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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

Why not carbon steel? It's lighter and just as durable, that's why it's used in restaurant kitchens.

It rusts if you leave it damp, and the rust is porous and consequently impossible to keep clean; you have to scrub it off or remove it with acid. Restaurant kitchens wash and scrub their pots constantly but they also use a lot of stainless steel.

cast iron has the same problem

That's true, you have to keep it well seasoned to prevent it from rusting. Can you do that with carbon steel? I'd think the surface chemistry would be about the same, so maybe? Does the greater flexibility of the thinner cookware make the seasoning flake off?

Yes carbon steel cookware is seasoned almost exactly the same as cast iron. Although it's sometimes thinner, it's still quite dense and heavy cookware that's comparable to cast iron stuff in use and seasoning lifetime in my experience. It cooks just as fantastically well too--I love carbon steel pans.

Thanks!

Carbon steel is the same as cast iron, just less brittle due to lower carbon content. They sometimes make it thinner (doesn't have to be as thick since it's not cast), but there is plenty of thick carbon steel cookware out there too.

The carbon-steel itself is very tough, but most people try to keep a layer of seasoning on it to prevent rust. Sometimes it takes a lot of care to maintain that seasoning, and it still might flake off because of e.g. metal spatulas.

Good stainless steel, OTOH, is generally hard enough to survive reasonable run-ins with metal utensils, and doesn't require re-seasoning.

Carbon steel also contains chromium and nickel, and presumably also leeches those into food as you cook like stainless steel.

Cast iron is 100% iron.

FWIW, I use all three types of pans happily in my kitchen and won't judge anyone for using any of the three, but this question is kind of hilarious given the linked study about steel cookware.

> Cast iron is 100% iron.

plenty of cast irons have all sorts of things mixed in them. i don't think anyone particularly cares to use pure iron, because additives make the process easier.

if your pan manufacturer will even tell you which kind they used, you can check matweb for the composition.

some of them include chromium, nickel, molybdenum, etc.

Yes that's true, but compared to stainless and carbon steel it may only contain trace amounts of the metals that are the focus of this study.

Everything in the study is trace amounts!

I don't think they're really comparable though. For example: Stainless steel contains 10.5%+ chromium. Carbon steel contains up to 10.5%. Steel (with a non-trace amount of chromium in it) ends up leeching trace amounts of chromium into food. Some cast iron probably has trace amounts of chromium in it, but far less than the 10%+ in steel.

This may also leech chromium into food, but most likely at an even further insignificant amount. It's not part of the study and I am not a chemist, so I don't want to make a conjecture.

Chemistry is complex enough that layman cannot make any assumptions. For all we know stainless steel and carbon steel have higher content than the cast iron, but leach less because it's far more stable.

Doesn’t chrome and moly make it stainless?

It’s the chromium. Cookware usually has nickel too. When a pan is advertised as 18-8, they mean roughly 18%Cr-8%Ni. Basically the same as 304 stainless steel. You have molybdenum additions in something like 316 stainless steel.

I think it depends on the amount, though I'm no expert.

Cast iron is not 100% iron. It contains carbon and silicon and usually other alloying agents and impurities.

Well true, but compared to stainless and carbon steel it contains trace amounts of the metals that are the focus of this study.

Can anyone just admit they were wrong? Ffs.

lol You're on a website catering to people who dislike having others prove them wrong and will stretch "technically correct" as far as possible, in the face of all else. If computers didn't exist, they'd be lawyers. If lawyers didn't exist, they'd be clergy.

I think you just won HN.

Lots do. Not all. Intellectually honest and educatable people hang out here too. But you’re understood.

I don’t expect anything to be perfect. Maybe just some metamorphic rocks that have been heated by coals that I can roast my food in.

Thermal mass is a desirable feature for cooking some things, the cooking surface loses less temperature as you introduce ingredients.

I prefer spun iron which is as thin (and light) as a carbon steel pan but still pure iron. I do like cast iron, though, as it's just a thick chunk of metal you can throw in the oven or on a barbecue etc. without too much care.

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