To me, someone who celebrates a bit more of the spectrum than most: Metal hot. Make food hot.
Non-stick means easier cleanup, but my wife seems to think cast-iron is necessary for certain things (searing a prime rib roast, for example.).
After I figure those out, then I gotta figure out gas vs. electric vs. induction vs infrared…
It lasts forever, you wont scrape whatever “non-stick coating” they use off. If you want a pan that will outlive your grandchildren and is permanently non-stick once it’s seasoned, for most things a cast iron is perfect. If you have that, some pots of various sizes, and a wok, youre set.
I prefer induction or infrared stovetop. We dont need to burn more gas.
Imo, the main advantage to cast iron vs literally everything else is how you can abuse it as long as the one rule you follow is to clean it after use.
Teflon and other nonstick coatings are too easily damaged by things like scrubbing pads or metal utensils.
Cast iron don’t give a single fuck.
Teflon will eventually flake off even if babied. The problem is thermal stress between the aluminum and Teflon. Repeated heating and cooling will eventually cause it to fail.
You can absolutely scrape the seasoning off a cast iron pan through aggressive use of metal utensils, but you can also re-season it by applying a little cooking oil and getting it hot for an hour or so.
You also don’t have to worry about getting Teflon flu if you overheat the pan. The worst thing that can happen is that you ruin your pan, not that you poison yourself.
Induction gives you the speed and control of gas, without the exhaust gases. Induction is more efficient than infrared, because you’re heating the pan directly. The cooktop only gets hot from the pan resting on it.
Get induction, it’s by far the best!
i also want to add that you should avoid ones with capacitive buttons. they suck, and imagine cleaning them…
Also against the capacitive buttons my cat has accidentally turned on my stove so now I need to turn on the cleaning lock whenever I am done using it
same here, i just always make sure there’s nothing metallic on the stove. it will just turn off after a while if my cats turn it on. don’t understand why the controls can’t be similar to the oven: knobs in the front panel that can be pushed in
Induction also requires specific pans, right? So a regular cast iron pot won’t work?
If it’s sticking to a magnet, it will work. Cast iron works. Induction is great, i’ll never go back to gas!
Thanks! Sorry for spreading the FUD
Probably answered below:
All will work with induction, except for cheap aluminum nonstick pans
I thought it was more involved than that but after a quick search online I’m wrong
You do still need a fair amount of mass on the bottom for it to be efficient. Anything ferrous will work, though.
Pure copper pans will not work for the same reason as aluminum.
A very slight clarification here:
cheap to make alumin
spoiler
i
um nonstick pans. Mine doesn’t work AND it wasn’t cheap : (.
The reason cast iron is useful for searing a big cut of meat is that it has a reasonably high specific heat capacity (less than aluminum, more than copper, similar to steel) combined with considerably more mass than typical cookware made of other materials. It takes longer for the meat to cool the pan, so more heat transfers into the outer surface of the meat.
Cleanup of properly seasoned cast iron should be about as easy as non-stick pans because the seasoning (polymerized cooking oil) is, in fact a non-stick surface. Contrary to popular belief, it’s fine to use soap on it, but aggressive abrasives can strip the seasoning. Fortunately, that’s not hard to fix.
Stainless steel can be plenty nonstick but you have to get it good and hot. Seasoned cast iron is a little more forgiving, but heavy. Carbon steel may be the best of both world because it’s similar in weight to stainless, but takes a season, but I don’t have enough experience with it yet to say for sure.
This is a HUGE “Yes, but.”
Entering adulthood, I got cheap run of the mill non stick pans, they work until they dont.
Then we tried cast iron. Gotta oil it, cure it, and don’t use soap to wash it. Some extra work, but it worked great.
Now, I’m rocking stainless steel. Less work than the cast iron, but you need to preheat the pan before you put anything in it. If you do this, it’s just as nonstick as the others, and it’s a lot lighter and easier than the iron, and I think they are less expensive than cast iron, but I haven’t compared in a very long time.
FYI, you can wash cast iron with soap.
Not using soap is a hold over from when soaps were more caustic (e.g. lye soap).
FYI, you can wash cast iron with soap.
Only if you re-season it afterwards. Otherwise it starts to rust because the seasoning is what protects it from oxidation
Really not. See the lye comments.
I generally wash with dish soap and a chainmail scrubber, then dry with a paper towel. If I remember I might spread a tiny amount of oil.
Yeah I could do better but the point is I’ve done almost nothing to care for them in years.
Pure iron oxidizes without the high carbon content to make it stainless and will absolutely rust if you don’t at least oil it after washing with soap, but seasoning it properly definitely makes a difference in how it cooks.
