pan. 

Seasoning is a very thin coating of oil that is polymerized you have oil molecules and if you heat them enough they link together and go from being a greasy liquid to being a dry plastic like solid.

If you notice the color of the metal of a new unseasoned wok, it's gray like gunmetal gray. Why is this not rusting well because it shipped from the manufacturer with some kind of protective coating on it that's not seasoning.

For comparison I have a wok that has already been seasoned a bit it can be seasoned more you can notice maybe that there are some lighter areas and there's some darker areas.

Where there's sort of different amounts of seasoning built up on the pan but that's eventually what we're going for is we want to turn this into this and then even darker we do that by laying down progressive micro thin coatings.

I cannot stress that enough might grow thin coatings of oil and then heating that oil so much it's going to smoke probably want to open your windows turn on whatever fans you have that is going to burn the oil on completely turn it into a solid from a liquid it is not going to be greasy at all when we're done.

It'll be dry to the touch and then we'll continue to lay down progressive coatings on top of that.

What kinds of metals do we season?

The answer is that we only season two kinds of metal. 
Carbon steel which is what this wok is made out of and Cast Iron.

We don't season aluminum pans we don't season stainless steel pans we don't season copper pans we do not season non-stick pans.
There are two main reasons to season a carbon steel and a cast iron pan.

1.   It protects the metal from rusting because the cast iron and carbon steel are extremely prone to rusting.

2.   Seasoning when it's done nicely forms a really great nonstick surface not as nonstick as Teflon but when the seasoning is good it's quite good.

The first thing I have to do is remove the protective coating and I'm just going to follow the manufacturer's instructions on this.

They say to boil water in this pan for five minutes dump it out wash it with warm soapy water and then we can begin the actual season.

All right now we wait, pens boiled doesn't smell very good I'm going to dump this out.

I'm going to wash the pan with warm soapy water immediately going to get the heat under it got to get some seasoning on this before this pan starts to oxidize.

I'm going to wait until I see absolutely not a drop of water left in this pan inside or out it's smoking as you can see I've got my oil here and I'm just going to rub it all over the pan.

I often just use canola oil vegetable oil some people swear by flaxseed oil but there's a lot of reports out there that flaxseed oil seasoning looks great but has a higher failure rate in terms of it chipping and flaking off so I tend not to use flaxseed oil.

You can use paper towels but a lot of paper towels will lint so if you have a kitchen towel that you're willing to ruin you know don't use some nice fancy one.

I'll do the outside as well seasoned the whole thing and the really important thing to understand is it is micro thin I do not want to see oil beating pulling glistening.

I'm going to buff it to the point where it looks pretty dry but now let's look in the pan see the color change it's starting to happen that's the oil polymerizing that's the oil I've applied transforming from a liquid to a solid.

Polymer seasoning is something you can do in the oven also for more even heat but you can't with this pin because it's got plastic handles so can't go in the oven.

This is now turned significantly darker than it was before with just one coating of oil and if you can maybe also see it's no longer smoking once the smoking stops you know that you're ready for your next layer a little more oil on your cloth and same deal.

Smoke just explodes, it's so hot be really careful with the rag because you could have something that's actually smoldering and you don't even realize it and it's so little oil it's just enough oil that I can just kind of see kind of a darkening of the metal as I apply it.

I think one of the biggest mistakes people make when they're seasoning is they add too much oil when you add too much oil it beads.

You get this splotchy look all over the pan and also if there's too much oil it has a really difficult time polymerizing and you end up with a kind of sticky texture.

That's halfway between a liquid the liquid grease endless and the solidified oil so here we go round three.

Wow look at that burned a hole right into the towel that's how hot it is the outside is you obviously don't have the concern about nonstick because you're not cooking on the outside of the pan but you do have the concern about the metal being protected so it doesn't rust.

I think maybe I'll just hold the edges a little bit and make sure that higher up we've got the oil polymerized well enough be very careful especially if you have water plastic as you're moving the pan around you don't accidentally put the plastic parts and the wood parts too close to your flame.

You don't want to melt it or let your pan on fire trying to do this.

There we go the initial seasoning on this pan is done now we just need to use it take good care of it.

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