I’m honestly surprised it took this long before Teflon and PFAS in general became a more public issue.
Especially after project farm showed how easy it is to scratch the coating material. I think only like 2 pans actually held up somewhat in hardness.
Not objective by any measure, but I don’t think ingesting dissolved iron is as bad as dissolved Teflon.
Don’t care, use carbon steel
I have a cast iron pan. Pros - it’ll last forever if you look after it, it doesn’t contain PFAS and generally it is non-stick enough to not be a nuisance. Cons - heavy AF, needs to be cleaned and dried after use & not in a dishwasher. I haven’t tried to cook anything acidic in it yet but it does okay for steaks, eggs, mushrooms, sauces that I have used it for.
I still use soap and a plastic scrubber on mine and just dry it on the hob for a bit. I haven’t had to reseason it yet but I imagine it will be a pain in the ass when I do. I have seen part of the seasoning flake off but it normally self heals with more cooking.
So it’s okay overall but I think lack of PFAS and the fact that this thing will last a lifetime are the clinchers. Even if you have non-stick buy one of these and use it by default. I expect a stainless steel pan would be good too for same reasons.
Stainless steel pans are amazing when used for the right purpose. They weigh much less than cast iron, don’t require any maintenance beside cleaning them, and they are pretty much indestructible. If you burn something badly you can use metal scowering pads or any chemical you damn well like (including sodium hydroxide that will melt flesh) to get the thing clean again. They are tolerant to any cooking temperature you would ever use, ever. You can’t overheat one with any appliance a normal kitchen would have. This means you can easily pop one in the oven provided it has a metal handle.
The only issue being they have no non-stick properties to speak of and relatively little thermal mass. This is good in that they don’t need long to heat up, but bad in that it’s not a consistent temperature and you have to know what you are doing with the power control to get the results you want. This means it’s essentially useless for cooking things like steak, and difficult even to cook an omelet without using a lot of butter, ghee, or oil. Things like tomato sauces though? Perfect. The stainless steel could care less about the acidity.
So the stainless steel does care at least a little bit about the acidity?
I’ve heard from several sources that the iron is supposed to be good for the diet. I love my carbon steel and cast iron kitchenware. All of the studies I’ve seen show it as a superior option to PFAS cookware and will still outlast the latest ceramic options. I have a very non-stick carbon steel pan and griddle from avocado oil seasoning.
You didn’t mention that you’re oiling it after drying it. It’s recommended that you lightly oil the surface upon storage.
One Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px6jqcYFdFs
Love my cast iron pan and my stainless and mostly agree. Just want to point out that stainless steel isn’t really comparable to cast iron. Cast iron is cheap while good stainless pans are quite expensive, and you can’t really season stainless to be nonstick. Sticking is actually a feature of stainless, because then you can use a technique called “deglazing” to make a flavorful sauce out of the stuck bits.
I have one of each and I like them both for different things.
Mostly agree. I want to add, there are ways to make your stainless steel produce a non-stick effect.
Very similar to the method used to produce a non-stick surface on carbon steel, cast iron, and other heated cooking surfaces. Essentially you apply a light coat of oil and created a polymerized surface on the pan.
One source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXEt-fhyCis
Edit: Another Source (Leidenfrost effect): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUwaOnCd1h0
The only thing I would use cast iron for is to fight the ninjas hiding behind my fridge
Unless you have arms like tree trunks then this is a bad weapon choice. Ninjas are notoriously fast and cast iron is notoriously heavy.
call me lemmyml but I fucking love using a carbon steel wok to cook anything
Why is that associated with lemmyml
Because they love everything from China. Woks, genocide, pollution, capitalism, murdering protesters, they love it all.
Soy sauce, execution vans, chopsticks, virgin boy eggs…
My biggest gripe with Teflon, after the whole PFAS problem, is that you have to baby it. I never was able to find a plastic spatula that worked well for any application. At worst, some are so darn floppy it’s like trying to flip an fried egg with another fried egg. Not to mention, the leading edge would eventually melt and deform sending plastic shreds everywhere over time.
The things you can do cooking-wise with metal tooling just get you more control and better results. Any pan/pot that lets you do that is going to help your overall cooking experience. Plus, even if you don’t go carbon steel or iron - say, stainless or even glass - de-glazing the pan with some water and heat from the range can make short work of cleaning.
