In general I find that cast iron is very overrated.
> Here's a list of myths about cast iron skillets: (...) You can't cook with acidic foods (e.g. tomatoes) because it'll destroy the seasoning
You might not destroy the seasoning but you will get metallic tastes in your food. I don't get why anyone would pick cast iron over stainless steel for an acidic sauce that needs to be cooked for a longer period of time.
Also not mentioned downside of cast iron - you need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily.
Stainless steel has better heat retention and distribution, doesn't react with acidic foods, is easier to clean, and never rusts. Nonstick pans are better at being nonstick than cast iron. So cast iron ends up being second best for most use cases but the cult around it is certainly strong. (And I admit that they do kind of look cool).
I don't use cast iron for boiling, simmering, and otherwise cooking liquids. It's a frying pan for frying.
I use stainless steel sauce pans, pots, etc. for liquids.
I clean the cast iron while it is hot. A lot of food comes off without water, only a little water is required to remove the rest, and the cast iron is mostly self drying. Since I usually use electric burners, I can stick it back on its burner to dry with the burner's residual heat. [1] This is also a reasonable time to oil it.
If something is really stuck, for example if I didn't clean the pan when hot, I heat the pan again and clean it when hot.
Cleaning stainless steel when it is hot is another algorithm that works on my machine.
There's certainly ritual and habit around my use of cast iron but I am not saying you should use cast iron. Particularly since I enjoy the process of using cast iron and you don't.
[1]: on my portable butane stove, I will reignite the flame and reheat the pan if necessary.
Our most used cast iron skillet had a tenacious crust of burned-on grease and carbon that had collected over the years, and because the surface of the bottom of the pan was no longer smooth, many foods would stick. Initially I thought the unevenness was the result of corrosion, but no. I took a sturdy stainless steel spatula to it and with quite a bit of elbow grease over a few days managed to scrape off all the crust and get down to the smooth surface underneath. Now anytime anything sticks and the surface isn't perfectly smooth, I use the spatula with a little water and Dawn dishwashing liquid and quickly scrape until it's smooth again (it's easy to feel with the spatula), followed by my normal routine anytime we use the pan: drying the pan with a dishcloth and then by heating it on the stove, wiping the surface with a few drops of olive oil, and leaving the pan on low heat for a few minutes before hanging it back up on the pot rack. Works great!
Maybe GP's mention of "boiling salt" does not refer to "table salt" but salt in the more general chemical sense. Perhaps they use Ethylammonium nitrate with a boiling point of 240 C (464 F).
Any food on a cast iron pan is converted to carbon ash by holding the pan at 750F for a few tens of minutes if you have a functional exhaust fan. This is useful for the most extremely stuck stuff like large amounts of meat mixed with blood. No amount of scraping would get that off. However the ash came off effortlessly. The electric range was old and worn out but got the job done easily.
I found a hoard of old unused sad cast iron pans at my wife’s grandma’s place. Putting them in the electric oven and running a self-clean cycle completely stripped them down to bare metal. From there, they were seasoned from scratch and have been in service for a decade now.
Personally - I find carbonsteel pans are basically my favorite ever.
Slightly heftier than stainless and much easier to season. I have a set of stainless (relatively nice triple clad Cuisinart) and I still much prefer the carbon steel pans.
It's essentially what cast iron pans would be if we had better manufacturing techniques, and they work really well.
Backing up though - I would 100% take cast iron over just stainless (in every situation except a professional kitchen) and there's not much that would entice me to buy a non-stick pan, basically ever, at this point. The only thing they do ok is eggs, and a tiny egg pan in cast iron does basically the same without ever needing to be replaced (or giving me liver cancer).
Cast iron isn't hard to use, is indestructible, has a very low chance of poisoning me (and handily helps provide iron in my diet), and just makes things brown like nothing else I've used - nothing will make hash browns or a grilled cheese sandwich like cast iron.
Plus it's dirt cheap (less cheap is carbon steel, but again - very nice).
We used cast iron for quite a while. It wasn't that non stick for things like eggs, was way more annoying to clean properly and get all the cooking residue of food that got stuck on the pan, and was too heavy and after months of use never really developed that 'seasoning'. And we babied it a lot, with special brushes, avoided acidic foods and lots of soap in cleaning it. It was annoying. So eventually I just got the triple clad cuisinart you had and I find the stainless steel way nicer and easier to clean.
If you're cleaning it hard enough to remove the brown/black layers that form near the bottom - you're cleaning way too much, and never letting it build up a layer of seasoning.
Despite the claims that modern soap won't hurt, I find it varies tremendously by brand. So I don't use it.
I literally just drop about a tablespoon of salt into the large skillets, and wipe out with a paper towel while it's hot still.
The egg pan gets a light scrub with a non-scratch sponge, and that's basically it.
While that is generally the advice, in my experience you're much better off treating them somewhat carelessly. The main thing is to not clean them too much, and to not let them stay wet. The seasoning happens with regular use. With a new pan you want to let it stay on the heat a bit after use so the oil has some time to stick to the pan properly. After the third or fourth time using it it should start getting pretty anti-stick, until then just use a metal spatula to dig stuff out of the pan.
If you get a lodge cast iron pan (honestly I wouldn't buy any other, tremendous value for the price) they come pre-seasoned and you just use it.
If food starts sticking to it, spread a thin layer of oil on it and then oven cook at the highest temperature you have.
You shouldn't use soap on the pan, that will remove some oil. Most soap won't remove the seasoning, but maybe lots of soap and excessive brushing will and food will start sticking quicker!
Once you're done with the pan drop some hot water in it (ice cold water could crack the pan) and scrape off the food - which should come out nicely.
If that doesn't work or you left the pan dirty from the previous day, pour water and scrub a bit harder until smooth. Salt can help as well.
To make sure you dried it correctly, put it back on the stove and (optionally) rub some oil into it.
my 12" stainless pan is hefty but not heavy. the smaller cast iron 10" or 11" is about twice the weight. I use it to cook just about everything. I think once the coating on my nice 12" non-stick pan goes off I'd probably get a carbon steel one (if it does... you can prevent most of it by not cooking things too hot and i mainly use it for hashbrowns on about medium.)
Yeah, carbon steel is pretty much end game for me. Lighter than cast iron, better heat distribution, heats up faster. Similarly near-indestructible (more indestructible, even, since it won't shatter if you drop it). Slot a silicone handle cover on it and it's basically perfect.
And still cheap! Slightly more expensive than cast iron, but not much; an entirely usable Lodge carbon steel pan is $40 on Amazon. The silicone handle cover is an extra $12.50 (although you don't reeeeally need one if you don't mind wearing oven mitts).
Personally I ditched nonstick coated pans — sure, PTFE is supposed to be safer than the old Teflon formulations, but the chemical used to replace PFOA in many formulations is GenX, which recent EPA studies indicate is probably similarly bad [1]. Carbon steel and cast iron just avoid all of that.
Oh yeah i forgot to mention uneven heat distribution too. I don't really mind using a small dishtowel to move the pan so that lodge is probably fine. i'm sure there are some designs that don't get the handle hot either though i haven't researched that much at all since i'm happy with my stainless pan for 99% of my pan cooking.
Yeah if you wanna drop some extra cash for the most endgame pan of all, Solidteknics sells excellent $109 "wrought iron" pans — carbon steel material, but in a single cast so there are no rivets — that more lightweight than Lodge and have long handles that don't (apparently) get hot.
I have a pair of solidteknics - they're pricey as all get out, but they are very nice pans (wedding registry ftw).
The handle does get hot, but it takes a LONG time. I can easily cook a couple eggs, or make a few grilled cheese sandwiches without any problem.
Cooking a whole batch of pancakes is too long through - I need sleeve/glove after about 25 minutes. Even then, though - it's not "burn me" hot, it's just uncomfortable to hold for more than a few seconds.
I love cast iron, but the thing to not like is the uneven heat.
Still, never trading. If I manage to reproduce, my offspring will be the fourth generation to own and love the 10" Wagner skillet I got from my grandmother.
Each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses. I have tried them all, including pans with aluminum cores but steel outer layers.
Cast iron is great for searing or for fried eggs or buttery scrambles.
I love my car on steel Matfer fry pan and try to use it as often as possible.
But for acidic or long simmering brown sauces that'll stick and tear off my seasoning, I'll probably teach for stainless steel. Afterward I'll scrape it down and it's good as new.
