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Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

I tried cast-iron (mostly for pancakes) but found that it heated very unevenly (to the point of burning food in the center and not cooking food at the edge).

I've found success with a multi-clad stainless steel skillet. Heating it to the Leidenfrost point [1] ensures that nothing sticks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect#Leidenfrost...

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That's why you pre-heat them in the oven. This freaks people out who've never done it. Whaa ... you're sticking a pan in an oven thats turned on? Because if you do that to a cheap stamped steel and plastic pan, the plastic handle will melt off. There's a reason CI pans have expensively attached solid cast iron handles and not bolted on plastic handles...

You seasoned the pan by heating it to 400F in an oven till it stopped smoking... by definition putting it back in a 400F oven isn't going to hurt it... Also you can't accidentally overheat to 1200F and burn the seasoning off in a 400F oven, unlike preheating on a stove top. The stove top is used to hold to a constant temp not heat it up.

Leave the oven at 400F while you're cooking on the stove top... finish cooking, wipe/scrub the pan, apply a very light coat of oil, toss back in the 400F oven, turn the oven off, by the time the oven finally cools off you just massively strengthened the seasoning layer. Depending how fast your oven cools off I guess.

WRT SS there is no free lunch, you spend about as much time re-seasoning cast iron as you do scrubbing stainless steel with barkeepers friend powder.

If I'm generating a sauce, like say making fried Italian sausages with grapes and a nice white wine sauce, its stainless all the way, but I don't generate sauce when I'm making plain breakfast sausage, for example.

Heating my oven up to use a pan on the stove seems ridiculously inefficient. Also I don't sear at 400. That seems way to low for most things I'd cook in cast iron.

Also, I've not once used barkeepers friend on my stainless. It tends to clean up fine with a scotchbright pad. But I mostly use teflon pans these days.

Oh I donno most of the energy going into stovetop ends up as air currents rising to the ceiling and the insulation is pretty good in my sealed oven. Also its very cheap to heat air (compared to water or iron) so it doesn't take much energy to heat that enclosed well insulated oven. I have the EE gear to do it and I'm almost tempted to figure out which takes more KWh, in my infinite spare time.

I season my CI to 400 and as you raise the temp more smokes off so I'd have seasoning problems taking CI to red heat. CI is cheap, cheaper than disposable teflon pans, so owning an unseasoned (probably rusty) one for 1500F steaks and one with glassy seasoning for my wife to cook her eggs is totally realistic. I have SS for high heat.

If you ever need help cleaning stainless, the powder helps. The thing with scotchbright pads is endless news released explaining that after the first use they have more bacteria than a truck stop bathroom...

Teflon is super expensive in the sense of my not being rich enough to shop at walmart. I've been cooking a long time and after throwing out 10 to 20 formerly non-stick pans I bought lifetime SS and CI. So lemme get this straight, I've been buying $50 non-stick pans roughly every year for 20 years thats $1000 of pans sitting in landfills, yet I can buy stainless alclad for only $150 that will last my descendants until at least the year 5000 if not longer? Sign me up! I'm too poor to buy $50 pans I can only afford the $150 pans.

> Oh I donno most of the energy going into stovetop ends up as air currents rising to the ceiling and the insulation is pretty good in my sealed oven. Also its very cheap to heat air (compared to water or iron) so it doesn't take much energy to heat that enclosed well insulated oven. I have the EE gear to do it and I'm almost tempted to figure out which takes more KWh, in my infinite spare time.

But you're going to use the oven and the stove, so this seems really inefficient to me. There's also a lot of stamped steel and metal racks inside my oven that has to get to temperature. The oven pulls a lot of electricity into large heating elements and still takes 15 or so minutes to fully pre-heat. I'm not at all sure that heating, say, 20 pounds of steel to 400 degrees is an efficient way to heat a pan.

> If you ever need help cleaning stainless, the powder helps. The thing with scotchbright pads is endless news released explaining that after the first use they have more bacteria than a truck stop bathroom...

I guess I don't believe that. I squeeze my sponges out so they fully dry, and I occasionally send them through the dishwasher. I'm not very concerned about the sanitation of my sponge, especially since I'm cleaning with soap, which should carry any germs off the dishes when I rinse. I'm also not clear what the alternative is. I'm going to scrub my dishes with cotton cloths?

> Teflon is super expensive in the sense of my not being rich enough to shop at walmart. I've been cooking a long time and after throwing out 10 to 20 formerly non-stick pans I bought lifetime SS and CI. So lemme get this straight, I've been buying $50 non-stick pans roughly every year for 20 years thats $1000 of pans sitting in landfills, yet I can buy stainless alclad for only $150 that will last my descendants until at least the year 5000 if not longer? Sign me up! I'm too poor to buy $50 pans I can only afford the $150 pans.