One last point to this rant: your favorite cooking shows are lying to you softly. Your cookware are tools - they’re gonna get fucked up. Used things eventually get scratched, stained, singed, dented, and that’s okay; I promise you they’re not unsanitary because they’re in this state. Those stainless pans with mirror-perfect surfaces, or carbon steel skillets with that pristine golden hue, they’re new; you usually see new product on camera thanks to sponsors and the general optics of the thing. Teflon pans hold out this false promise of pristine cook surfaces that just aren’t realistic. And in practice, even those awful things do not go the distance. So yeah, reject modernity and all that. You’ll be okay.
Why would you use a plastic spatula? I use wood with teflon - doesn’t scratch and isn’t floppy!
Right! I use silicone spatulas because I like the slight bit of flop it has, but there are options besides pan scratching metal and really crappy, pan saving plastic spatulas.
it’s so much better than stainless
debatable but i think so
it takes a little maintenance
everything needs maintenance in the sense that you have to clean it. jokes aside, the only maintenance it needs is to burn oil in it if the seasoning got a little damaged for any reason
can’t cook anything tomato based
you can, it’s not great but won’t ruin it
eight coats of oil you have to burn onto it before you can use it
that’s not true, all cast iron pans come pre-seasoned from the factory
you can cook fried eggs and steak
that is true
even after seasoning it everything will still stick to the pan
not really, it’s pretty non-stick
to clean it you gotta heat it up then dry salt scrub then re-season
not really, you only need to do that if the seasoning got damaged
if water ever touches it the entire thing will disintegrate
that’s not true, you’d have to leave it in water for days to get it to rust
things that aren’t mentioned: you gotta use it regularly otherwise it gets sticky; you can use metal tools like knives and spatulas directly in the pan that would demolish any teflon; the seasoning is more resilient than people think, you can even wash it with dish soap; the seasoning actually gets stronger when you fry fatty things in it (grilled cheese, steaks, eggs, sausages); it’s very simple, durable, rustic, old technology, and incredibly cheaper than skillets of a similar quality (excluding cheap teflon pans); you can unrust it in your garage and even weld it back together if it breaks, which is sick as hell.
you can unrust it in your garage
You can very easily de-rust cast iron cookware with Ospho which is basically phosphoric acid (Loctite naval jelly available at Lowe’s is the same stuff in gelled form, which is a bit grosser). Obviously you have to rinse it really well afterwards, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to physically remove the rust.
“some of this is true”
I’m with you 100%.
I’ll add that I rarely use my cast iron in the kitchen, preferring to use it on camping trips or the grill. Why? The sheer heft of the thing could accidentally cause my glass cooktop some trouble. For those occasions, I reach for my well-seasoned carbon steel pans: much lighter with most of the same non-stick situation as the iron skillet.
glass cooktop
This is one gripe I have with my own cast iron, is that it marks up my glass cooktop when I use it. I can return the top to pristine condition by scrubbing it with steel wool, so it’s not permanently damaging it, but it’s kind of annoying to me that you can see which one of the burners I use way more often than the others because its discolored in a cast iron-sized circle.
I don’t know your glass cooktop, but i’d be shocked if the weight of a cast iron was enough to damage it. Does this mean you also wouldn’t put a cooking pot full of water on it? Mine had no problem, didn’t even get scratched which i was worried it might.
That said i do think cast irons can be too heavy for some people, especially when it’s full
Here’s the thing: I’m a klutz, and do not always watch my hands (damn ADHD). So this whole thread is semi-rational at best. Still, I’m certain that I’m the guy that would drop it one or more inches onto the cooktop by accident. I honestly don’t know how resilient these things are, but I’m not about to find out.
That said, I looked up some numbers for weights and well, it’s really not too different from a full pasta pot. I may just have to work up the courage. Thanks.
Yeah i believe you can break a cast iron, it will snap instead of bend, but i have no idea how hard you’d have to drop it. It also probably would damage the glass
I like to avoid the hassle of taking special care of a cast iron and just use a stainless steel pan from IKEA. Spray on cooking oil works really well to keep food from sticking if your don’t crank up the heat and anything that does get stuck can be easily scrubbed off with a copper scouring pad. Best part is that there’s no need to worry about rust. Ultimately just use what you like most.
Ultimately just use what you like most.
I always say that the best pan is the one you got for free when you moved into your new house.
My best pan was the cast iron frying pan from the 1920s that I inherited from my grandmother. I say “was” because eventually my brother used it to drain the oil from his motorcycle. I still haven’t totally forgiven him for that.
Especially for steak, pork, and fish, the cast iron heats up better and sticks far less than steel. Also much easier to clean.