Nonstick has its purpose. One that I rediscovered recently is very low fat pan frying. Even though all my steel/iron pans are well seasoned, I still need more butter or avocado/grapeseed/coconut/etc oil when compared to cooking on a Teflon pan. If you are trying to cut calories, you'll need to count the additional cooking oil that goes into your carbon steel or cast iron dishes.
Yes, I am aware of the benefits of good fats in my diet. But sometimes you want to track or reduce total kcal consumption, e.g., if you are a weightlifter but aren't currently bulking. Reducing fat intake is the easiest lever, since you want to keep protein intake high, and want to limit carbs.
So yeah. Use the tool you enjoy using. I've seen Chef Jacques Pépin beat an omelette in a Teflon pan with a metal utensil, so who am I to judge???
> I've seen Chef Jacques Pépin beat an omelette in a Teflon pan with a metal utensil, so who am I to judge?
Lots of people do it who should know better. That's going to damage the coating, shortening the lifespan of the pan, and putting little bits of Teflon into your food.
> That's going to damage the coating, shortening the lifespan of the pan, and putting little bits of Teflon into your food.
Out of the concerns above, pieces of Teflon in your food is fortunately not a huge concern: Teflon is not toxic in the slightest. It works as nonstick because it doesn’t really react with anything, and that means it won’t react with your body either. It is a common material in various medical equipment like implants, frequently used as catheter lining.
Now, if you heat it to 500 degrees or more, it starts decomposing, and the resulting chemicals are toxic. So, don’t broil in nonstick (but slow braising in oven is fine).
Keep in mind, too, that demonstrating a recipe on TV isn't the same as cooking at home. He might just be doing that because it's what they gave him on set. Or maybe he can afford to go through pans at a pace that a normal person at home wouldn't be able to do.
So another interesting thing about nonstick pans: if you brown things in them, the fond sticks to the food, not the pan. Now obviously you can't get a super hard sear on teflon, but you can brown things, and I find it can give more control on delicate stuff like fish.
Also re oil, a great tip is to oil the food not the pan along with using nonstick too.
Oh, on that famous Pepin video (which is the one that taught me how to nail the texture), consider that Pepin probably has 100 pans a month sent to his agent/pobox unsolicited. He'd don't give a crap about that pan lol.
Not sure if it's the same video, but the one I saw of Pepin, he specifically mentions that he is not actually touching the nonstick pan with his fork, just skimming it right above the surface.
With the right (lack of) attention, cast iron can evolve to rust. After enough time, you'll never cook with it and have things stick (you'll also simply never cook with it).
The seasoning has no problems with acidic foods, you do not get a metallic taste units you leave the food in the pan overnight. Once seasoned it does not rust easily but even if it does this is not a problem, just clean it with some cooking oil and use it and the rust is gone. Clean it while warm and it'll dry by itself. Use some fat and your food won't stick - you need fat anyway. No problems with overheating plastic pans giving of noxious substances, no need to buy new cookware every other year. Cast iron doesn't warp like carbon steel does either, it stays flat and as such works better on old-style cast iron resistive electric cookers.
Source: my own experience using cast iron cookware for the last 30+ years, cooking on induction first, a wood-burning stove for the last 20 years.
This is not my experience, it probably depends on the resilience of the seasoning. I use these things every day with either olive oil or butter so the seasoning get a reworking nearly every day - I have 4 different skillets in regular use so there tends to be a day or 2, 3 between each use per item. It takes a night in the scullery for that irony taste to develop.
That said I don't mind the fact that some iron makes its way into our food. I mainly cook vegetarian/pescetarian because my wife does not want to eat meat ever since she saw some practice in a slaughterhouse at age 16. This means it is harder to make sure our food contains enough iron. One of the ways of achieving that is to use cast iron cookware when cooking acidic foods. The longer the food is in the pan, the more iron makes its way into it. Eventually this leaves that metallic taste but that takes quite a while in a well-seasoned pan.
Cast iron's real strength is the huge amount thermal mass and the relatively low rate of heat transmission. You preheat it, throw whatever you're cooking in it and the residual heat alone will brown it perfectly, even a huge slab of meat. It holds tons of energy and releases it relatively slowly. Steel pans will sometimes have all the heat sucked out of them before you're done searing (lower thermal mass, higher transmission) and it doesn't come out right, especially if you have a low output stovetop because it can't keep up with the cooking and maintain proper temperature.
Cast iron is kind of the opposite of a wok, which is made so you get about as close as you can to cooking with the flame and no residual heat from the cooking vessel. Note that woks are designed to be cooked on crazy output stoves that you don't really see in Western homes. This allows you to sear with much more control of the thermal transmission at the cost of a blazing hot kitchen and a hefty gas bill.
I thought about challenging you with writing a thermal energy transfer equation, but will stop at writing two constants: heat capacity of cast iron vs stainless steel: 540 vs 500 J/(Kg*°C). So just buy a stainless steel cookware 7.5% heavier than cast iron - and you are all set.
Aren’t cast iron skillets usually made heavier though? Ie, sure heat capacity is similar per kg but if one is almost always 2-3x heavier than the other then it’s going to retain more heat
I think it's just that cast iron pans usually come heavier. My relatively heavy 28 cm stainless steel pan (Ikea Sensuell) is 1.7 kg, while my 29 cm cast iron is 3.1 kg.
I wish there were heavier and affordable stainless steel pans for searing, as I can just chuck those in the dishwasher.
Where is the company selling clad (copper or aluminum) steel cookware (dutch ovens, everyday pans, deep frying pans) with the steel part 7.5% thicker than common cast iron pans. Sounds like an untapped market.
I did once melt the hood of a gas grill by putting a piece of steel in it. Held heat so well the cover and front of the grill warped.
I also don't taste metalic notes in my food and that includes doing stuff like shakshuka right in the pan.
Stainless multi-clad isn't really a replacement for cast iron. They're different tools. Same goes for nonsticks, which are great for some things but not high heat (and yes every product that claims otherwise is lying to you).
Cast iron and carbon steel are close alternatives, where the tradeoff is between weight and thermal capacity.
People shouldn't mythologize cast iron, both in cultish enthusiasm, or exaggerating its flaws.
> Also not mentioned downside of cast iron - you need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily.
I mean, yeah, you have to use tools the way they're meant to be used for them to be effective. But dry isn't the goal really, just leave a thin coat of oil on it and it'll never rust.
They're cheap, rock-solid, non-stick (and you're welcome to use metal tools against them) - and if you abuse them enough, you can just re-season them in a couple of hours and they'll be back in factory condition.
I personally have a few pieces of stainless cookware and a cast iron skillet. I use the skillet for probably 75% of my cooking. Its ability to retain heat is lovely. I can't really order steak at restaurants anymore because I can do it at home for half the price with a beautiful crust and sear, perfect mid-rare inside. Once you grease it up and heat it up, nothing will stick to it. You can cook at high temp, brown things, sear things, finish them in the oven - all with a natural non-stick finish. Cleanup just involves at most a scrub down with sea salt and a little water, and a thin coat of oil.
You could still cook acidic food acidic food on it if for a short period of time if you've got a good season - and not too acidic - but no, it's not the tool for every job.
Getting the skillet was definitely a step change for my cooking. It's pretty hard to beat a 10.25" Lodge skillet for $20, delivered, from Amazon.
Python's being 2nd best for everything is kind of a meme that's been around for a while, not necessarily a rigorous evaluation of Python's viability for all possible use cases. And this is a thread about pans. :)
I might be concerned about teflon and similar non-stick coatings, but not really about ceramics. Humanity has been using ceramics for ages, and we haven't found any adverse affects yet.
> Humanity has been using ceramics for ages, and we haven't found any adverse affects yet.
Porous ceramics can easily breed bacteria, good and bad. And glazes on ceramics can contain all kinds of delightful compounds that can leach out. You certainly don’t want to eat or breathe unfired glaze.
As for ceramic nonstick cookware, I’m not convinced that such a thing exists. I think that “ceramic” coatings are actually sol-gel, and I can’t find a straight answer as to what is in them. They do advertise that they are fluoropolymer-free, and they seem to be stable to rather higher temperatures than PTFE.
Yeah, the downside is whatever that stuff is, it obviously doesn't bond as hard as PTFE, because every ceramic nonstick pan I've seen degrades even faster.
>Some PFAS are approved for use in the manufacture of non-stick cookware coatings. These coatings are made of molecules that are polymerized (i.e., joined together to form large molecules) and applied to the cookware through a heating process that tightly binds the polymer coating to the cookware. Studies show that this coating contains a negligible amount of PFAS capable of migrating to food
I can't access the page from tor, but i'd be interested in seeing those studies. Do they account for extreme heat applied, or for mechanical harm to the coating? These two scenarios are mostly inevitable over the lifespan of a non-stick pan, and they're typically blamed for being the cause of the actual food poisoning.
