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.
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.
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.
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?
Everything has it’s pros and cons. There is no ‘better’. A stocked kitchen will have variety of different cookware types, a professional kitchen will have more than one heat type as well. most people for whatever reason, only use one cookware type and convince themselves it’s the ‘best’, but that isn’t true at all. i’ve taken professional cooking classes and they use every type of cookware and tell you to but certain types for certain styles/dishes.
choose your heat source first, then your cookware. non-ferrous cookware won’t work on induction stoves.
personally i have non stick, stainless steel, cast iron, and ceramic. i don’t bother with carbon steel because i don’t do high heat cooking that works best with it. i have a couple of basic alloy stock pots too, because they are lighter.
We were told that the teflon coating is “inert”, implying it’s harmless. But, now we have microplastics in every cell in our body, of which, teflon is one. I’m not sure that chemically inert equals harmless.
Cast iron is great once you learn to cook with it. Food does stick sometimes, even in a “seasoned” pan. But, it’s not a big deal. Also, you can clean and polish it with power tools, if you need to. It’s virtually indestructible.
Induction stoves? You WILL break the glass, and the glass is expensive to replace. If I got electric, I’d go with an old-school coiled heating element type, literally buy an old, used stove, because new appliances are crap construction quality. You can get them refurbished, and they’re easy to fix if anything goes wrong–very simple machines.
If you choose gas, you NEED good ventilation, a hood that vents to the outside. At least, you need to open a window while you’re burning the gas.
Here in Germany everyone is using radiant heat or induction cooktops. I’ve never broke the glass or seen that anywhere. Don’t know what you’re doing with it.
I wonder if cast iron pans are the culprit becuse they’re heavy as fuck. But I haven’t heard of people breaking the glass either
You sure have to be a little more delicate with a heavy cast iron on glass than if you had a gas stovetop. But that comes pretty automatic if you understand that different materials have different strengths and you don’t have think too much about it.
I wouldn’t necessarily trust them to live long in a high traffic restaurant kitchen.
The best argument against Teflon has absolutely nothing to do with cooking with it and everything to do with how it’s manufactured. The chemicals used for manufacturing are incredibly bad for every part of the environment, have been proven over and over to cause cancer and are impossible to contain. Of course there are good arguments against using it for pans as well, but nobody ever listens to those, I’ve tried.
Asbestos is chemically inert.
Anyone who uses that as a claim of safety is not only brainless trash, but stupid too.
My knife is chemically inert, shall I insert it into your body?
Non stick: alright for eggs and other relatively low temperature stuff. Make sure you only use rubber, plastic, or other soft utensils, and never clean it with a scraper or steel wool. The surface of the non stick is fine as far as I know, but if you go deeper by getting too hot or scraping with something too hard, you can expose the toxic chemicals.
Stainless: my go to. Use whatever utensils you want, and clean it however you want. The main thing to make it non stick is heat the pan up hot enough that when you splash a bit of water on it, it beads up and scatters. Then use plenty of oil. The main downside is you usually can’t put them in the oven.
Cast iron: better in use than stainless, but harder to clean. Upside is you can use whatever with them, and you can swap between oven and stove. Downside is you can’t clean them the same way as anything else.
Do not use steel wool on stainless. It can pit it and the steel wool can shed in those pits.
Ceramic non-stick is pretty great. I’ve used cast-iron and it’s fine, but it’s kind of fussy when it comes to cleanup.
No it isn’t. You can wash cast iron with regular dish soap, unless you’re still using lye soap. The “cast iron is difficult to clean” stuff is corporate propaganda from Teflon.
Neat!
The only thing you can’t do is chuck them in the dishwasher.
But mine usually clean with a quick rinse and 5 seconds of brushing.
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)
100% agreed on skill issue. I have one of those same Lodge pans, and it goes airborne as I like.
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
It’s only better in two things: longevity and taste. Maybe the two most important things for a cooking utensil.
Searing and oven safe.
Absolutely love that I can toss them right into the oven, and maintenance is not that bad
I lack the subtlety to tell you if my cast iron pan cooks better or makes anything taste better, but I can assure you it regularly survives abuse that would ruin a Teflon pan in days.
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.
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.
This. A cast iron pan just stores so much more heat than anything else. IDK the sciency chef-talk but if you like meat to look crusty and golden on the outside but tender on the inside then this is the way.
I basically just completely disregard any bullshit “seasoning” advice, and I’ve never had any rust or whatever. I don’t scrub it with steel wool or whatever but I don’t scrub anything with that. Sometimes I put a few cm of water in it and let that boil off any crusted on whatever.
The solution to all this mess is to buy good quality pans that meet your cooking needs and learn how to care for them, I have cast iron that belonged to my grandparents, I also have good nonstick pans,stainless pans and carbon steel they all have their uses. But if someone just wants a pan and doesn’t cook alot I would go with carbon steel, it’s more expensive, but you will probably only buy it once, (Vimes boots)and it does most thing well enough.
I have Lodge cast iron and De Buyer carbon steel and I definitely prefer the carbon steel. I do have non stick for things like eggs or pancakes but they don’t last forever, I get a few years of use. I recently replaced my old Tfal PTFE with Blue Diamond and I’m quite happy with them.
I bought an carbon steel pan about 5 years ago, best pan ever! Highly recommend 😊
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 don’t know if it is a limitation on some (cheaper?) non-stick pans but all I’ve ever dealth with were dishwasher safe. It’s metal untensils that fuck them up
Dishwasher is supposed to be more abrasive than metal tools because it’s blasting pressurized water with coarse elements onto the stuff you put inside, same reason you don’t put good knives in the dishwasher.
It’s not going to break the first time, but I seriously doubt any non-stick coating can survive a dishwasher for a year.
I have three of just such pans. Dunno if our dishwasher is just delicate. They all say they are diswasher safe. But I think it does shorten their lifespan, but I haven’t noticed much of a difference. Like said, maybe my machine is just delicate
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.