But for anything that’s saucy (pasta) or could benefit from a good deglazing (scallops particularly but also for veggie dishes), stainless steel works best.
I just have to commit myself to cleaning up immediately after the meal or consign myself to a lot of scrubbing.
I like to have both on hand. Really depends on the dish.
Hey, if your meat is sticking it might just need to sit longer at a slightly lower temp if you are worried about burning. Letting pork sit for longer has done a lot for me for it sticking.
And then also for cleaning heating up the pan dry on the burner than throwing in some warm water to boil while scraping the bottom has been way faster than scrubbing it all.
I have no idea what kind of pots and pans I have. I know they’re not cast iron though lol. I just use them and they work.
Love my cast iron. Got it for free from someone who had bought it and never used it, had to scrub the rust off but since then the only maintenance its required it wiping out the excess grease and oil after cooking with a paper towel.
Just a heads up, despite the popular myth, it’s totally fine to clean cast iron with soap. The seasoning is a polymer (plastic) that is bound to the pan. The soap destroys grease, but the polymerized stuff isn’t effected. You don’t need to every time if you don’t feel like it, because heat should clean things fairly well, but don’t be scared to do it if it’s dirty.
Useless context: the soap thing used to be true when soap had lye. But now, like overcooking pork chops and washing chicken, it’s outdated advice from our grandparents.
I just like how I can use my metal scrapers and spactulas without having to worry about damaging it.
I get that point, but stainless steel also exists.
Stainless doesn’t work as well as ferrous, especially for frying. Carbon steel pans are popular too, sort of a modern version of cast iron.
Yeah honestly I want more pans made like my wok and just have it be anodized carbon steel. It’s so good even if it is not pretty.
Cast iron is cheap, indestructible, gets better with time, does want some care but nothing outrageous. I do have a good stainless skillet as well, call it the “stick pan”, if you want something to stick and then deglaze, it’s good.
But the cast iron is my joy, my kids joke that I love it more than I love them (it is older than they are) and already argue about who will get it when I die. Have never bought a nonstick pan, they seem unhealthy, and old cast iron is satiny and nonstick. It suits the way I cook, or perhaps the way I cook has been shaped by the pans. I don’t worry about tomatoes or wine sauce but wouldn’t slow cook spaghetti sauce in one, would use stainless or the Le Cruset one for that.
Mostly I think it’s like flannel, not great at the start but improves with use, ends up better than everything else and then stays better for a long time. In the case of cast iron that could be several generations.
Then my fictional grand kids can have my pan that has 5 different layers of seasoning on it with half of them peeling off.
It will last even longer because it’s in my cupboard for 5 years at a time.
Nooo give it to a disapproving hipster dude, so he can sand it and lovingly restore it and judge you!
One of mine got crusty, I put it in the oven and ran it through a self clean cycle, it all burned off and I re-seasoned it, been smooth sailing since. So you could try setting it on fire like that.
Tue secret to cast iron is fire.
I know everyone talks about their tricks but mone has mostly just been lots of heat directly applied to it and then slap cheap oil and rub it with a rag I accidentally set on fire once and then back to the flame. I figure it worked for my ancestors. And they seasoned that shit with sunlight.I don’t have much more than 250, 270 celcius and that does not seem to cut it.
Find someone with a self clean oven. My current one doesn’t do it either but the ones made to burn the baked on grease to ash get up to 475-480, that is what will burn off the seasoning. Not as hot as a kiln, I have no Idea what that would do.
I use my 3 cast-iron on a rotation near daily, use soap and water to wash them, and season maybe once every 6 months to re-up it?
I’ll cook tomato shit in there no problem, just don’t fucking let it sit on there and get stuck or you’ll have issues. Never worry about food sticking
Chainmail + warm water + dot of soap and 15s of rubbing and I’ll have a perfectly clean pan ready to go for another use immediately if I really wanted. Hand dry, warm over stovetop to evaporate any remaining liquid to avoid rust
Tbh it’s less work than my stainless steel was because things get stuck WAY less often, and I’m an ADHD mess who never does dishes
You have to be amazingly shit with kitchenware to fuck them up
I bought like a $30 one at the grocery store a few years ago and it’s still going strong. If I forget to use it for a long time it’ll get a patina of rust, but it scrapes right off. I only seasoned it once when I got it with beef tallow.
Honestly if I threw it away today and bought a new one it still would have been cheaper than buying a Teflon pan for like triple the price and having it only last maybe a year before it gets completely ruined, and you get those forever chemicals in your body as an added bonus.
