Cast iron is one of the only things where I've switched to basically "old for the sake of old". It's just gross seeing Teflon flake off the pan. Iron's heavy but I can deal
The weight isn't the problem, it's the clean-up. Teflon pans are very easy to clean; cast iron seems virtually impossible without a sandblaster. It's also useful for foods where you can't have the food sticking to the pan without ruining it.
> cast iron seems virtually impossible without a sandblaster.
What are you on about? You scrape the pan and get most of the grease out with a paper towel. For the incidental big clean you just wash it by hand with water and soap, but then you do need to oil it some to avoid flash rust.
I never said cast iron wasn't non-fragile, just hard to clean. And scraping and paper toweling a pan sounds like a LOT of work compared to a non-stick pan.
Also, how do you deal with food sticking to it? How can you make pancakes or crepes in it, for instance? It seems like it might work fine for some foods, but poorly for others.
> How can you make pancakes or crepes in it, for instance?
This is a strange question given that pancakes aren’t a particularly sticky food. This is kind of like asking how you don’t spill water on your face without drinking through a straw, there’s some potential for challenges but it’s pretty easy to deal with if you have a basic familiarity.
Well seasoned cast iron is pretty non stick. The added benefit of a Teflon pan is fairly marginal.
For my pizza pan I use cooking spray. For my wok I use oil since I'm frying anyway. Haven't had much trouble with sticking. I suppose it means I'm always using oil.
> Also, how do you deal with food sticking to it? How can you make pancakes or crepes in it, for instance?
I mean... you just do? Pancakes and crepes especially work VERY well in a cast iron pan. You'll know the crepe is done because it'll start sliding around in the pan when shaken.
There's a lot of words out there about how to perfectly season a cast iron pan, but in my experience the best way is to just treat it sort of badly. If you want to be slightly more purposeful about it you can occasionally overheat some oil in the pan. I tend to just bang it back on the hob after cooking and heat the remaining oil/fat in the pan to the smoke point before turning it off.
re: scraping: I think you're overestimating the sort of scraping I mean. I'm not talking about scrubbing with a lot of effort. I just mean you take a metal spatula and scrape some of the burnt stuff into the trash. Doesn't really take any force either.
Yeah it's not quite as effortlessly nonstick as a nonstick pan, but at least I'm not worrying about flaking poison off into my food, and having to be careful with metal utensils. You can treat a cast iron pan badly and it'll make it work better, not worse. The one fragility it has is rust, and even that is largely overstated.
Dang. Uncontaminated blood found dating back to the Korean war that was saved and archived. Now that is messed up.
And then ofc you see stuff like this on Duponts website “DuPont is using science and innovation to make the world a safer, healthier, and better place to live. It's how we're helping to invent a better now.”
I always wondered how are they non-stick. There must be some type of non-stick surface or chemicals involved. Are these less or more risky than PFAS for example? Do we have any data, it took pretty long for PFAS to be considered bad.
