I don't use cast iron for boiling, simmering, and otherwise cooking liquids. It's a frying pan for frying.

I use stainless steel sauce pans, pots, etc. for liquids.

I clean the cast iron while it is hot. A lot of food comes off without water, only a little water is required to remove the rest, and the cast iron is mostly self drying. Since I usually use electric burners, I can stick it back on its burner to dry with the burner's residual heat. [1] This is also a reasonable time to oil it.

If something is really stuck, for example if I didn't clean the pan when hot, I heat the pan again and clean it when hot.

Cleaning stainless steel when it is hot is another algorithm that works on my machine.

There's certainly ritual and habit around my use of cast iron but I am not saying you should use cast iron. Particularly since I enjoy the process of using cast iron and you don't.

[1]: on my portable butane stove, I will reignite the flame and reheat the pan if necessary.

I suspect a degree of sarcasm just wooshed over me.

It also soaks up any excess fluids.

Slightly heftier than stainless and much easier to season. I have a set of stainless (relatively nice triple clad Cuisinart) and I still much prefer the carbon steel pans.

It's essentially what cast iron pans would be if we had better manufacturing techniques, and they work really well.

Backing up though - I would 100% take cast iron over just stainless (in every situation except a professional kitchen) and there's not much that would entice me to buy a non-stick pan, basically ever, at this point. The only thing they do ok is eggs, and a tiny egg pan in cast iron does basically the same without ever needing to be replaced (or giving me liver cancer).

Cast iron isn't hard to use, is indestructible, has a very low chance of poisoning me (and handily helps provide iron in my diet), and just makes things brown like nothing else I've used - nothing will make hash browns or a grilled cheese sandwich like cast iron.

Plus it's dirt cheap (less cheap is carbon steel, but again - very nice).

What's not to like?

You cover the pan with a fat, overheat it, and the fat polymerizes : https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-season-cast-iron-pans-ski...

Heck, I've done it on aluminum pans and eggs are fine, just like old-school breakfast spots and their griddles.

If you're cleaning it hard enough to remove the brown/black layers that form near the bottom - you're cleaning way too much, and never letting it build up a layer of seasoning.

Despite the claims that modern soap won't hurt, I find it varies tremendously by brand. So I don't use it.

I literally just drop about a tablespoon of salt into the large skillets, and wipe out with a paper towel while it's hot still.

The egg pan gets a light scrub with a non-scratch sponge, and that's basically it.

Also - I'm in no way affiliated, but this is basically the best cleaner for cast iron you can get: https://www.amazon.com/Ringer-Original-Stainless-Cleaner-Pat...

While that is generally the advice, in my experience you're much better off treating them somewhat carelessly. The main thing is to not clean them too much, and to not let them stay wet. The seasoning happens with regular use. With a new pan you want to let it stay on the heat a bit after use so the oil has some time to stick to the pan properly. After the third or fourth time using it it should start getting pretty anti-stick, until then just use a metal spatula to dig stuff out of the pan.

If food starts sticking to it, spread a thin layer of oil on it and then oven cook at the highest temperature you have.

You shouldn't use soap on the pan, that will remove some oil. Most soap won't remove the seasoning, but maybe lots of soap and excessive brushing will and food will start sticking quicker!

Once you're done with the pan drop some hot water in it (ice cold water could crack the pan) and scrape off the food - which should come out nicely. If that doesn't work or you left the pan dirty from the previous day, pour water and scrub a bit harder until smooth. Salt can help as well.

To make sure you dried it correctly, put it back on the stove and (optionally) rub some oil into it.

All true, but if you're steelmanning it, you really need to mention the weight. Also it doesn't conduct heat well.

It's heavy. The handle gets really hot.

my 12" stainless pan is hefty but not heavy. the smaller cast iron 10" or 11" is about twice the weight. I use it to cook just about everything. I think once the coating on my nice 12" non-stick pan goes off I'd probably get a carbon steel one (if it does... you can prevent most of it by not cooking things too hot and i mainly use it for hashbrowns on about medium.)

And still cheap! Slightly more expensive than cast iron, but not much; an entirely usable Lodge carbon steel pan is $40 on Amazon. The silicone handle cover is an extra $12.50 (although you don't reeeeally need one if you don't mind wearing oven mitts).