I have a Lodge skillet I’ve been using and seasoning for a decade+ with a simple technique: After use, rinse, lightly scrub, with water and a little dish soap (basically what comes out of one squeeze of a sponge). Towel dry, apply a thin layer of canola oil over the cooking surface with a paper towel. Throw on medium heat over the stove for ~5 minutes. Done.
I can pour maple syrup over salmon at high heat in that pan and it doesn’t stick. Not something you can do with stainless.
I have a pan I've been treating similarly, for a similar length of time, and I doubt a teflon pan could be any slicker. I used to scrub it out with salt, if anything got stuck on, but I haven't had to do that in a while.
I recently found that you can get a jump on the process by polishing the cooking surface. I took an orbital sander to a new skillet last month, from 60 up to 180 grit, and it works great. Seasoning with six rounds of flaxseed oil was a complete failure - it all flaked off immediately - but the pan cooks pretty well anyway, just the bare metal. Of course I oil it lightly after cleaning to keep it from rusting, and it is starting to develop a nice patina.
Personally instead of using soap as part of the seasoning process, I pour a bunch of Morton sea salt into the pan and a little bit of water, and abrade it that way with a sponge. It also has the benefit of creating a lovely matte finish at the end of the seasoning process. I've also found the seasoning process works better at each iteration this way.
I clean the pan about 80% of the time with just salt and a paper towel. Pour salt in, rub it around, dump salt in the trash, marvel at how nice the pan looks (seriously, I have to admire it every single time).
The other 20% I need water because something stuck bad, and usually I'll just use my soapy sponge. But if the pan is real hot still, I'll just put water in it and let it deglaze the stuck stuff.
Indeed, just use stainless steel pots for your tomato sauce.
That said, I throw some acidic stuff in my cast iron and I can't say I can notice the metallic taste.
A cast iron pan is not really a replacement for stainless steel (I don't think anyone has anything against those), it's a replacement for non stick pan.
Calling it a replacement for non stick pan is actually quite insulting: nothing sears meat like a cast iron pan, we should say that non stick pan are a poor replacement for cast iron pans.
The reason I moved to cast iron pan (more than health concerns or caring about the environment) was to cook meat like chefs on youtube do, after years of cooking mediocre dishes on non stick pans.
The only major downside is the weight (2kg) and how hot it gets - which makes it hard to use for the miss.
I spent an afternoon sanding down the inside surface of a cheap new cast iron skillet last month, just to see what would happen, and I have really been enjoying the result. The bare metal, after polishing, cooks better than the factory seasoning did. I look forward to seeing how it develops over time as I get a new seasoning built up.
metallic taste == nutritionally available iron. Also rust is trivial. We once put our cast iron through an oven clean cycle by accident. It rusted all to hell, turned solid orange, but re-seasoning returned it to better-than-ever condition.
Eating a meal always implies eating your cookware and packaging. I don't want to eat chromium and friends, or PFAS. Non-stick is gonna get banned eventually, mark my words.
What's the latest science on whether more iron is a good thing?
If a person is already near optimal iron levels, could cast iron push them over into just a bit unhealthy territory? Maybe not enough that people complain, but what would a sensitive study show?
> Stainless steel has better heat retention and distribution
I could be wrong, but I thought that cast iron has higher thermal conductivity (53 w/mK - watts per meter-Kelvin) then stainless steel (14 w/mK). Both are relatively poor thermal conductors compared to aluminum, however (>200 w/mK).
you need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily
If you dry it with a kitchen towel (you don't even have to do it carefully) and then hang it up overhead instead of placing it flat in a cabinet or on the stovetop, it will never rust.
I badly screwed up my cast iron pan by frying shredded meat with lots of blood (Korean BBQ).
However, I converted all non-metal stuff to pure carbon ash by heating the pan to 750 F with my 25 year old electric range. At this heat it was very uncomfortable to keep a flat palm hovering one foot over the pan for any period of time. But it cleared up very nicely after some smoke that I extracted with a dedicated kitchen fan. The ash was scraped off like dust. I wouldn't do this without an exhaust under any circumstances though.
My friend is a chef and looking after their pans properly also involves wiping them down with oil before storage, not sure I’m up for that level of pro maintenance.
I’d recommend against using spray oils such as Pam because they include lecithin, I think so that the oil coats surfaces more easily. Eventually lecithin will build up and make the cooking surface less effective. You can scrub it off with detergent but it’s kind of a pain.
I’d recommend putting just a little oil on a paper towel and spreading a very thin coat across the surface. Only takes a few moments.
Ceramics, pretty basic stuff similar to what we use for plates and such. You wouldn't want to eat the pigments in large quantities, but there's zero safety concern from enameled cast iron and the like. They're as inert as it gets.
One thing I've recently discovered with my cast iron pan (now 20 years old!) is cooking pan pizza at home with it. I follow the America's Test Kitchen recipe here and it comes out unbelievably good, just like Pizza Hut from the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-srfPL5CWZs
It's super trendy to obsess over getting the hottest pizza oven--something that gets up to 800 degrees, etc--so you can get super authentic restaurant pizza at home. That's great and a fun hobby for some folks I'm sure, but a cast iron pan with a long overnight fermentation of the dough is a game-changer for from scratch pizza for me.
I've had the same experience. It's really a game-changer. Start the pizza in the cast iron pan on the stovetop first, then move it to the oven.
You can get such a good crust that's any shade of brown you want.
Great idea that I will incorporate into my pizza-making process.
Here are two methods that I used to get the crust to brown:
a) Pre-topping: Prep just the crust by putting the pan into the oven for 5-minutes as the temp rises from 400 to 500-degrees. Top the crust with sauce, cheese, and toppings post the prep stage.
b) Post-baking: Once the pan is out of the oven, I put the hot pan on the stove for a few minutes if the crust needs some more cooking.
For what it’s worth, I use Kenji’s recipe for pan pizza [1]. I prefer his method of measuring ingredients using grams vs. other units of measure (teaspoons, cups) that I tend to get wrong.
I recently bought a cast iron pizza pan (https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/lodge-bakeware-pizz...) after my pizza stone broke. I had a lot of trouble transferring the dough to the stone without messing it up, but it's easy with the cast iron. You can take the pan out of the oven when it is hot, which makes it much easier than using the stone.
I preheat the pan in the oven, pull it out, transfer the dough to the stone, and put on the toppings. The pan stays hot, so the dough starts cooking while I prepare the pie. Then after cooking for 6 minutes in the oven, I can take the pizza out of the oven again, put on the cheese, and cook for a few more minutes to melt.
The cast iron is also super easy to clean, unlike the stone, which was pretty much impossible to get fully clean. After it cools, I rinse it off and coat with a thin layer of oil. Then it's ready for the next use.
This does miss one huge drawback of cast iron for cooking some dishes - heat control. Cast iron retains heat like crazy and doesn’t change quickly. Get that thing up to a searing temperature and it’ll be 10-15 minutes before you can get an egg anywhere near it for example. A thinner steel pan will heat up and cool down much rapidly allowing for a lot more control.
Luckily there’s a fantastic non-nonstick option for that too; a carbon steel wok. Amazing tool that is frankly under-utilized in the western world.
J. Kenji López-Alt released a book this year that goes over how to use it in great engineering-focused detail for anyone wanting to give it a shot.
they are not popular at home but, even in the western world, carbon steel pans are the most common type of pan used in restaurants, they are also known as Lyonnaise pans. Recently they are becoming more common and you can even buy them at Ikea: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vardagen-frying-pan-carbon-stee...
Not only they (carbon steel pans and woks) are faster to heat and easier to control than cast iron, they are also lighter, and another advantage is that they have longer handles that don't heat up as much, which means you can grab them without using oven mitts or handle covers.
Carbon steel wok is only viable on a powerful gas stove. Right now where I live there is a campaign to get rid of gas stoves. And the existing ones are far, far from being powerful enough to use wok properly.
I actually just moved to a house with an all-electric range. We use the wok too often for that, so grabbed a butane burner for ~$50 on Amazon. Can also find them at camping supply stores.
The one we got is 15,000 BTU, which is frankly too much. You can find 10,000 or 12,000 BTU options for cheaper, and will probably get some more fine grained control out of it.