It’s not like it’s some huge investment, just give it a try and see if it works for you. Buy a cheap one at a big box store, season it with oil or fat, and don’t put it in the dishwasher just hand rinse it with lye-free dish soap and a soft sponge. Maybe that’s too much work for you and you prefer your nonstick or stainless, that’s fine too, good quality stainless can last a lifetime if treated properly and ceramic nonstick pans are getting better and cheaper all the time and pretty much outcompeting PFA-based products because people are becoming more aware of how shitty they actually are.
In all seriousness my cast iron never looses its seasoning and is the best non stick I have in my house. I refuse to go back to PFSA
People have weird ideas about seasoning. It is literally oil polymerized and bonded to the metal with high heat; but people act like it just rubs off. You can scrape seasoning off, but it’s hard. I need steel wool to do it.
I think these people complaining aren’t really seasoning their pans - just using dirty pans (i.e. the oil hasn’t fully polymerized).
Different types of oils form different polymerized surfaces, too. Related to the greentext, some people came up with the idea of flaxseed as the best oil for seasoning cast iron based on some theorycrafting about chemistry at a high school level, and it turned out that flaxseed oil seasoning chips and flakes really, really easily.
So there are a bunch of people out there doing it wrong and complaining that it’s too fussy.
How about olive oil? Does it work and make anything you cook smell/taste more delicious?
Also, I’ve heard some mention that cast iron pans can infuse your food with more iron, but wouldn’t the seasoning block that? Or do iron ions move through the seasoning over time?
I use whatever is on the counter usually, but lard (homemade), bacon fat (clarified) and avocado oil are the usual and seem the best when doing the high heat seasoning. I just get the pan hot after cleaning it, with a very thin layer of oil (wiped as thin as possible) and keep wiping oil in there awhile with a paper towel, take it off the heat and occasionally wipe it with the paper towel to spread it evenly.
Pancakes also work as pan rehab. The long low heat works to get them smooth again. I use butter for that, which leads me to believe that any fat is probably fine.
Grapeseed oil.
Cheap at big box stores. Incredibly high smoke point. Dirt cheap.
Use that for first couple layers and after that honestly whatever oil or fat you want to use or have. I re-up my pans with everything from Crisco to just cheap “vegetable” oil (rapeseed or soy usually) and even duck fat from after making other dishes.
Don’t expect any to necessarily be more delicious but sometimes you get different flavors from what sorta burns in. You supposedly might get some iron passing through but it’s actually kinda a necessary mineral like volcanic ash.
Yeah, to clarify, I was asking about the iron because I understood it to be a generally good thing but then questioned whether it really was an advantage of cast iron pans at all.
Though for the grapeseed oil having a ridiculously high smoke point, wouldn’t adding a final layer of something else mean that that will have the relevant smoke point?
It’s pretty likely that the temperature needed to polymerize the oil would destroy whatever compounds are responsible for making olive oil taste and smell the way it does. Plus, if done well, seasoning creates a permanent bond between the polymer and the metal, so you probably wouldn’t get anything to come out of the seasoning into the food.
As for adding iron to the food, you might be thinking of acidic foods causing iron to leech out into the food. If the seasoning is “perfect” then this might not happen, but any weakspots in the seasoning can allow acids to corrode the pan if they’re left there long enough. Common advice you’ll find is to avoid cooking acidic food for long periods of time (e.g., simmering tomato sauce for several hours)
As for adding iron to the food, you might be thinking of acidic foods causing iron to leech out into the food.
No there are actual cast iron trinkets you can cook with to fortify your food with iron. I can’t answer if that same effect would work through seasoning though.
Olive oil works well for seasoning, idk about taste though. You burn all that stuff away and what’s left is bonded to the pan so there’s not much room for flavor to transfer.
Avocado oil is what I use. It has the highest smoke point of the readily available cooking oils, is supposedly healthier than other oils, has a clean flavor and doesn’t peel once polymerized for me. Olive oil works, and so does various other fats; bacon, tallow, butter etc.
I use my cast iron more than any other pans because it is more versatile than my carbon steel or stainless steel pans. Each have their own place but cast iron works for more of what I do. The cast iron absorbs heat and works well for doing high heat cooking so having an oil that doesn’t burn until higher temps gives more temp ranges to operate in. When an oil/fat goes past it’s smoke point it becomes a carcinogen and is unhealthy to breath/eat. So avocado oil’s smoke point just over 500° is better than olive oil at around 300°-350°f.
