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Cooking delicious food along the river with Sir Campalot using Snow Peak TTA .

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Men With The Pot. Summer. Open fire.

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Char Siu with Fire to Fork.

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Braaibroodjie from South Africa.

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Braai with Chris Lemmon from Stort Biltong. For this braai we had Boerewors, Shisanyama Spice Lamb Chops, Braai Sugar and Honey Glazed Pork Rashers, Picanha Steak, Braai Mealies and Pap en Sous. Washed down with a Sparletta Creme Soda, the South African way!

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Under by chef Nicolai Ellitsgaard in Lindesnes, Norway.

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Antiliaanse Feesten in Hoogstraten, Belgium on 7, 8 & 9th of August.

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The Viper Room, LA.

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Maplewood, New Jersey has garage bars.

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Erling Kagge

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“If you ask chefs what we use in our homes, most of us probably didn’t buy the pre-seasoned wok from a fancy kitchen store for $100,” says Melissa Miranda, chef-owner of Musang in Seattle. Miranda’s own wok, a traditional carbon steel workhorse, stars alongside her in her Bon Appétit video for adobong pusit pancit (a Filipino noodle dish with squid and adobo). In the video, Miranda uses her wok to cook the alliums that serve as the base for the dish before adding the diced tomatoes, squid, fish stock, and adobo sauce in quick succession. “It’s super important to have all your mise ready because you can see it’s already starting to cook,” Miranda says. She then adds the noodles to the wok, which soak up the deliciously saucy base of the adobong pusit pancit, and gives the dish a very impressive flip or two to combine.

Years of use and care have given Miranda’s wok a rich patina of seasoning that acts like a nonstick finish, and its carbon-steel construction allows the chef to use stainless-steel tongs and spatulas without a second thought. “I remember growing up, my mom ended up buying a nonstick wok and it got ruined,” she says. “If she used tongs it scraped up the bottom—whereas this one, it can take a beating.”

It’s clear why carbon steel is a staple material for professional chefs: It’s lightweight, durable, comes up to temp in a flash, and becomes naturally nonstick with use. For all of the attributes that endear the material to the pros, Miranda thinks it’s suited to the enthusiastic home cook too. “When you’re talking about Asian cuisines, you want that kind of char or smoky high-heat sear that you can’t really get when you're waiting for stainless steel to heat up.”

Carbon-steel woks excel at stir-fries (“The beauty of fast cooking at a high heat means you can’t overcook the vegetables,” she says), but Miranda also uses hers for everything from sautés to fried rice and noodle dishes. “My team makes fun of me, but I’ll actually make pasta dishes in my wok,” she says. “It helps to have a large enough surface to really get that integration of the sauce and noodles, which release their gluten and starches into the liquid and make the dish more creamy.”

Woks are offered with either a flat bottom, which allows them to sit atop a stovetop’s burner grate like any other pot or pan, or a round bottom, which requires a wok ring to help position the wok as close to the heat source as possible. Aside from the “rounded versus flat” and “carbon steel versus nonstick” choices to make while you shop, the last consideration is whether to season your wok yourself or buy one pre-seasoned.

While some may prefer the ease of a pre-seasoned wok, Miranda is all for embarking on the seasoning journey yourself. “Seasoning is part of the story of the wok,” she says. Because carbon steel is vulnerable to rust, you must ensure your wok is bone-dry before storing. Miranda dries hers over a stovetop burner and reseasons it with a coat of cooking oil spray. “It’s kind of like cast iron in that way,” she says.

While Miranda sourced her go-to wok—it’s one in a rotation of several the chef uses in the kitchen at Musang—from a restaurant supply store, the online outpost of San Francisco’s Wok Shop is another reliable source for woks and their accessories. Miranda also recommends in-person shopping: “You can go to Asian markets or walk around Chinatown. They have such beautiful, beautiful pans. It takes a little bit of extra elbow grease and love to cook with an unseasoned carbon-steel wok, but it will last a lifetime.”

By Bon Appetit

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Villa Drakothea in Mykonos, Greece.

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Lupitas Casa in Yucatan by Arquitectura Elemental.

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Ever since I bought my Lodge cast-iron pan, it’s taken up permanent residence on my stovetop. I use it to make just about everything except fried eggs (that’s still my nonstick skillet’s domain). There’s crispy hash browns for weekend brunch, chicken roasted in the oven with a mess of root vegetables, apple crumble, sausages with beans and greens.

Besides utter deliciousness, the one thing these foods have in common is that they’re very skilled at leaving a layer of gunk and/or blackened char all over the bottom of my pan. I searched diligently for a cast-iron cleaning method that would keep my cookware shiny and debris-free but that also wouldn’t take a lot of work, because I am lazy. I tried scrubbing the pan with kosher salt and a paper towel, hot water and a scrub brush, baking soda and a scouring pad, and even dish soap (a little is allowed if you re-season), but no method became habit. I was more likely to leave the dirty pan on the stove and pretend it didn’t exist until the next time I needed to use it. But I was determined not to let this skillet meet the fate of my first cast-iron pan, a cherry red Le Creuset square grill pan that met its untimely end after a pepper-crusted steak gone horribly wrong. May she rest in peace.

Then I found the Ringer—a cast-iron scrubber and miracle cleaning tool I discovered while searching for bottle brushes on Amazon, because this is my idea of a good time. This delicate 8"x6" swath of slinky chain mail looks like it was hacked off the suit of a medieval knight. It is the easiest method I’ve found to clean cast iron of even the most stubborn crusty bits.

Made of rust-resistant and ultra-durable stainless steel chain mail, the interlocked rings create a textured surface that’s ideal for tackling crusted-on residue. Here’s how it works: After you’re done cooking and your cast-iron skillet (or griddle or Dutch oven) is cool enough to handle, fill it up in the sink with some warm water, then take the Ringer to town and scrub down every inch of the pan’s surface. Rinse and repeat if you’re working with some heavy-duty crust, then dry and lightly oil the pan like usual. That’s literally it. To clean the Ringer, you can either loosen up any stuck-on food by running it under the tap or just throw it in the dishwasher.

By Bon Appetit

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Cast iron pizza on a campfire technique with The Bear Essentials.

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Welcome to onlypans. Harry Fisher checks out the best camping pan with Fire to Fork.

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Using the $160 Cast Iron from Smithey for 30 days with About To Eat