When I let home (a long time ago) I wanted to cook stir fries and got a wok. My family never used a wok or cooked Asian food but my Ken Hom cookbook had instructions for seasoning a new wok and my Chinese friend told me I should never wash it with dishwashing liquid, just scrub any food residue off it with hot water.
This was all pre-internet so I had no pictures to compare against, just those two bits of advice.
25 years (yes really!) later, I have a very very black, totally non-stick wok which I thought was well seasoned but it suddenly occurred to me to google what a well seasoned wok should look like and they all look a lot more like bare metal. But most of them are new woks that are being seasoned for the first use, not an old veteran like mine.
It works fine in this state and if it was going to make us ill it would have happened a long time ago so I'm not too concerned, but I am curious!
Wok experts - is this what an old, well-used wok should look like or have I spent two decades cooking in a scuzzy wok?
Name changed so I'm not forever tainted by a scuzzy wok