The butane lasts for quite a while in it for wok use as well, since you’re generally only cooking for a few minutes at a time.
Happy to read this, I’ve been considering this exact arrangement lately. A bunch of things I’ve read say you need 15,000 if you want to get that carmilization on your stir fry’s.
I’m also very inspired by this video [1] which shows what appears to be a jet engine under a wok used by a master chef.
The restaurant looks REALLY nice. Singapore is starting to look really nice -- maybe I should visit?
Sure, the chef is amazing. I'm surprised his wok does not have a long handle. So, he uses a towel as a pot holder when he holds the small handle on his wok.
No joke he has a lot of heat. At one point he even has some of the oil in his wok flaming a little!
He seems to have his wok heat source going 100% all the time. So, to pay for the fuel he cooks really fast, lots of dishes per hour, and has a cheap fuel source? Also, he needs to have some good exhaust air flow for his kitchen or soon will also cook everyone in the kitchen and restaurant!
For his heat source, looks like he has repurposed an old GE J79 jet engine, e.g., as used in
You can get more powerful burner but you can also reduce your portions.
I have a carbon steel wok on a typical (here) gas burner (~7k BTU). I can make single portion on it. It requires moving the food around the wok surface constantly to parts that had some time to get hot. Forget about throwing more than one portion into it, it will just start to boil. So the only time I get to use it is when my family is away or when I want to make something for myself at an odd hour but pretty much useless for a meal for my family.
Similarly I have the cheapest BBQ I could find [0] and use both my CS wok and CI/CS pans almost exclusively on it. It’s rare that I use the BBQ plates that came with it, it’s basically an outdoor burner.
Mostly so that my house doesn’t stink. I can go hot hot hot just out the back door and not worry about the smoke.
A standard gas bottle (refill ~AU$40) lasts about 8 months.
(1) Off the kitchen, have a back porch, i.e., no roof, call it a deck.
(2) Get an inexpensive, propane powered deep fat fryer turkey cooker.
(3) Use the propane burner to heat a wok.
Get plenty of heat!
Did that! Cooked quarts of Moo Shi Pork (basically sauteed pork matchsticks with steamed, shredded cabbage and various flavorings) at a time. Worked great. Lost the setup in a move!
They work splendidly on wood-burning stoves, give it a try. If you don't have one of those a metal bucket with holes in the bottom-side (for air intake) and top-side also works very well, just feed it dry sticks through the air holes to keep it going. I regularly use a big carbon steel wok to make nasi goreng (fried rice), to deep fry fish and for similar things.
I use carbon steel pans on a ceramic electric stovetop and they work perfectly. If you don't like Western style pans and you still want to use a wok, then you can get a wok where the centre is flat (many woks are built that way so it should't be too hard to find one), and it will work the same way as the pans I use.
The point of the wok is that the liquid gathers in the centre of the wok leaving the sides with very little liquid on them which helps a lot with browning. You can also throw small amounts of relatively delicate ingredients (like garlic) that will get sauted in deep pool of oil in the centre and then you can add more ingredients and build your dish.
With any flat bottom you give away some properties of the wok, depending on how large the flat part is.
Another nice property of wok is that because of its dome shape it will not deform even at high temperature differentials. Any flat piece of steel subjected to high temperature differentials will deform over time.
yes, I get what you mean about the pool of liquid in the centre, my wife is Asian and I've seen her using that technique before.
You're right about pans getting warped, I have this issue from time to time with my carbon steel pans, luckily it is an easily fixable issue (using a sturdy rubber mallet on a pre-heated pan is my favourite method).
> where I live there is a campaign to get rid of gas stoves.
I'd be very interested to hear from the serious home cooks on this issue, as well as the perspective of professional chefs. While I consider myself an advanced home cook, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not limited by going electric only - it's the heat, not the flame that matters for most of what I do.
For those cases where I really do need flame (roasting peppers or something maybe?), I can always go outside to my grill.
Again, would be very interested in other perspectives on this.
I've cooked on most types of stove: gas (butane, propane, natural gas), electric (coil stove, solid disc resistor, glass top halogen, glass top induction), a few older styles (cast iron wood stove, kerosene camp stove, straight up campfire). I consider myself a pretty proficient home cook. My thoughts on the stove types:
- Gas is overrated. The excess heat it generates indoors is not worth whatever benefits it has. The heat on the sides of pans can sometimes be helpful, but perhaps more often is a hindrance - have to make sure to scrape the sides of pots thoroughly and regularly when making a cream sauce, for example. I don't find gas to boil water faster than an electric cooktop. I usually use an electric kettle for 2/3 of the water with coil and gas stoves, but I don't have to bother with induction. Small portable gas burners (as made by eg Iwatani) are quite handy to have around for those times you really want the advantages of Gas (a bbq or grill would serve same purpose).
- Induction is great, except for wok cooking. Specialized induction wok burners do exist, but are still pretty specialized pieces of equipment. 120v induction hotplates are not so good (but not as bad as coil ones). One thing I don't like about induction is they tend to have some electronic whine when operating - presumably as they switch on and off to regulate heat output. I dislike how complicated the electronics are - when something goes wrong, they're so expensive to repair that it's barely worthwhile.
- Coil stoves are decent, as long as they have a 220V supply - 120v coils, eg hot plates, are awful. I appreciate their ruggedness and simplicity - it's basically a wire from the wall, through a potentiometer, to a big resistor.
- Solid disc resistance stoves are awful
- Cooking on a wood stove is not practical usually, but it can give a nice home-y feel, especially if you're simmering some Apple Cider or Mulled Wine.
I've cooked on both, many years on each and I'm an every-day kind of cook. In my experience, gas is better. Heats up faster, reacts much faster to control input, and by looking at the flame under the pan I can adjust exactly, and quickly.
I have not cooked on induction though, which might be a big improvement over the electric ranges I've used.
Another thing about gas ranges that is purely mechanical, is that I can slide pans around to get them off the burner when I need things to cool down fast and I don't want to turn the flame completely off. I have come to really rely on this. The electric ranges I've used have a glass top and it will get scratched up if you slide the pan around.
Virtually every type of pan comes in carbon steel for affordable prices from cookware wholesalers. They've been life changing for me, especially combined with an induction cooker.
Not to endorse any specific company, but a Thermalloy 8-inch pan is available for approximately $20 USD.
High reserve heat is the reason to use cast iron. It's certainly possible to learn to do delicate things with cast iron and heat, just as (identical to in fact) it's possible to get the hang of this with resistive coil hobs.
But it's fighting the tool. Unless one has a strong commitment to minimalism, or a kitchen/galley which demands it, one is better off having other skillets for that. Wrought iron, carbon steel, stainless, pick a couple you like.
But to get that deep caramel crust on southern Johnny cake, you'll want cast iron. Fantastic for getting a deep even sear on a sous vide steak.
+1 for Kenji’s book “The Wok”. I use an inexpensive carbon steel, flat-bottomed wok on my regular old electric stove. Sure, a round-bottomed wok on a gas burner might work better but I can get good results on my setup.
Carbon steel woks are useless for induction or electric jobs. The sides are so high that they don’t get near to the heat and never season. Then they rust.
I which I could find an alternative to non-stick woks. I’ve ordered a steel aluminium laminate. Maybe that will work.
True, but worth noting that they usually also come with machine oil on them. It’s very important to correctly clean and season before first use, same as with cast iron.
In my country (Brazil), it is traditional to cook in cast iron. There are pans, pots, skillets… everything you can think of. It’s also cheaper than steel, ceramic, etc. Funny to see people elsewhere “rediscovering” these products.
I cook everything on it: steak, fish, eggs, sautéed tomatoes, etc.
> They are easy to clean ( with one of these)
I never have to clean it with anything, just wash ;)
If you have to scrape, either you burned the food or it wasn’t seasoned. You don’t need to do anything special to season, just cook everything on it and don’t scrape clean.
> Funny to see people elsewhere “rediscovering” these products.
It’s funny for us Americans to watch our fellow Americans go through their “cast iron is amazing” phase. Cast iron is actually very common here as well, but many young people start with a cheap nonstick pan and only later discover that there is a range of cookware options available.
In reality, an experienced cook will use a variety of cookware for different tasks. Having cast iron, non-stick, stainless steel, and enameled cookware available is very common.
I appreciate cast iron, but this trend of worshipping it as the one true cookware is funny. Good nonstick pans are amazing when used properly and replaced when they wear out.
I actually only have cast iron and inox steel cookware. I inherited some Teflon (“non-stick”) ones that I don’t see the use for, and will dispose of after learning it’s toxic. I can cook eggs and omelette just fine without those.