I own 4 different size/shape cast iron and I speak from experience. Any decent dish soap will still strip the oils that are acting as a barrier to the open air and oxidation, doesn’t have to be lye-based
Cast iron is extremely forgiving of improper treatment. And even if it eventually rusts, you can fix it. I’ve been using cast iron as my primary skillets since pandemic. I know I don’t treat them like I should, but they’re not yet rusted, still have an easy to clean surface that food doesn’t stick to. I’ll probably have to reseason eventually but if that’s not until I’d normally have to replace non-stick, I’m way ahead without putting in any extra work
Edit: sure, standard three cast iron skillets, and cast iron Dutch oven. I also have a set of stainless pans, and some induction ready non-stick for company
It only oxidizes when water can reach the iron. If you have a good seasoning on it, mild dish soap can’t lift it off, and water can’t reach the iron.
Making sure it’s completely dry (I dry mine with heat on the stove) and adding a thin layer of oil is a good idea too. There are often parts of the pan that aren’t well seasoned. On mine, it’s the part that touches the stove that’s most likely to rust.
Stainless steel is made with chromium, not carbon.
Carbon steel makes good knives, but will definitely rust.
If your seasoning rinses off with mild soap and water, you might want to try some different seasoning methods. That might mean using a different oil, different temperature, longer heat time for the seasoning, etc. Or you might want to season it with thinner layers of oil multiple times in a row.
Thanks for the tip. I saw many people saying both sides, so I figured I’d just avoid soap and not find out for myself.
If you wash your cast iron with eg Dawn dish soap, you can definitely clean it down to bare metal and it will rust. I usually will clean the cast iron pan last and use the sponge that just has a small amount of soap left in it. Just watch it as you clean, if the shiny hard coating seems to be going away, rinse out the soap and make something greasy next time you use the pan to replenish it.
If you have a good seasoning, it won’t wash off. “Seasoning” is the process of polymerizing oil. That hardens the oil and binds it to the surface. You’re more likely to burn the seasoning off or to scratch the seasoning and have it flake off than take it off with dish soap.
Whether you use soap or not, dry it on the stove and give it a light coat of oil after you clean it.
Yea that’s the part that keeps me from cast iron.
Not being able to wash it normally just sounds weird and nasty to me.
And two the whole having to season your pan… God damn I’ve got a million things to worry about and barely time to make food, I don’t have time to be giving a hot oil massage to my pans…
Metal hot. Makes food hot. Yes.
But!!
Cold food makes hot pan cold.
Cast iron has a lot of thermal mass, so when you put a cold piece of meat on it it doesn’t immediately get cold and stop cooking for a bit. Thin pans without it don’t keep hot, hot so they don’t sear long enough and you don’t get the maillard reaction and the tasty brown crust.
I got started when I inherited my grandmothers Le Creuset dutch oven. She purchased it in the 1950s and it’s still going strong…
Then I found they had an outlet store near me…
Non-Stick, no matter what brand, will need to be replaced every 3-5 years. So, yes, enameled cast iron is more expensive, but when you compare 1 set of cast iron to 15 to 25 sets of non-stick… yeah…
Cast iron also retains heat better than non-stick, carbon or stainless steel, aluminum or copper.
But it is HEAVY AS SHIT. You aren’t hand flipping pancakes in cast iron.
can’t handflip pancakes with cast iron
yeah dawg I’ll be real here, that’s a skill issue. do some weights, and wrist exercises, and then you too can hand flip pancakes in a pan like this:
~(imperial measuring tape for scale)~I’ve used cast iron for about 15 years now, and flipping pancakes in this thing is downright easy these days. (yes I know my kitchen is a bit dirty, I literally just made dinner, and am posting on Lemmy as I eat)
I cheat and use an æbleskiver pan. 😜 No flipping required, you just rotate them with a skewer.
https://youtube.com/shorts/pCQCW5NS2jg
Danger is in eating too many without realizing it. LOL.
hahahahahaha that is true! I’ve got canadian maple syrup, duty free from some family in CA, and booooooy do those flapjacks taste GOOD with butter and syrup.
æbleskiver look astoundingly similar to another dish - takoyaki; as well!
~~…dangit now i’ve got a hankering for takoyaki, and the only good place is an hour away, and also closed for the night. ~~
Pull a Tampopo and break in to cook them yourself (and clean up so no one knows). >:3
If the weight is a problem, you can always try carbon steel. It’s similar to cast iron in it’s use (seasoning and all that), but it is lighter.
Yeah, that’s what I did for a wok. They make cast iron woks, but the weight defeats the entire purpose.