My only problem with teflon durability is other people. I've had $25 teflon pans last for a decade. I've also had $50 teflon pans get ruined after a week from people using metal utensils on my new pans. :(

I have plenty of stainless cookware that I use when it feels appropriate (e.g. searing). I have cast iron as well, but while I'd like it to work well, I've generally not had much luck. I can get it seasoned, but I have trouble getting it clean without destroying the seasoning. I also haven't found it to be nearly as nonstick as teflon unless I use a lot of oil (which I don't actually mind, but my wife does).

"getting it clean without destroying the seasoning"

I've had excellent luck with a nylon bristle brush from the dishwashing aisle. Looks like it would work as an elephant handler's toothbrush (giant toothbrush for the elephant, not the handler).

Hot pan cleans a lot easier than cold pan. About a cup of water helps. Probably I'm slowly clogging my drains with grease by doing this, but it cleans up so well.

If you know the setting on the stovetop that holds the pan at the temp you want to cook at, you probably won't burn the seasoning by putting the burner modestly higher than that.

Hm, I had never thought to do this. (I no longer own the pan.) Granted, that would require me to get up a lot earlier to wait for everything to heat up :)

Think about how these cast iron pans need to work. They have a high thermal mass so once hot will have a nice uniform temperature...but you will have to wait for that to happen. A thinner pan will heat much faster but will be liable to hot spots.

I prefer a thinner pan myself[+] but I understand why people like the cast iron.

[+] one thing about those pans: the idea of a "seasoned" pan, with old, rancid oil molecules stuck in the nooks and crannies simply creeps me out. However I haven't heard of anyone actually getting sick (or suffering any olfactory effects either) so I'm sure it's all in my head.

"old, rancid oil molecules"

the seasoning process polymerizes those double bonded molecules into a plastic polymer. Some people cook on a painted film of semi-toxic teflon polymer plastic, you're cooking on a film of olive oil polymer plastic. I wonder if anyone's ever cooked on a sheet of kapton plastic? It should take the heat... Then again given how well hot PLA and ABS stick to hot kapton maybe its not so much fun.

>A thinner pan will heat much faster but will be liable to hot spots.

No, it won't (unless you're talking about a thinner cast iron pan). Cast iron has terrible thermal conductivity. A thinner pan made of a better metal, such as aluminum or copper, won't have hot spots.

IMO, the best pans are stainless steel, with plates of copper and/or aluminum in the bottom for even heat distribution. Stainless steel looks nice (unlike cast iron) and is easy to clean with steel wool or even oven cleaner if you have something really stuck in there, and with the conductive layers inside has superior performance.

Yes, I meant thinner cast iron pans, as that had been brought up in the post I was replying to. Apologies for not being clear.

Perhaps I wasn't patient enough, but I waited a long time for that stupid pan to heat evenly. The thermal conductivity was just too low. And in the meantime, the excessive temperature in the center would burn the seasoning off.

Whereas with stainless steel, it reaches the Leidenfrost point in a matter of minutes.

Disclaimer: I am an avid cast iron user.

It seems like cast iron fails on electric cooktops, or in the case of much of the thin modern cast iron cookware. In an effort to keep weight down to compete, they ruined the product. Gas flame mostly solves this, but is increasingly uncommon.

I cook with cast iron frequently, but I have been unable to find any recently-manufactured cast iron cookware that is actually worth buying. I think I last checked around 2006, so maybe the quality of available product has improved since then. I do know that "pre-seasoned" pans are just a complete waste of time, because you have to remove that spray-on crap before seasoning it properly.

So I pretty much just use the one Wagner pan, manufactured before 1996.

The nonstick PTFE coatings on my other cookware has always come off after a few years of use. I can't refresh the coating in my own kitchen, so the pan is basically useless after that. So I'll stick with the polymerized vegetable oil seasoning, even though the cast iron cookware is not as idiot-proof as more modern cookware construction. I like being able to keep something for 20 years, and not have to continually discard and replace crap that's not even 5 years old.

It would be nice if I could laser-sputter AlMgB14 + TiB2 onto a 12" round BAs wafer, and cook on that, but that's not likely to happen in my garage--or anywhere else with an oxygen atmosphere.

Avid cast iron user here as well... I've been using heavy cast iron skillets and pots on an electric stove for over a decade and enjoying it with no issues.

Could it be an issue with an induction-type electric cooktop? I never tried cast iron on one of those.

An induction stove would work several times better than a standard electric stove with cast iron, as well as heating the whole pan more evenly.

Can confirm this, my previous house had a conduction cooktop and it worked perfectly with my cast iron skillet.

I'm sure part of my problem is that the pan was a large square, and I was trying to use it on a smaller round electric element.

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