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…
Cast iron is overrated. And people overthink a lot about it being seasoned. Really though, you still have to care for it and it isn’t like you can just re-season the pan. Just make sure it doesn’t rust.
Induction FTW and cast iron does work the best with induction since it heats up the most. However, I also enjoy non-stick since it being slower is an OK trade-off for the easy cleanup
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.
I use cast iron on electric and am 100% happy with both. I have a mix of pans that I bought new and acquired used. One of them was quite rough and I restored it. I find them extremely easy to use and cleanup.
Yes. Our house only has cast iron and stainless.
There’s a small learning curve with cast iron, but the less you worry and over think it, the easier it gets. I fry eggs every other day in mine, and it’s about as non-stick as anything else. Preheat the pan or griddle, that’s all. Cleanup is a wipe with a paper towel or a rinse and quick scrub.
Cast iron works 95% of the time, but acid can strip the seasoning. So anything simmered an hour or more in tomato or win,e or sauted with lemon juice, get stainless. Don’t put it in the dish washer. Not a lot of rules, really. My pan is 15 years old. My Mom uses ones that might be older than her.
When I travel and have to use someone else’s non-stick pans, I hate the delicate little snowflake pieces of shit. Flimsy, toxic, someone else showed it a fork once so now it has damage and sticks anyway in a line across the middle, can’t go on the oven, can’t sear, handles all wobbly. Generally just disposable trash. Why would you love trash?
Nonstick pans are amaaaaazing the first few months. After that, they get non-non-stick in places.
I have a non-stick, and I use it rather infrequently. I have read about the effects of damaged coating, and GOD I would throw it away immediately as soon as I see ONE flake in it. Maybe I’m just overreacting it, but I treat it like it was a delicately covered layer of asbestos.
It’s great and smooth NOW, but I’m only using it until I see a noticeably hard scratch. Until then, I get rid of the oil and juices with a paper towel immediately after cooking (and I’m already slightly worried that the dry paper could be too abrasive on the dry bits of the pan), and I leave it to cool down before I wash it to prevent it from heat stress.
I might be overthinking it. But I’m playing with the thought of getting a cast iron or carbon steel already.
Everyone else in the comments are saying Teflon is harmless to consume. Who do I believe?
I like carbon steel, mainly for two reasons
- Heats up insanely fast
- Super easy to clean
High carbon steel. The real champion. Agree
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…
Induction also requires specific pans, right? So a regular cast iron pot won’t work?
I have induction; anything magnetic will heat, pans sized to your elements work best. Pans with too much aluminum and not enough iron (or other ferro magnetic material) won’t work very well. Getting induction was a great excuse to dump the cheap pans I’d wanted to replace anyway. When shopping the discount racks like Home Goods, Marshalls, etc. I always grabbed some fridge magnets and tried them on the bottom of any prospective purchase; the stronger the pull, the better it will perform with induction. The only item I really missed was my moka pot (stovetop espresso, usually all aluminum casting), but I was able to find one with a stainless steel base that works great. Your pots and pans will also need a flat bottom to react to the induction elements, so woks and such built with a slope or curve to encourage flames to lick up the sides don’t work so well compared to gas. Finding a Teflon coated pan that works with induction was difficult (I don’t often use it anyway, but SO insisted we have one for their use). I’m looking into replacing the Teflon pans with nitrided carbon steel soon.
Cast Iron and induction are a match made in heaven though. The cast iron heats fast and evenly and the induction means you can be very precise about how much heat you apply and when. When you turn off the element, the only heat left in the whole system is what you’ve already put into the pan, which is a big deal in my tiny kitchen when I don’t always have room to move a pan off to the side to rest or cool. The cast iron and stainless pans I have heat fast enough that I can basically cook starting from a cold pan for most things. Heating an empty pan takes seconds. I can bring a pot of a water of a couple quarts/liters to a roaring boil in about 4 minutes, then back down to a gentle simmer in seconds.
If gas is cooking with fire, induction feels like cooking with science. As may be clear from the rant, I love my induction range.
Small note on induction.
Since power setting works by turning the element off and on quickly, having a really thin pan with little thermal mass will result in some really weird uneven heating (basically just a hot circle).
Two ignorant questions for you:
Do you see any benefits to teflon over carbon steel?
I’ve been using airbnb a bit and sometimes the tops are some form of electric (but I’m ignorant enough not to know what type of electric) and by far the most brittle part seems to be the touch buttons that many have. Do you have any pointers on shopping around for stovetops without issues with the buttons?
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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
I recently watched a video on the topic of which pans you need, and the only two that were mentioned as important are non-stick and stainless steel
Non-stick chemicals have been historically poisonous, don’t know about the modern stuff though.
Also, cooking with cast iron increases iron intake.
i have a nonstick with a ceramic coating. has lasted a lot longer than teflons
Teflon itself is harmless, it’s the by-products in its production (PFAS) that are dangerous. Here’s more in the topic: https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
cast iron increases iron intake
You need acidic ingredients for that. Cook your tomato sauce in a cast iron to get a healthy dose of iron for the whole family!
Cheap “modern” stuff? Still toxic. Though there are plenty of coatings that are less toxic and more robust. Not to say any, including a seasoned cast iron pan, are abuse-proof. Use metal utensils on anything, and you will damage any coating.
Yeah, PFAS or forever chemicals like Teflon are not all equal. The bigger “fluffier” molecules can pass through the body way easier than the smaller ones.
If people are in the US they should check their drinking water first since that’s the majority of PFAS that stay in the body weirdly enough.
I use a metal spatula on my cast iron all the time.
There’s no [edit: manufactured, not easily replaced] coating on cast iron (unless enameled)
You seasoning is a coating
Yes there is, it is polymerized fats and oils that build up over time.
Technically the truth, but using a metal spatula will not have much impact.
Also It is technically plastic.
Unwise regardless of how it can be ‘replaced’ on cast iron.
Cast iron can take a fair amount of abuse.
The method some people use to clean super stuck on bits it literally a square of chain mail. I just use salt, I don’t think the chain mail works that well.
Yeah, grandma’s been sending me those ‘good luck’ chain mails since the nineties, and I’ve still not seen any luck at all.
Non-stick is teflon. Not harmful unless you burn it (at over 300°C).
Not sure why you are down voted, you are right. Teflon molecules are really long chains, your body doesn’t interact or store it, you just shit it out as it entered. The issue is the molecules used in it’s production, that are dumped in rivers and end up everywhere.
Yea, and if you burn them they break down into shorter molecules that accumulate in the liver or something.
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’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.
They’re all fine with some extendent. It really depends specifically what and how you’re cooking. I like cast iron for steak because you can heat it up a helluva lot, even without fat, while trying that with non-stick pans can damage the coating and make some weird smells. Similarly, I prefer it for frying eggs because I like to use a metal slice to flip eggs, and worry about scarcjing my non-stick. But I have both and happily use both.
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.
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.
I use my cast iron for non stick operations and my stainless for fond sauces and acidic dishes.
Next time with stainless try this: bring a little oil to smoke point, wipe the pan dry, back on the heat. Then add cold oil and your food. It’s pretty nonstick, but it only lasts for one use.
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.