I like carbon steel, mainly for two reasons
- Heats up insanely fast
- Super easy to clean
High carbon steel. The real champion. Agree
Hell yeah. Carbon steel pans are great. Gonna get a carbon steel wok soon and then home deep frying is gonna be a breeze.
Yeah I went from cast iron to carbon steel. So easy to clean and non stick. Seasoning it was so easy. All I did was cook onions and garlic with oil a few times.
Depends on what you’re doing. Yes, it’s better for most things where you’ll need to sear.
Carbon steel frying pans good as well.
For me, cast iron are by far my most used pans. You know how flannel starts out sort of awful but gets better and better as it gets older? That’s cast iron. Starts out sticky PITA but over time becomes satisfying satiny nonstick surface. I’ve always used them a lot so that’s how my cooking style evolved.
We also have one steel pan we call the Stick pan, sometimes you want food to stick so you can deglaze. My kids use it for potsticker dumplings, and they like it also because it’s lighter, cast iron is heavy. And of course a rice and pasta pot, those are steel.
I don’t buy “nonstick” pans, they don’t last and I’m not convinced they are safe.
Cast iron is fairly cheap and reliably buy it for life. Non stick pans are so delicate that you can’t even use metal tools with them and their handles are usually plastic so melt if you put them in the oven, and even then they won’t last more than a few years.
All of my pans are cast iron. For saucepans I have stainless steel. Never really had a problem with cleanup, what are you doing?
Alternative to cast iron: carbon steel.
Same seasoning process, better heat conduction, lighter, cheaper.
Non-stick has to be cleaned by hand, whereas stainless steel can go in the dishwasher, so for me that’s easier to cleanup.
Non-stick has Teflon on top, which shouldn’t be heated above a certain temperature, and to sear steak you need to leave the pan in the stove for long without anything on it so it gets extremely hot (which would damage the Teflon coating of non-stick and release poisonous gases on your kitchen, not enough to kill you, but still can’t be healthy).
So, in short, stainless steel is a good middle ground, easier to clean and maintain than non-stick and cast iron.
As for gas/electric/induction it’s about efficiency, induction heats the bottom of the pan, electric heats the glass where the pan is resting, and gas heats everything. There’s a video from a YouTuber that measures time for a pot of water to get to 100° in all 3 (I don’t remember who, I thought it was technology connections but can’t find it), and in short induction is the fastest, electric takes a while longer, and gas melted his thermometer before the water boiled (which shows you just how much heat you’re putting in a place that’s not the pan).
That being said there’s certain stuff that is easier to do on gas stoves, possible on electric and impossible on induction. Namely anything that requires the pan to be heated at an angle. It’s very niche, I would say most people wouldn’t even notice or care about this limitation, but professional chefs sometimes prefer gas because it allows to be used like this.
I’m thinking about a wok. That surely couldn’t work with induction. Or does it?
It does, I have an induction wok that I used in my previous apartment that had an induction stove. That being said it does have a flatter base than a “real” wok, but most woks you will use on your kitchen also have flat bottoms anyways. But yeah, you can’t use it the same way, so if you mainly cook with woks it might be an issue, for me it wasn’t.
I’ve been enjoying my carbon steel more than cast iron. It’s the same as cast iron for seasoning and non stick, but much lighter.
Cast iron is pretty good at almost everything, but isn’t the best at anything.
For searing meat at high temps, I’ve settled on stainless steel. It’s easy to clean and maintain, and the typical 3-ply or 5-ply cladding has much better heat transfer characteristics than cast iron (which is a mediocre heat conductor masked by the fact that it’s so heavy and thick that it takes on a lot of thermal mass to aid in searing). You don’t have to worry about metal utensils or harsh scrubbers scratching the surface. And you don’t have to worry about acidic ingredients messing with the surface, either.
For things that need nonstick characteristics, like eggs, I cycle through nonstick on a short replacement cycle (once every 2 or 3 years). I might get a carbon steel one day but I’m not in a hurry.
The 5 ply stuff is really good. The ones I have are just as heavy as the cast iron but they can go in the dishwasher so that makes them my favorite. They cost way more than cast iron though
Eggs tend to cook rather well on cast iron so long as you use butter/tallow/fat/etc. and aren’t scrambling them.
Unfortunately I scramble my eggs nowadays so I don’t have much reason to use my cast iron pan anymore :(
I scramble eggs in my cast iron all the time. No issues. What issues are you having with that?
Yeah, I don’t have any real trouble with scrambling on a cast iron. Even if it does stick a bit, it’s scrambled so it’ll all come together in the end anyway.
