A ghost brand in the kitchen
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 120
The Wirecutter's Best Wok Is Not the Wirecutter's Best Wok
CONSUMER AFFAIRS DEP'T.
I WENT TO the Wirecutter for advice about which wok to get. We needed a new wok because the nonstick coating on the old wok was starting to scratch up, and nonstick coatings are suspect anyway. Really, we were in the market for two woks, because we'd never replaced the smaller Ikea wok when its lining got scratched up. But then I was ordering a replacement LED bulb for an Ikea lamp and I saw Ikea now has a wok with a lining that's ceramic polymer, rather than teflon. I don't really doubt that in the medium run, the ceramic polymer could be like those BPA-free baby bottles that ended up being at least as bad as BPA. But for now, with the limited information available, that took care of one wok.
The other one, though, was a challenge. We'd been talking off and on for a long time about getting a plain steel one. That's the way a wok is supposed to be, really, right? A natural pan with a naturally seasoned patina. But the seasoning thing is not our area of household expertise; the cast-iron pan evangelists always left us unpersuaded. Oh, it keeps being hot if you turn the burner down? And you can't wash it with soap? And it's incredibly heavy? OK—
But for a wok, sure. Why not? Only which one? How can you pick out an extremely normal object anymore? The browser that used to be an information portal is now a sewer pipe full of SEO and AI advertising spam, with a million different vendors of various degrees of scamminess trying to cram their wares to the top of the window, while Google tries to cram itself into the market right with them.
This used to be what the Wirecutter was for: bypassing all of that with a supremely narrow-focused, knowledgeable indie consumer guide that did nothing but tell you exactly which product would be good to buy in a particular category. Now it's owned by the New York Times, and under the pressure to scale up, its entries have steadily gotten wider and shallower. Where I used to turn to the Wirecutter for expertise, I now go looking for maybe the lingering afterimage of expertise, the hope that someone might at least still be trying to make a good-faith guess about what might be a decent product, whether they actually know or not.
The Wirecutter had a little debacle in the wok department a while ago, when it declared that the best wok was one from a little West Coast mom-and-pop operation called the Wok Shop, which was entirely unprepared for the kind of demand surge the New York Times can create. Semi-coincidentally, our first attempt to buy a steel wok was that around that same time, we heard about the Wok Shop through some other channel, ordered a small, not-too-challenging wok from them, and just never got it.
Now, chagrined, the Wirecutter had demoted the Wok Shop product, with a warning about availability issues, and replaced it as No. 1 with a carbon steel wok from Sur La Table. A part of me blanched, the part that believed I really ought to just go find a restaurant-supply store on the Bowery and grab one there. But I wouldn't really know what I was doing, and restaurant supply woks don't necessarily have features like heatproof handles. So I got the recommended wok.
It arrived stably packed inside a nice Sur La Table carton. The wooden handle had "Sur la table" engraved into it. A cardboard jockstrap wrapped around the bowl had printed cleaning and seasoning instructions on the natural cardboard background. "Our exclusive carbon steel wok makes quick work of Asian stir-fries and tempura," the text began.
Down in the bottom of the wok there was a less tastefully colored label, in red, white, and black text on orange. It read:
IMPORTANT
Initial Cleaning and Seasoning Required
To ensure that your Joyce Chen® cookware is ready for its first use, SCAN THE QR CODE or CAREFULLY FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS ON THE PACKAGING detailing how to properly clean and season your cookware.
(Below that, it read, "Pour vous assurer que votre ustensile de cuisine Joyce Chen®...")
The QR code led, in fact, to the Joyce Chen®–brand wok seasoning instructions on KitchenSupply.com. Our Wirecutter-certified single best wok, the Sur La Table 14 inch carbon-steel wok, was apparently the same product as the Joyce Chen® Classic Series 14-Inch Carbon Steel Flat Bottom Wok with Birch Handles.
This didn't necessarily reduce my confidence in the wok. In the abstract, I would have trusted the Joyce Chen name on a wok more than the Sur La Table name, anyway. In reality, Joyce Chen's descendents sold off the "Joyce Chen" cookware brand years ago, and it appears to have made its way, as pure intellectual property, to the Honey-Can-DO International LLC home-organizing-gear company of Berkeley, Illinois, and thence to the Kitchen Supply Co. of Forest Park, Illinois. Sur La Table, meanwhile, was bought out of bankruptcy by Marquee Brands LLC of New York during the pandemic. Somewhere behind them all is a factory churning out woks.
The wok seems OK but we haven't finished seasoning it yet.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
OVER AT FLAMING Hydra, the 60-writer publishing collective that your Indignity staff belongs to and wholeheartedly endorses, I wrote about the bad-mannered house sparrow, humankind's constant if unaffectionate companion:
The house sparrows are here because the house sparrows go where human beings go, across six continents and all four hemispheres. [The naturalist and engineer J.D.] Summers-Smith wrote that they “spread along railway lines during their construction, by living on scraps at the railhead camps,” and that they followed troops into the previously uninhabitable Sinai desert during the First World War; when people move off of islands, the house sparrow population dies off behind them. Their most visible absences on the map are from the Arctic tundra, the jungles and rainforests of the tropics, and East Asia, where the Eurasian tree sparrow occupies their role.
Whatever else there is to say about the house sparrow’s morals or manners, it is a civilized bird. It moved into human territory millennia ago—not as a friend like the dog, nor an outright enemy like the rat or bedbug, but as a creature that saw its chance and took it, evolving into a new way of life in parallel to human activity. House sparrows hunt insect pests in the fields to feed to their nestlings; the nestlings grow up and fly off to steal ripe grain from the fields. Mostly, outside the cycles of earth’s bounty, they enjoy what Summers-Smith called “a remarkably short working day compared with most passerine species.” In winter, he wrote, “house sparrows appear to have little difficulty in finding sufficient food and in fact spend a considerable time in other activities such as social singing.”
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
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SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Mrs. Ericsson Hammond's Salad Appetizer Cook Book, by Maria Matilda Ericsson Hammond. Published in 1924, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Gherkin Sandwiches à la Digre
Sandwiches de Cornichons à la Digre
Take six medium-sized sour gherkins, two spoons of Parmesan cheese, yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, six slices of bread, three tablespoons of butter, pepper and salt.
How to Make It. Chop the gherkins; mix it with the chopped parsley and chop it very fine; stir the butter to a cream; to two spoons of the butter add the gherkins with the parsley and spread it on the slices of bread. Cut the bread in the shape of a diamond; chop the yolks very fine and make a row of it in the form of a cross from point to point. Put the rest of the stirred butter in a paper bag that holds a small tube and decorate on both sides of the yolks and all around the sandwiches. Arrange on the platter; garnish with parsley.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
LESS THAN 10 COPIES LEFT: HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, and is available for purchase at SHOPULA.