Personally I ditched nonstick coated pans — sure, PTFE is supposed to be safer than the old Teflon formulations, but the chemical used to replace PFOA in many formulations is GenX, which recent EPA studies indicate is probably similarly bad [1]. Carbon steel and cast iron just avoid all of that.

1: https://www.epa.gov/chemical-research/human-health-toxicity-...

Lodge is pretty good though IMO.

The handle does get hot, but it takes a LONG time. I can easily cook a couple eggs, or make a few grilled cheese sandwiches without any problem.

Cooking a whole batch of pancakes is too long through - I need sleeve/glove after about 25 minutes. Even then, though - it's not "burn me" hot, it's just uncomfortable to hold for more than a few seconds.

Still, never trading. If I manage to reproduce, my offspring will be the fourth generation to own and love the 10" Wagner skillet I got from my grandmother.

I also use cast iron for other things though. They have different strengths.

Cast iron is great for searing or for fried eggs or buttery scrambles.

I love my car on steel Matfer fry pan and try to use it as often as possible.

But for acidic or long simmering brown sauces that'll stick and tear off my seasoning, I'll probably teach for stainless steel. Afterward I'll scrape it down and it's good as new.

Nonstick has its purpose. One that I rediscovered recently is very low fat pan frying. Even though all my steel/iron pans are well seasoned, I still need more butter or avocado/grapeseed/coconut/etc oil when compared to cooking on a Teflon pan. If you are trying to cut calories, you'll need to count the additional cooking oil that goes into your carbon steel or cast iron dishes.

Yes, I am aware of the benefits of good fats in my diet. But sometimes you want to track or reduce total kcal consumption, e.g., if you are a weightlifter but aren't currently bulking. Reducing fat intake is the easiest lever, since you want to keep protein intake high, and want to limit carbs.

So yeah. Use the tool you enjoy using. I've seen Chef Jacques Pépin beat an omelette in a Teflon pan with a metal utensil, so who am I to judge???

Non-stick : JavaScript / Python

Cast Iron : C

Carbon Steel : Go

Stainless Steel : Java

Lots of people do it who should know better. That's going to damage the coating, shortening the lifespan of the pan, and putting little bits of Teflon into your food.

Out of the concerns above, pieces of Teflon in your food is fortunately not a huge concern: Teflon is not toxic in the slightest. It works as nonstick because it doesn’t really react with anything, and that means it won’t react with your body either. It is a common material in various medical equipment like implants, frequently used as catheter lining.

Now, if you heat it to 500 degrees or more, it starts decomposing, and the resulting chemicals are toxic. So, don’t broil in nonstick (but slow braising in oven is fine).

Also re oil, a great tip is to oil the food not the pan along with using nonstick too.

Oh, on that famous Pepin video (which is the one that taught me how to nail the texture), consider that Pepin probably has 100 pans a month sent to his agent/pobox unsolicited. He'd don't give a crap about that pan lol.

Source: my own experience using cast iron cookware for the last 30+ years, cooking on induction first, a wood-burning stove for the last 20 years.

Epicurious's taste tests indicate that the proper figure is 30 minutes.

That said I don't mind the fact that some iron makes its way into our food. I mainly cook vegetarian/pescetarian because my wife does not want to eat meat ever since she saw some practice in a slaughterhouse at age 16. This means it is harder to make sure our food contains enough iron. One of the ways of achieving that is to use cast iron cookware when cooking acidic foods. The longer the food is in the pan, the more iron makes its way into it. Eventually this leaves that metallic taste but that takes quite a while in a well-seasoned pan.

Cast iron is kind of the opposite of a wok, which is made so you get about as close as you can to cooking with the flame and no residual heat from the cooking vessel. Note that woks are designed to be cooked on crazy output stoves that you don't really see in Western homes. This allows you to sear with much more control of the thermal transmission at the cost of a blazing hot kitchen and a hefty gas bill.

That said, if you do a lot of baking a nice thick sheet of steel is definitely the tool.

I wish there were heavier and affordable stainless steel pans for searing, as I can just chuck those in the dishwasher.

I did once melt the hood of a gas grill by putting a piece of steel in it. Held heat so well the cover and front of the grill warped.