What really impressed me with cast iron skillets is how they actually get better with use. I bought my first cast iron skillet 10 years ago, originally it came with a relatively rough cooking surface. This meant that it was still somewhat sticky even after seasoning it.
But now, 10 years later, the cooking surface has worn to a completely smooth state through constant use, it's very easy to cook anything on it without sticking.
My grandmother has some cast iron pans (one of which came from her mother) that are so smooth to the touch that it is hard to believe they are the same material as the gritty Lodge pans at the store. This is what I love most about these pans! It completely flips the script on our disposable culture and gives you something that just keeps improving as the decades go by!
In the old days, they finished the pan interiors more than they do now. I've known people who buy a modern cast iron pan and have a machine shop smooth out the cooking surface.
Yup, it's this. Lodge pans are good for the price but part of that price is they skip the polishing, so the surface is basically just what comes out of the sand cast.
The old griswald pans are prized by bargain hunters because of their near glass like smoothness. I dated someone that had a huge collection she'd found via craigslist and the like. Cooking with the smaller pans was really fun.
When I got my 12" Lodge a number of years ago, I just hit the cooking surface with a flapper wheel on the angle grinder. It only took a few moments and turned out super smooth. I love that pan. Still use it every day, probably 10 years later.
> I wonder what people are doing to their nonstick pans that they need to throw them out every year?
I had a very high-quality non-stick skillet, only used wood/plastic utensils, and the non-stick coating started coming off after about three years (of pretty heavy use).
I plan to have it refurbished, there are (at least in Germany) services where they sand-blast your skillet and apply a new coating. Seems wasteful to throw away the entire skillet for that.
They just don't treat them well. I have a non stick pan, mid level, for over 10 years, and it's in use quite often, it looks just like on the first day. You would be surprised to see how people treat their kitchen utensils and the poor maintenance that goes on in most people's homes. It can be also bad quality of some, but I've seen people destroy Le Creuset pots after just a few months.
Poor craftsmanship is likely the biggest culprit, followed by thermal shocks, putting the pans in the dishwasher, and not following care instructions.
I went through half a dozen non-stick pans over a 5 year period that all had their coatings fail. After having expensive brands with lifetime warranties fail on me due to poor build quality, I swore off of them and went with hard anodized and haven't had an issue since.
Simple tip for temp control: know the smoke point of your oil. Olive oil for example is in the range of 375-400F. So if you use it in a nonstick pan and see it smoking (not steaming) you know to pull back the temps a bit.
prose.sh really is quite interesting, a ssh-based blogging service. I was looking for something like this after reading more about astro.build, since in a way, prose is even more minimalist in that I don't even need to set up my own site, just my markdown files.
I'm quite surprised this is the first comment about the site itself. I know it's off topic but I find the setup to be more interesting than yet another discussion about pans.
It has been covered before on HN [0], as well as a similar product called BearBlog [1], although that requires a signup which Prose does not require, which puts Prose above BearBlog for me. God forbid you ever lose your ssh keys however...
During the pandemic I learned how to make great Neapolitan style pizza in a normal kitchen oven. To get great pizza you usually need very high heat (~500° / ~930°F) so the pizza cooks very fast and gets cross and soft at the same time. If you use less heat the cooking will take longer and the longer you have it in the oven the more dryer it gets.
So you need either a pizza stone or cast iron pan to transfer a lot of heat fast. I bought a skillet since it costs the same, I have more control over the pizza making process (e.g. browning the bottom on the stove before putting it in the oven), and can use it for steaks and such.
I read it as saying you don't need 500C if you have a pizza stone or cast iron pan for transferring heat fast. So use a object that has a significant heat capacity to buffer heat, and you don't need the oven to be as hot. (Stone has higher heat capacity per unit mass than iron, but large cast iron pans are heavier than typical pizza stones, so the two objects probably have similar heat capacities.)
If you use the grill function and put in a cast iron pan, the pan will heat up to those levels even if your oven normally just goes up to, say, 250 degrees Celsius.
I'm not going to claim that cast iron is the best at everything, it isn't. That said, most of the people who dislike cast iron do so because they don't actually know how to use it. Anyone who is an accomplished cook learns that there are different techniques appropriate to different tools, and cookware is just a kind of tool in the kitchen. You should use different techniques with cast iron than you use for stainless steel than you use for non-stick than you use for copper, simply put. There are a number of commenters in this larger thread that are describing issues with cast iron that are directly caused by using the wrong techniques.
One of the great things about the Internet though is that there is truly a wealth of information out there to learn these things. I was an okay cook before the pandemic, but I spent most of my free time during lockdown learning how to cook and even found an online culinary school I could take classes through. It made a massive massive difference both in the quality of my output and the level of frustration I experienced during the process. I went from dreading cooking to really enjoying it as a form of zen.
If you use the right techniques to match your tools, everything starts to come together easily.
I love my cast iron pan, but I also love having some carbon steel pans around.
DeBuyer carbon steel pans are the same price as Lodge cast iron and are much lighter and better for certain tasks. The handle is a lot longer too, which makes it more fun to use than cast iron.
I love my cast iron skillet, which must be at least 4 decades old. It’s great for cooking with the only challenging task being scrambling eggs on low heat (for fluffier eggs), which can stick a little.
I recently bought a new cast iron skillet and it just doesn’t seem to be of the same quality, it’s a lighter colour and doesn’t seem to season as well. Are there different grades of cast iron, or are they just not made like they used to be?
New cast iron usually isn't finished as well. I have seen people take new cast iron to a machine shop and have the cooking surface smoothed down a bit.
There's apparently something of a trade in antique cast iron; I don't have any, but I've heard it used to be smoother. But even in new stuff there are different qualities; my no-name cheapie is definitely rougher than my Victoria brand pans.
I have used cast iron and carbon steel for a while. They have their uses and I generally prefer them, but a nonstick pan is essential in many circumstances. Just watch Jacques Pepin make a French style omelette. He used a non stick pan. Who is going to disagree with that man.
I'm a big fan of the Tefal pans for value. I use a mixture of stuff I've assembled over the years, but Tefal is my go to for having a couple nonstick pans around.
Carbon steel is very much like cast iron: it's easy to keep clean and seasoned, but some people like to make more elaborate rituals for whatever reason. I'd say it's easier to keep clean that cast iron typically actually, as it usually has a smoother surface finish, and having to herc a big heavy pan around in a sink is a legit annoyance.
> Might look into carbon steel, but I'm a bit wary of how it's going to be to clean.
If you have experience maintaining cast iron, the process is the same for carbon steel, both when it comes to cleaning and seasoning. They're very similar. I basically just treat carbon steel as a thinner and lighter version of cast iron (and the thinness changes certain attributes such as heat retention)
I love cooking with cast iron and have built up a decent collection over the years. More recently, I’ve also gotten into carbon steel cookware.
However… I always keep one nonstick pan in the kitchen, and it sees a fair bit of use. My practice is to buy something cheap, since I’ve found that the nonstick coating will last only so long, even on an expensive pan. By not spending much, I avoid feeling upset when it’s time for a replacement. (My current one came from IKEA, for about 15 EUR. I expect to get a year out of it.)
Sorry to be skeptical, but are the links affiliate links? Added to that question is the question of the quality of the article. While I agree completely with the main point about using cast iron pans, I think the post glosses over some issues. To be clear I own two cast iron skillets and NO non-stick pans. But it ain't as easy as the post makes it. "Easy to clean" with a scrubbing net is misleading because it is only "easy" if you maintain a good seasoning patina. So research that before you buy. And I would look at Lodge instead of Amazon brand and skip the net cleaner until you have the seasoning part down and decide you really need that.
My number #1 accessory for cast iron is a Duxtop Induction Cooktop (one burner). If you can't find it yourself on Amazon I would skip the cast iron skillet and work on that skill first. <snark/>. Someone commented on the heat retention but I find that with an induction cooktop I get very good temperature control. Maybe its just me, but I just don't notice a problem and I am picky about my eggs.
Another person commented on cast iron woks and I echo that. I found a flat bottom cast iron wok (and again you can probably find it yourself on Amazon) and it works very well with the induction cooktop. Probably better with a gas stove that blasts heat, but for me I can cook things (fried rice with eggs) that are much better than any other method I know of.
Just my 2 cents and an apology if that is not an affiliate link. I am so used to seeing them and wondering if the review is affected by the profit that I now suspect everyone. I don't mind so much when people announce them.
