Two Dutch designers innovate with kitchen stuff
Two Dutch designers, Jorre van Ast and Nicolai Carels, won a Grand Prix design award from manufacturer Royal VKB. Van Ast scored with a new-fangled drying rack for dishes, the Dish Drainer Geo, while Carels came up with a wok for dummies, the Boomerang Wok (see video).
I have to agree with one of the comments I read: wokking is a skill and spilling the food everywhere like in this video seems like a dummy Western thing to be doing. However, the Boomerang Wok seems like a nice solution.
(Link: idealize)
I would consider that object as bad design, for a variety of reasons. The first one is that an enclosed shape like that is going to be difficult to get to dry in a dish rack, unless you invert it completely. The second one is that, if you are afraid of spilling stuff while cooking, you can just buy a bigger wok, which will afford you more working space without having to buy funny-shaped expensive objects.
What they made is like a half-assed saucepan.
The other thing to discuss would be the whole “wokken” thing, which is usually done on underpowered burners so that the result is not a stir fry but something way more soupy. You can tell that they have something very wrong in their mind when they claim that wokken takes no time. Well, it does, if you do it right, since you have to stir fry ingredients separately – without considering the preparation time before. Of course, if you buy bags of precut vegetables and packages of precut meat, and you just tip it all into the Boomerang Wok it will take not time at all.
But, at least for me, the real killer is the nonstick surface in the pan. Can’t stir fry in such a thing.
[…] wok shown in the middle was the Boomerang Wok, designed by Dutch designer Nicolai […]