Los quemadores de wok para exteriores son la clave para preparar salteados al estilo de los restaurantes

Our favorite outdoor wok burner is the PowerFlamer Outdoor Wok Burner. It’s powerful, you can adjust its flame easily, and it’s simple to use.

For my testing, I was interested in gauging exactly how much energy each burner could transfer to the wok (as opposed to the total energy output of the burner), design elements that were suited or unsuited for wok preparation, ease of use, protection, and stability. However, it turns out that the two weakest burners I tested were the best for wok cookery, and I’ll explain why as we go through the testing. Burners that spread the flame out in a wide pattern lose a lot of energy to the air, where it’s not going to do a lick of good in helping you cook (but it may well end up burning the hair off your hands).

To test this efficiency, I filled a carbon steel wok with two liters of water at exactly 20 C (about room temperature), set it on top of a burner, then turned on the burner at full blast and timed how long it took to bring the water (and the wok) to 100 C. The one with the highest BTU output, the Bayou Classic double jet burner, at 210k BTU/hr, brought the water to 100 C in just under a minute, and to a full rolling boil in about one minute 20 seconds.

But it’s only about 5 percent efficient—95 percent of the energy output is being lost to the air. A massive amount of energy is lost out the sides when trying to cook on them with a 14-inch or even 18-inch wok.

The two most efficient models were the Eastman Outdoors Portable Kahuna Burner and the Powerflamer 160EI. The 65k BTU/hr Kahuna burner brought the water to 100 C in two minutes for an efficiency of a little over 9 percent.

The 160k BTU/hr Powerflamer, with a heat shield designed specifically for directing heat to the wok, brought water to 100 C in just 45 seconds—that’s faster than even the powerful Bayou Classic—for an efficiency of just under 10 percent. It’s also about the energy imparted directly to the food in the form of convection as you toss it up and through the flame. The Kahuna, though it doesn’t have a flame guard, only puts out 65k BTU, which is much more bearable during preparation. (Even with 65k BTU, you can easily achieve wok hei when cookery a four-person serving of fried rice).

The Powerflamer features a gas adjustment valve in front of the burner, and even better, it has an electronic ignition along with a pilot flame that can be left always-on, meaning you can adjust the flame or shut it off completely and reignite it without having to move from your spot. The only burner that struggled a little bit with a full load was the Kahuna. 65k BTU/hr is a lot, but it has its limits at around six servings at a time. This was the only test in which the wide burners and open sides on the Compass and Gas One burners proved more effective than the concentrated rings on the Bayou Classic, Kahuna, and Powerflamer.

There was one clear frontrunner throughout my testing, and it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the only one specifically designed for wok preparation: the Powerflamer 160EI. What we liked: The Powerflamer was the clear winner in all of these tests, thanks to its ample power, a burner designed to put the flame where it’s supposed to go, and good features like a flame guard, an always-on pilot, and flame adjustment knobs on the wok instead of by the propane tank.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, at full blast, this burner goes through a 20-pound propane tank in about two-and-a-half hours. Even with a relatively meager 65k BTU, it still produces plenty of wok hei and is powerful enough for all but the most heavy-duty stir-fry posts. Indeed, I’ve even suggested it in the past, and if you already have a turkey fryer or brewery burner, you may not see a need to pick up a separate outdoor burner just for wok cookery.