> Sorry to be skeptical, but are the links affiliate links?
Err, why are you asking us that when you can simply look at the links yourself? (Since the very presence of your question could taint the author’s post, I will tell you - they’re not. Affiliate links contain a tag=xxxx parameter).
Writing a multi-paragraph rant based on an easily debunked suspicion isn’t a great idea.
Why do people care about affiliate links? If someone benefits from me clicking on something then good for them so long as the price stays the same for me.
Because it incentivizes to link to products from which the author can get the most revenue. When a link is an affiliate link, there is a greater likelyhood that the choice of product wasn’t completely neutral with regard to that incentive.
For me, affiliate links can be an indicator that the author's motives may be more skewed toward convincing people to buy things than giving a fair representation of the products. However this isn't always the case obviously.
> Being able to use metal utensils on a skillet is so nice. I can really scrape food off the pan without worrying about chipping the paint.
The multiple mentions about scraping make me think the author has some unconventional cooking techniques, like using too high of heat or not using enough fat, this should basically never be happening with pans that are even a little bit nonstick.
> after spending $150+ on a all-clad non-stick pan, which died after a year or so of heavy use, I realized this was not the way
If this is referring to the All-Clad hard-anodized aluminum pans then I definitely think something is odd is going on here. I have used these nearly daily for years now, including washing them in the dishwasher, and while they have shown some wear, they are still performing perfectly. They also have a lifetime warranty like the rest of All-Clad's products. They are also not that expensive—currently $70 for a two pack:
I have transitioned the opposite direction of the author. I used to use cast iron, and now I never do because of the All-Clad HA1 line. They can be washed in the dishwasher, are much lighter to handle, are metal utensil-safe, and can go up to 500 degrees in the oven. If they ever break, All-Clad will fix them for free.
Again, dishwasher. This alone is just so much better than cast iron.
Cast iron is easier to deal with if you have an outdoor or really-well-ventilated oven for re-seasoning, which you'll have to do from time to time, in my experience. It's actually far, far easier to just get a new pre-seasoned cast iron pan (I also bought Lodge, as the fine article's author did), but if you're going to buy a new pan every year anyway, suddenly nonstick doesn't seem like a bad deal.
Part of the "will outlive us" is not buying a new one every year. I know I've been trying to reduce the waste I produce lately and going with cast iron pans has been a part of that plan. Buying one every year instead of taking the 1 minute to wipe it with oil and then throwing it in your oven for an hour is laziness. If you don't like the smell and you have an outdoor grill (preferably one where you can set a temperature) it's pretty easy to season your skillets in one of those and let the wind deal with the smell of polymerizing oil.
There's been a lot of discussion in the cast iron fanatic circles about how terrible Lodge's pre-seasoning is and how it's better to build up your own. I own one Lodge and two other brands and I've noticed the other two I seasoned myself are basically as good as Teflon and the Lodge (which admittedly hasn't seen as much cooking) sticks like it doesn't have any seasoning at all. YMMV I guess but I feel like it's worth putting in the effort to season yourself and keep up the seasoning.
There are a dozen mutually exclusive methods for seasoning cast iron. I’ve never found one that works as well or as simply as advertised. In a 1bd apartment, the seasoning process will make it difficult to breathe for nearly the full process unless you have incredible ventilation. Stripping the previous seasoning after burning something (only once, but it mentally scarred me, as you might be able to tell from the ranting… ;)) is incredibly difficult. So much steel wool. So much elbow grease. That was the final time for me, and I gave up after several weekends without being able to get the burnt odor to go away. There is a limit to how many hours I’m willing to invest in cookware, and it was not much higher than ten. You are welcome to call me lazy over it. :)
I have just started a business recycling peoples' cast iron. Please ship me your offcasts, and I'll sure that they are re-seasoned and re-released into the wild.
Jokes aside, you can buy some flax oil, wipe it on thin, and let the pan sit a few months and the oils will polymerize on their own in a few months. Or, you can buy a naturally pre-polymerized boiled linseed oil (flax oil that has been heated--just make sure you get one without chemical dryers like Tried & True brand) and it'll polymerize on its own in a few days. Likely it'll still smoke a little bit when you cook.
But you could also get a cheap hotplate and take it outside if you're really worried about the smoke. You don't need to use the oven method, just use a very, very thin coating of oil, bring it up to temp slowly and hold it there. Cast iron is a decent heat conductor, so you can get good coverage.
People get way too obsessive about seasoning cast iron, like it's magic to get a good seasoning and a horror if the seasoning gets stripped away. It's not. Badly damaged seasoning is like 10 minutes inconvenience.
I’ve been using a lodge for eight years, the same one, and I’ve never once put it in the oven. Still works beautifully, occasionally a full scrub clean and just do a bit of oil coat on the stove.
I use it for steaks because they are hard to sear in other cookware.
The cleanup and seasoning processes make cast iron hard to use for anything else.
I plan to get a ceramic one (with iron core) but even if it solves the seasoning process and the cleanup process, it isn't the best to sear steaks in it.
My point is that each tool has its use and in this specific case, cast iron is not the tool for everything.
Everything is about compromises. Once seasoned, you don't need to re-season if you follow certain rules. Clean up is pretty easy IMHO; even a little detergent is fine, and you can soak for a couple of hours (just not overnight). Ceramic will apparently wear through the coating eventually. With cast iron you can re-coat (i.e. season), while ceramic you can't. I use cast iron pans for almost everything, the rest is in a stainless steel pan.
I season my Neoflam “ceramic” pans. Different (lower temp) process than for carbon steel or cast iron, but similarly improves/restores the non-stick coating.
Pat steak dry with paper towel. Brush with thin layer of high-heat oil. Season with coarse salt & fresh cracked pepper. Heat any pan (except Teflon) until Leidenfrost effect occurs. Put steak on pan, wait about 1 minute per 3 oz. Afterward, gently nudge steak with tongs; if it moves freely it's ready to flip, if not leave it on longer. Higher heat will result in more intense charring/crust, but will accelerate the process (will not have a significant effect on cooking of inner meat). After you flip, either reduce the heat halfway through cooking (won't work with cast iron) or plan to remove meat about 3/4 way through cook time. Remove to cutting board and rest 10 minutes [per lb]. Serve.
A dry surface + oil + very hot pan + wait until there's a crust is the secret to never getting the steak stuck. The oil ensures uniform heating and good heat transfer which will result in a more uniform crust and less sticking. You can go without oil but it can still stick if the steak wasn't dry enough or your pan wasn't hot enough or the surface is scratched. You could use butter but it'll burn.
Preheating the steak to bathwater warm has worked wonders for me - especially for medium-rare very thick steaks. Preheat using microwave, or induction pan on 1, or rack above the BBQ, or whatever.
I went from teflon to ceramic to cast iron to steel ("carbon steel"). You still have to season it, but it's a lot lighter than cast iron and things stick less. The price point is roughly the same. Searing with gas or induction is straightforward.
The price point of carbon steel pans is about the same as cast iron? My first exposure to carbon steel was a link someone posted out here on HN and the linked pans were $100's (compared to cast iron which are $10's). Maybe I just looked at a very expensive sample..
Side benefit, you get an ergonomic pan. I was gifted a couple a couple of carbon steel egg pans when a friend of a friend closed a restaurant, and I was like, "ah these are pans that need to be comfortable through a shift, not look shiny at Crate & Barrel for amateurs."
I feel like carbon steel is the biggest secret that people outside the restaurant biz are oblivious to. I have cast iron, but my carbon steel gets used much, much more.
We have the same 12” cast iron skillet and every word is true.
Sometimes people mention rust and it’s true as well. We washed it many times in dishwasher and it’d rust. But then scrape it with a scraper, oil it and heat it until oil polymerizes - voila you’ve your pan good as new.
Oh and if you need to cook tomatoes, get enameled cast iron skillet - you’re not going to go back ever to non-stick.
I like using cast iron pans for searing meat since they have a large thermal mass and you can get them ripping hot without damaging them. Being able to put them in the oven is also nice for meat and such. I also use them on the grill sometimes e.g. for making fajita veggies without smoking up the house.
I often want to de-glaze the pan after cooking the meat to make a pan sauce. I have had issues sometimes if the sauce is too acidic the seasoning starts flaking up.
I don't understand how people cook eggs in cast iron. I have an antique cast-iron pan with the smooth surface and a pretty good seasoning but it's not even as nonstick as my crappy old ceramic non-stick pans. I do like my eggs to be very soft and delicate but maybe its okay for crispy fried eggs.
