- Carbon steel wok is designed to cook things hot and fast.
Flash-searing and things like that.
Carbon steel,
it's got a lower carbon content than cast iron,
which makes it less brittle,
so you could use a thinner piece of it
and achieve the same results.
So you kind of get like all the same great cooking benefits
that you get from cast iron, and it's a little less weight.
When Smithey approached us and asked
if we could make them
a wok.
that brought us to
studying wok makers,
primarily in China.
We don't have lots of craftsmen available
that can sit around, you know, doing this for,
for hours and hours and hours.
So we landed on a machine that is primarily used
in the making of
one-off kind of sculptural sheet metal pieces.
It's a reciprocating hammer.
It's used in aerospace
and it's used in the automotive industry
and just super, super precision sheet metal work.
- The head is going up and down the same amount,
and then we can open and close that gap
with the foot control.
So as it's pulsing,
you're able to get some really precise control
to manage and measure what you're doing as you do it.
Specifically with the wok,
the cold process that we do is bending that metal.
So as I'm starting
and I'm starting with just that flat disc,
cause I really want to move in a symmetrical pattern.
From there, I'm making quick judgments
with every single strike of the hammer
to manipulate it and move it where I want it to be.
You're really paying attention to the surface
and surface changes.
How it's arcing, what the radius is.
You need to know what it looked like before that blow,
what it looked like during that blow,
and what it looked like after that blow.
And it slowly begins to create this hemisphere.
- Now we're going at 600 beats a minute.
that hammering motion,
it's making the materials stronger
because it's planishing the surface of the steel.
This machine was designed for, you know,
making a fender on like a 1965 Ferrari or something,
and somebody's got to sit there
and shape it by hand and by eye.
We adapted it to make woks.
- [Annie] I'd never really done
a whole lot of sheet metal work
before we began doing this cookware for Smithey.
I came out with a lot of things that, you know,
looked like wavy potato chips.
So as I began to experiment with the hammer and play with it
until finally I got a little system down that was like,
ah, this is, this is it, this is the piece.
Carbon steel is just another way of describing steel.
Carbon is one of the main alloys in it.
We don't mass produce iron anymore in America,
so this is, you know, kind of the closest thing.
It's going to be the most malleable.
for the handles that what we're using, is just a mild steel.
- We're starting off with a blank
of three quarter inch round steel stock,
and we're going to shape it into the main handle.
So forming a handle, we heat them up in the forge,
we start to draw out the neck of the handle, if you will,
using one of our forging hammers.
Now we've created an hourglass sort of shape.
We take that little nub and we put it in our bottom die
under another larger forging hammer.
We splat out the cusp for the handle,
and that's the portion that then gets holes in it
and gets riveted to the side of the pan.
Then we stretch out the handle portion
and we actually shaped the part
that your hand is going to hold.
This is all done using a technique called open die forging,
which is forging using a power hammer,
and it's all about how you hold the material
in between those dies
to get whatever result you want to get.
We get it to the shape we want,
and we want to leave some hammer marks in there.
We don't want to make it too smooth
because it gives it a sense of comfort.
It gives the evidence of the handwork that went into it.
Put it back in the fire, heat it up,
and put it on the anvil,
and then we stamped the Smithey quail logo
into the end of, of the handle.
So now we're just shaping the handle.
And this is just like
the old fashioned way.
I started dabbling around in metal work
when I was in high school.
I went to college, you know,
I got a job in corporate America.
Did that for a couple of years,
absolutely hated it,
then the economy crashed.
I went to a school for blacksmithing in Hereford, England.
Then I traveled around Europe a little bit,
parts of the middle east,
just working for people,
learning the craft of blacksmithing.
And then, when I felt I knew enough, I opened up shop.
eight years now,
and we're making all sorts of different things.
- At a molecular level,
when we heat it, those, those molecules relax more.
And then as you beat on it, and as it loses heat,
those molecules come back together, and get stronger.
So you've got to move quick,
every blow of the hammer is sucking out of that.
The air around it is sucking heat out of it.
Your body is absorbing some of that shock as well.
You want to do as little of that as possible.
We tell how hot it is by its color, right?
Yellow, almost a white heat,
that's going to be the hottest that it is,
and you want to work at that heat as much as you can,
because it's going to move a lot easier.
Traditionally, a blacksmith
is someone who works in iron and steel.
Smiting is someone who shapes metal.
And then the black part of blacksmithing
refers to the black metals,
which are iron and steel.
Called the black metals,
because at room temperature they appear black.
As you're lifting up that hammer you're looking to see,
where do I want to place this next blow?
How hard do I need to hit?
Do I need to change the angle of my hammer?
How are you standing?
And you really have to pay attention to every moment,
and every second.
This tool here is called an arbor press.
And just give it a pull,
and it pops a hole in there.
And there you have it,
got our holes ready.
All right, so now that we've got our holes punched in,
we're ready for the final bit of shaping.
As I'm getting in that last little bit of curve
and that's what's going to allow it to attach to,
to the body of the wok at the right angle.
- [Robert] Annie is, is the head of the cookware department.
Annie came through
the American College of the Building Arts.
She was sort of a rising star in,
in the blacksmithing program at the college.
And she started with us as an intern.
- All right, so now we've got all our parts made,
we've got the body of the wok, we've got the long handle,
and then we've got what we refer to as the helper handle.
I'm going to start here
by making sure everything is lined up well.
- [Robert] She came through a path
of classic blacksmithing training.
But what I soon found is that
Annie actually had a knack for organization and management
and all the things that are really required
to actually manage a large scale project.
- I'm noticing this a little bit crooked,
so I'm going to use a real fancy technique here.
Just whack it on the side of the table.
All right, yeah.
So I got that nice and inline where I want it.
And make sure everything looks good and happy this way.
I want to make sure that the balance is fairly good.
And there it is, there's your wok.
- [Robert] Carbon steel wok is to use in a really unique way
that other pieces of cookware aren't,
because you're not just using the bottom,
you're using the sides, you've got different heat zones.
As you're heating it up and cooling it down rapidly,
it is expanding and contracting.
But it's really forgiving
and you can kind of use it and abuse it,
and it'll, it'll still be okay.
After the wok is assembled,
the next step is it goes to seasoning.
It goes into a big commercial oven
and it's heated up for like 30 to 40 minutes
at about 500 degrees.
This changes the color, really, like, deep, bronze color.
And grapeseed oil is applied,
thin, thin layer of grapeseed oil,
which adheres to the surface.
Then it goes back into the oven,
gets heated back up for another hour,
comes out, and does, does another cycle of that.
The purpose of the seasonings,
it protects the cookware from rust
and it provides a natural nonstick surface.
And through use,
the layer seasoning
just gets deeper and deeper, and richer and richer
over years and years and years of use.
It contributes to the flavor profile
of the things you cook in the pan.
Our challenge for this product has been,
how to scale up a handmade process
and not lose the artisan craftsmanship.
So the fact that we've been able to scale it up
and I can still take a lot of pride in the fact that
each piece is hand crafted.
I do love the act of blacksmithing,
I love the act of forging.
There's something about,
about working with an element of danger.
Kind of forces you to be present
with what it is you're doing.
That for me is really sort of meditative.