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Comment by lukevp | Hacker News Reader

Use a carbon steel or cast iron pan and learn how to season properly. They are very nonstick if you cook correctly in them, and their surface is incredibly durable (I use metal spatulas and I primarily cook on carbon steel and a cast iron griddle.) you can also incorporate stainless steel pots, although stainless pans are not nonstick and very hard to use for beginners.

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A properly seasoned cast iron pan can be non-stick but the temperature has to be right, you need shortening, and you can't just put any amount of food in it at any temperature.

Stainless is can do the job too, but temperature and shortening is even more important. There's a much tighter window of temperature that it works at. You do the "water drop test" to determine that it's ready. See youtube for an infinity of videos on how to check the stainless is at right temperature!

I've given up on non-stick pans. They're semi-disposable because the don't last very long and you don't want to use them at high temperatures. All it takes is a little bit of skill to never have to use non-stick teflon pans.

I use cast iron for everything I possibly can, but there is one use case I still need non-stick pans for: frying eggs. The only way to get them to not stick in even the best seasoned cast iron pan is copious amounts of oil, which seems like it's probably worse than a few molecules of PTFE derivates.

I've been frying eggs in my cast iron every morning for years, works like a charm! I use a small slice of butter and it's nonstick. The eggs don't freely slide around like they would in a non-stick pan, but after frying on one side for a moment I can easily move them with a metal spatula.

My trick though is that I have a cast iron only for eggs... if I cook other stuff in it the smooth buttery coating gets lost and the eggs start sticking again. After a few days of eggs-only it becomes nonstick again.

I’m guessing your cast iron pan isn’t polished. If it is, you can get it to be non stick.

Stainless steel also works very well. You just need to preheat it to get the Leidenfrost effect.

I did actually polish this one, and to be fair it works mostly OK in that I'm not scraping the eggs off with a metal spatula, but it still sticks enough to be annoying, and for a teflon pot to be a measurably superior solution.

I haven't played much with preheating though, I'll have to try that - thanks for the suggestion :-)

I think you will be surprised how well stainless works when it has thin layer of fresh oil and preheated to the right temperature such that it passes the "dancing drop" test.

Just get a normal stainless steel pan. And leave it alone. It never sticks.

Really? I fry eggs in a cast iron pan almost every day, with just a little cooking spray or wipe of oil (like, put a little oil in, wipe it out with a paper towel, painting the whole surface with oil in the process). I mean, it's not no oil, but it's far from copious amounts.

I'm with Kenji Lopez-Alt on this one. No matter how nonstick your cast iron or carbon steel pan is, it's not as nonstick as Teflon, which is so nonstick that we had to come up with new methods to get it to bond to surfaces. Carbon steel pans are great, but they simply are not a replacement for nonstick.

question since you obviously know the topic!

a cast iron or "stainless" steel pan will get some gruff from cooking since its nonstick. It regularly goes to the dishwasher, some stuff won't get cleaned. Mostly oil burn stains it seems ("stainless" hardly!) .

Is that completely safe/expected ?

We obviously diddn't get that with the nonstick pans. We got rid of that stuff for a reason, now i'm not sure what is worse: nonstick pan surface OR hard-stuck burnt oil on a stainless steel pan. Thoughts?

Not the person you're replying to, but here's my $0.02. We have a couple stainless frying pans that we've had for a long time, and I've never been much a fan of them. I find they stick pretty bad no matter what procedures you use. Our main pan is a 12" cast iron that I smoothed out the bottom cool surface with a flapper wheel on an angle grinder. It's been used thousands of times over at least a decade and never gives me any trouble. I usually clean it with a stainless steel scrubber and hot water, and then either wipe it clean with a paper towel, or just put it on a burner on low to dry out. I'm not afraid to use soap if needed, but I find it rarely is. We also cook anything in it, including tomato sauce or whatever, and have never had a problem related to that. I find that most of the conventional wisdom around cast iron is just a bunch of voodoo. Just use it and don't worry about it. Beyond the cast iron, we have some ceramic coated cast iron dutch ovens/pots (including a real Le Crueset and a couple knock offs) and stainless steel pots. I'm real happy with our setup. No teflon, no grief, lots of thermal mass for even cooking. I don't feel like we've had to make a tradeoff. With the right equipment, it's really all upside from my point of view.

I can second your advice about the cast iron. A lot of people are too precious about these things.

I use mine daily for anything and everything. I wash it with Dawn. It continues to work as well as any cast iron I have ever seen.

Apparently the "don't use soap on it" advice stems from the era of harsher lye based soaps.

thank you, i will follow this advice

Not a cooking enthusiast but you should not put cast iron in the dishwasher. Heat some water in the pan, add a tiny drop of soap and use a spatula to scrape off any residue. Once dry add some oil (otherwise it will rust)

I have never been able to figure out stainless steel on the other hand. Apparently the trick is getting to the right temperature but I have never gotten it to work.

On the health side, Teflon pans used to be considered totally safe until they were not. Now they are considered safe again as they no longer use PFOA. Burnt oil and iron oxide might not be ideal either but at least it isn't novel to humans as it has been used for thousands of years. Unfortunately, difficult to get hard science on such subjects as it would have extremely large studies conducted over large periods of time to overcome the noise. In any case there are probably far more impactful decisions in life than which kind of pan to use.

A weak acid (tomato paste, dilute vinegar, ...) will help with burned-on stuff, but the real trick is just good, hard scrubbing with an abrasive (steel wool or similar).

Stainless, when used properly, won't have hard-stuck burnt oil on it. They clean up nicely by just boiling some water in it and then a light scrub-- no need for dishwasher.

Worst case-- you've gone too high in temperature for too long and you need some bon-ami.

Cast iron is intentionally seasoned with oxidized cooking oil to make it non stick, and that should not be cleaned off.

Stainless is pretty easy to get totally clean with steel wool and/or scotchbrite pad sponges.

And Barkeeper's Friend makes it easy to polish up stainless if you like it to look fresh. I find it's mostly cosmetic, but I still do it a few times a year.

Just gonna throw this out that as a long time seasoned cookware junkie:

There isn't really any clear data on what exactly the seasoning on our pans is, and what by-products are also formed. It seems somehow no one has done an academic deep dive on cast iron. Heating oils to the point of polymerization is very likely to have byproducts.

Now for the conspiratorial part, it seems likely that large manufacturers (Lodge) have done the research internally, but they haven't released anything along the lines of "We have research backing the safety of our pans!".

In some ways I really would not be surprised if it comes out that the seasoning process creates all manner of nasty byproducts.

I could be wrong but I thought it was well known and studied that the seasoned part of oil in cast iron were types of trans fats. Not great for you in any amount but also probably very tiny amounts are actually consumed.

Personally I make a lot of pressure cooker stews and things with more liquid which is less hassle and less chance of burning. If it needs to be seared in the outside then that can be done quickly without needing to cook the whole thing (pan or oven)

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