Overall I think it's worth having one since they're cheap, even though they're only really great at a few things.
Sorry but I cant sign this. Stainless steel with and without enforced bottom is the way to go.
I have also cast iron and I polished and seasoned the living shit out of it and it still sticks omelette.
For delicate things like eggs I use an non stick pan from tefal for 10€ that I buy new every 2 years….. why not? It works way better than stainless and way way way better than cast iron.
The only advantage of cast iron is heat retention but this is solved with reinforced stainless steel.
Btw copper is for sauces and marmelade … got them too….
Here some other downsides of cast iron…
You have to maintain it realy well with regular seasoning and cleaning. You cant clean it with a ironsponge. Acid stuff will atack it. And du you realy want whatever this seasoning is in your food? That stuff has to be polychained burned oil. And Iron is one of the most agresive free radicals that you can pump in your bloodstream ;)
Ps: I am french so I am a complette ashole if its about cooking
Do you use the ironsponge on stainless steel? I assume you mean something like steel wool?
My biggest "pro" for cast iron is that it's incredibly easy to clean without worrying about ruining the pan. Our stainless steel pan gets scratched if I look at it wrong, even using the rough side of the sponge. Not sure if we just have the wrong pan, or worry about scratches more than we should?
For our cast iron I use chainmail if there's every anything stuck on hard. For the stainless steel I feel a lot more out of luck! Metal utensils, soap, rough side of the sponge, I'm never worried about it!
Yup, cast iron has all these advantages. Yup, I, too, have both 10" and 12" cast iron skillets.
Yes, on seasoning, as you explain, it's easy, natural, would be tough to avoid, is good to have and easy to maintain. The common complicated descriptions seem to be to make the authors look like they have some advanced, tricky expertise -- nope, it's all just dirt simple.
If have a cover, then can also use the pair effectively as a stove top oven, e.g., for pizza, as in my
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32433275
Stamped steel can be similarly good and is easier to work with for some things, e.g., flipping an egg or an omelet, because it is a lot lighter than cast iron and has sloping sides.
For a pot, say, 6 quarts, stainless steel with a thick aluminum bottom bonded on the outside can also work well.
I haven't seen a whole lot said in the thread below about ceramic coatings. While I like and use cast iron and stainless steel in my kitchen, I've been very pleasantly surprised by some of the "non-commercial" grade ceramic pans I've encountered recently. Especially for those times when I just want to fry an egg and I'm not doing soufflé or omelets, there's a lot to be said for reaching for a generic ceramic pan. Conducts heat uniformly, doesn't stick, cleans up beautifully, and as far as I can tell doesn't contain any kind of harmful chemicals. For a beginning cook in particular, I'd really recommend this path over some of these other options that take a bit more effort in both cooking and clean / care.
Even better are stamped steel pans. I will admit, not only is this is highly debatable, but both sides have good valid arguments, however stamped steel edges out cast iron for two reasons, it is more responsive to heat, that is, it is easier to get the temperature you want(like a wok) and it is lighter and stronger.
But really having a pan that you can abuse, and all it takes to get back to cooking trim is a little oil is great. note there are some real artists with seasoning pans out there, and if you look online you will probably find one, but I don't bother with any of that, I rub a little oil on it after I clean it and if I am feeling especially diligent I will get the pan hot. 10% of the effort for 90% of the result.
Nowadays it’s also much easier than it used to be to buy smooth cast iron, which becomes extremely easy to cook even fairly sticky foods on after just a seasoning or two (e.g. https://fieldcompany.com/products/field-cast-iron-skillet).
As sibling commenters have mentioned, smooth vs. rough does seem to make a difference.
Source: I have cast iron like these and use it to comfortably cook eggs and food where sticking would be a problem all the time.
Unlike several other commenters here, it absolutely hasn’t seemed like a tool ‘mostly for steaks’. In fact I cook most things in cast iron, carbon steel wok or finally fall back to stainless if neither is appropriate.
Your comment made me curious and I looked up what I paid for my skillet 10 years ago. I found the order confirmation e-mail, it was 12.99€ - that's over a 10x difference. I'm sure that explains why my skillet had a rough surface, but still, the price difference seems crazy to me, considering how there are no quality issues at all with my skillet even after a decade of use.
I found an old cast iron pan at a second hand store that was antique (i.e. ground smooth). After cooking on the old one, I went out and bought some flap disks to stick on a drill and polish my modern lodge. It does work better. But not as good for eggs as carbon steel (which you also season, and has same durability advantages as cast iron)
My only gripe with cast iron is the absurdly small handle that they almost always have. They are not designed to be handled well and in a stable way, especially with added weight from the food.
Tupperware MicroPro with the eterna coating has been great for me. I can make a roast in 20 minutes, lasagna from scratch in 15 minutes, etc. The coating is a lot more durable than conventional coatings and there is no indoor air pollution, like with my gas stove. The technology is better than the old way of cooking. It is so much more convenient, in fact, that I wonder if there was a campaign against microwave cooking by the petrochemical industry.
No. No you cannot. You can cook a cut of meat commonly called a ‘roast’, but you sure as heck aren’t actually getting all of the culinary results of roasting.
Totally agree with what you said about non-stick pans. Sounds like a total scam. I myself did not go with cast iron skillet (only for some outdoor/bbq stuff). But I switched to stainless steal pan from demeyere like 10 years ago. It's still like new and made thousands of meals. Now i'm in a (slow) process of converting all my equipment to stainless steel from demeyer, quality is just that good. Buy for life.
When I interviewed at Google, I was asked to bring a picture of something I thought had elegant design. Instead, I brought my cast iron skillet. When the interviewer asked for my picture, I plopped it out onto the table, and we talked about its merits for half an hour. I left it out for subsequent interviews, which made a nice ice breaker. I got the job!
It was fun going through airport security with it, too.
Does anyone know how well enameled cast iron works for eggs? I've seasoned my cast iron and I wasn't able to get it to be efficient with eggs. But maybe the enameled ones would work.
Personally I'm not really that worried about PFAS uptake from non-sticks for my one non-stick meal per day, but it'd still be interesting to know the most efficient way to do things outside of non-stick.
Enameled and egg is more or less a no go unless you use enough fat to in effect shallow fry.
The blunt truth is teflon pans are the best tool for eggs. There's alternatives you can make work, but nothing quite as good. So most of us just have a dedicated egg pan.
Seasoned carbon steel is probably your best bet for eggs outside of teflon. Its surface is usually smoother, and it seems to take the seasoning a bit different.
Well, I was a huge fan of ceramic ones but found that they also wear off.
Still better than non-stick pans, but not perfect.
Might be that newer ones are better but I already switched to cast iron by now.
Right now my main pan is from a Kickstarter campaign (Stur). Plus a sticky metal one where that's enought.
Although I have been a microwave chef for about a year, I am growing more worried about the possibility of leaching chemicals into my food as a result of nonstick coatings, so I am switching to these: https://cookanyday.com/
There is a reason this were done that way until the 60s/70s. In large part because nobody the everything away because it was cheap. Not all of the "moving forward" has been a good idea or actually beneficial. But yes some inventions such as the electronic typewriter demonstrably save multiple hours each week for people.
I read somewhere that iron and steel expand at a microscopic level, when heated, such that you can fill these small holes up with oil and get a non stick cooking surface.
Whenever I’ve washed up an iron pan I always put it back on the heat with some oil. You can literally see the water bubbling out of the surface as the pan gets hot and the water boils off.
I haven't had any issue with my hexclad that i've had for about 3 years now with teflon coming off. Use the 10" skillet just about every day. If you do want to get an alternative I would say to get some carbon steel pans instead of cast iron. Much easier to season and much lighter with similar advantages.
Tangent, but given all the recent discussions around PFAS and Teflon and metal toxicity and all that, does anyone know of any kind of cookware that we can consider to be "safe" for cooking aside from cast iron? Or is that literally the only option left?
Yes! I want to know whether stainless steel is considered just as safe.
Also, now that air friers are all the rage and they all seem to have a non stick coating and they are heating said coating more than a skillet would, are they basically poisoning us?
GreenPan falls under the “ceramic” nonstick category. When I looked into this category 2-3 years ago most of the pans had Teflon or other fluorinated compounds (Teflon-like) as the final coating on top.
I’ve seen greenpans perform about the same in terms of non-stickiness and durability as regular nonstick pans.
In fact I suspect (and 2-3 years ago confirmed) that most “ceramic” nonstick pans are still coated in teflon like materials. Possibly GreenPan isn’t, but they also won’t tell you what they ARE coated with…so I’m pretty sure they know they’re doing something dirty.
Thanx for this reply, til. I really wonder what their tech is, one of my fav pans is a greenpan and it can get very hot with no issues and has been surviving my dishwasher for 2 years now. But this does smell fishy indeed.
Regarding non-stick pans, the AMT pans [0] are great, which use a ceramic coating. I bought my first one in 2015, and it hasn’t degraded since, despite regular use.
I haven’t had any luck finding cast iron in thrift stores for years now. There’s people scouring the stores for them. I’ve seen a couple of crappy 6 inch pans from the 90’s and that’s it. Any vintage ones get snapped up instantly.
I bought a professional non-stick (teflon) pan and I use it with a metal fork a couple of days a week for almost 3 years now and it's good as new. Just don't stab it.
It was still cheaper than a cast iron pan and the amount of time I save cooking is enormous.
I really want to love my cast iron, but I just have such a hard time cleaning it - or rather, maybe I'm not supposed to clean it? I'm just so confused with what to do after cooking with it for a meal.
For me, when you are using a cast iron, you have to adjust your idea of clean. I think of it like a grill. You're not going to spotlessly clean your grill every time you use it. There are always going to be some carbon on there that wipes off.
Honestly, the reason why I love my cast iron is because of how lazy and rough I can be with it. I rarely clean my cast iron unless I leave oil in there for weeks or there is a ton of residue from sauce or something. I use scrap out the bottom with a metal spatula and call it a day.
> Caring for cast iron or carbon steel is fairly difficult
When it comes to cast iron this is clearly false. In the US, there are thousands of cast iron pans still hanging around that were used for decades or generations by non-rich non-“cookware geeks” who gasp used soap on their cast iron cookware and didn’t treat their cast iron cookware as if it were a delicate snowflake. Instead they just cooked with it, cleaned it how they wanted to, and nothing went horribly wrong.
When I cook with my cast iron, I wash it by hand using regular dishwashing soap and a non-scratching sponge. Dry it and then coat with a bit of oil before storing it away. Easier than caring for my SS where from time to time I need to use Barkeeper’s Friend to bring it back to its original looks.
I love cast iron and generally prefer it. But I have had great results with all clad nonstick pans when I use only avocado oil in them. Olive oil will quickly ruin the non stick coating.
I agree overall, but there are a lot of misconceptions about cast iron that can give it a learning curve.
The post glossed over this, but it is certainly possible to damage your seasoning, especially if something you're cooking sticks to the pan. However, this doesn't mean you need to do some day-long "reseasoning" process that involves stripping the whole thing and baking it in the oven. Just clean the pan, put some oil in it, put it on the burner, and rub the oil in with a balled up paper towel until it gets hot. Do this after you cook until you build up a good seasoning and then stop. If your seasoning gets damaged for any reason, just rub some oil into it after you cook until it's good again.
The key for me was learning to care for carbon steel woks. It's basically the same as cast iron, but there's a lot less misinformation and internet superstition out there.
> this doesn't mean you need to do some day-long "reseasoning" process that involves stripping the whole thing and baking it in the oven.
Unless you want everything you cook in the cast iron pan to smell like what was burned in it for weeks, you really do. Or, hear me out: buy a new cast iron. The seasoning process is really onerous, but the manufacturer does it in bulk, and a new cast iron is typically cheaper than a quality nonstick pan. The incredible inconvenience of re-seasoning has made me want to never do it again after a few attempts over the last dozen years in various apartments. Nope.
It's definitely possible I'm doing it wrong. There are so many reasonable-sounding articles I've read over the years about smoke points and food-safe flaxseed oil and temperatures and ventilation so you can season for H hours for each seasoning coat...
When everything is working, cast iron seems great: quick brush off, slight bit of oil to rub in while it's still warm, done. When a spot of rust appears, or large spots on the interior become matte while the rest is shiny (or the reverse), or you're using it as a dutch oven and burn a steak, well, that's when the nightmare begins. After several weekends of attempting to get that smell out and get it re-seasoned, I gave up, left it in the leave/take area of my then building, and bought a new one. But I haven't used that one much, because I know it's only a matter of time until something happens and I am faced with the whole process again.
If my seasoning is getting a bit thin I just smear on some oil in a thin layer and heat at high temperature for about 3 minutes and that’s it. I never have any rust spots because I always dry it after use.
Got to remember that westerners have been sold on the entire product cycle of every day chores. Wash your hair everyday - lather, rinse, repeat. Yes! Hey we could increase our profits 100%? WTF how?? We just tell them to do it twice! Lol.
Cooking food? Buy a spray to oil it! Buy a nonstick pan that will last a year. Buy dishwashing soap! And cool washing up brushes that dispense the soap! It’s not clean unless you scrubbed it back down to the state it arrived in! Keep buying those products!
It’s too much work to clean an iron skillet! Well you don’t clean it: you just wipe it. What??? No you must clean it! Dawn says so!
Anodized aluminum is non-stick, non-reactive, lightweight, can be cleaned as normal, requires no seasoning, is scratch-resistant, and heats very quickly.
Aluminum, even anodized, will definitely stick to food. Most anodized pots are treated with a teflon nonstick interior though and its color is very similar to the grey color of the anodization.
You do have to be careful about scratching anodized stuff too. The anodization will scratch and flake off if hit with hard material like steel. But again it's usually not anodized material directly in contact with the cooking surface since they put nonstick there.
Looks like you're right; they used to not add coatings back in the day, but now they all seem to have them, even if they don't point it out in the product details.
Yeah aluminum is still great, it's actually a lot better than cast iron for heat distribution. Thick aluminum stuff in particular is amazing in my experience. I have an anodized aluminum sauce pan that is a perfect rice cooking pot--it heats up and boils water super fast, retains heat well, and nonstick interior is great for rice. Still looks as nice and clean as the day I bought it 15 years ago too.
I can't say if it's commonly accepted wisdom, but I personally use dish soap on my cast iron when I need to (i.e. if it's too greasy). I think this is confusion that stems from dishwasher powder, which you should definitely keep away from cast iron (actually, a little might be OK as long as you don't run it through the dishwasher; not sure, never tried).
If (modern) dish soap washes your seasoning off, it wasn’t seasoning, it was just grease and grime stuck to your pan.
It is true that dish soap used to be much more aggressive, and those soaps can cause issues for pan seasoning (and also for your skin…), but those soaps haven’t been sold (in any meaningful quantity) in decades.
I always use dish soap, and it will definitely take off any oil that hasn't been polymerised.
I think the people who believe this (and use cast iron) probably haven't seasoned it hot enough or have scraped off the seasoning close enough to the metal.
Seasoning is a reaction between the pan and fat. You're trying to create a thin layer of that reaction product (not just a coating of burned hydrocarbons). Any procedure that looks roughly like the following will be fine enough:
- Coat your iron with a heat-tolerant oil (peanut, avocado, ...) in such a way that it won't spill or make much of a mess. This usually includes very thin layers and maybe a drip pan.
- Cook it at 350-480F for 5-120 min. This often involves an oven, but you can do fine just bringing the pan up to high heat with some oil for a minute or two before you cook anything.
- Repeat as necessary.
The seasoning isn't critical for most dishes. Don't overthink it; just get the pan roaring hot once in awhile and start cooking in it. If you do manage to screw it up somehow (you probably won't), half a minute with some steel wool will make it easy to start over and try again.
This doesn't really pass a cost/benefit analysis, compared to cooking tools like microwaves.
With modern microwave-fridges, I can place my food in and leave it chilled out until it's ready to cook. A simple tap of the app starts it cooking for me and it's ready as soon as I open my apartment door.
This plus my regular, drone-delivered meal replacement shakes mean I never have to waste time worrying about skillets or whatever ancient tech this guy is rambling about.
> Here's a list of myths about cast iron skillets: (...) You can't cook with acidic foods (e.g. tomatoes) because it'll destroy the seasoning
You might not destroy the seasoning but you will get metallic tastes in your food. I don't get why anyone would pick cast iron over stainless steel for an acidic sauce that needs to be cooked for a longer period of time.
Also not mentioned downside of cast iron - you need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily.
Stainless steel has better heat retention and distribution, doesn't react with acidic foods, is easier to clean, and never rusts. Nonstick pans are better at being nonstick than cast iron. So cast iron ends up being second best for most use cases but the cult around it is certainly strong. (And I admit that they do kind of look cool).
Cast iron = the Python of cooking pans.