I also don't taste metalic notes in my food and that includes doing stuff like shakshuka right in the pan.

Stainless multi-clad isn't really a replacement for cast iron. They're different tools. Same goes for nonsticks, which are great for some things but not high heat (and yes every product that claims otherwise is lying to you).

Cast iron and carbon steel are close alternatives, where the tradeoff is between weight and thermal capacity.

People shouldn't mythologize cast iron, both in cultish enthusiasm, or exaggerating its flaws.

I mean, yeah, you have to use tools the way they're meant to be used for them to be effective. But dry isn't the goal really, just leave a thin coat of oil on it and it'll never rust.

They're cheap, rock-solid, non-stick (and you're welcome to use metal tools against them) - and if you abuse them enough, you can just re-season them in a couple of hours and they'll be back in factory condition.

I personally have a few pieces of stainless cookware and a cast iron skillet. I use the skillet for probably 75% of my cooking. Its ability to retain heat is lovely. I can't really order steak at restaurants anymore because I can do it at home for half the price with a beautiful crust and sear, perfect mid-rare inside. Once you grease it up and heat it up, nothing will stick to it. You can cook at high temp, brown things, sear things, finish them in the oven - all with a natural non-stick finish. Cleanup just involves at most a scrub down with sea salt and a little water, and a thin coat of oil.

You could still cook acidic food acidic food on it if for a short period of time if you've got a good season - and not too acidic - but no, it's not the tool for every job.

Getting the skillet was definitely a step change for my cooking. It's pretty hard to beat a 10.25" Lodge skillet for $20, delivered, from Amazon.

> You might not destroy the seasoning but you will get metallic tastes in your food.

I cook sauce in mine and it doesn't taste metallic.

> Also not mentioned downside of cast iron - you need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily.

Absolute horse apples. I treat my pan like garbage and give it a wipe ONCE and it never rusts.

It is fine preferring one type of pan over another but you are saying patently untrue things here.

Python is a top choice for a number of applications..?

Webpage programming with Django, you might not like it (?) but for many people it's the top choice.

All underlying stuff is implemented in !Python.

Swiss army knife of languages

Porous ceramics can easily breed bacteria, good and bad. And glazes on ceramics can contain all kinds of delightful compounds that can leach out. You certainly don’t want to eat or breathe unfired glaze.

As for ceramic nonstick cookware, I’m not convinced that such a thing exists. I think that “ceramic” coatings are actually sol-gel, and I can’t find a straight answer as to what is in them. They do advertise that they are fluoropolymer-free, and they seem to be stable to rather higher temperatures than PTFE.

Ceramic glazes have been problematic [0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/12/08/563808879/ca...

>Some PFAS are approved for use in the manufacture of non-stick cookware coatings. These coatings are made of molecules that are polymerized (i.e., joined together to form large molecules) and applied to the cookware through a heating process that tightly binds the polymer coating to the cookware. Studies show that this coating contains a negligible amount of PFAS capable of migrating to food

read this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX#Pollution

Florine is remarkably not inert.

Teflon is a relatively stable Florine compound.

But as you say, it can destabilize when the pan is used within a few sigma of ideal cooking temperature.

I just put a little evo on a paper towel and apply it all over the pan.

I can pour maple syrup over salmon at high heat in that pan and it doesn’t stick. Not something you can do with stainless.

I recently found that you can get a jump on the process by polishing the cooking surface. I took an orbital sander to a new skillet last month, from 60 up to 180 grit, and it works great. Seasoning with six rounds of flaxseed oil was a complete failure - it all flaked off immediately - but the pan cooks pretty well anyway, just the bare metal. Of course I oil it lightly after cleaning to keep it from rusting, and it is starting to develop a nice patina.

It's also how I clean the pans if I have to.

The other 20% I need water because something stuck bad, and usually I'll just use my soapy sponge. But if the pan is real hot still, I'll just put water in it and let it deglaze the stuck stuff.

That said, I throw some acidic stuff in my cast iron and I can't say I can notice the metallic taste.

A cast iron pan is not really a replacement for stainless steel (I don't think anyone has anything against those), it's a replacement for non stick pan.

Calling it a replacement for non stick pan is actually quite insulting: nothing sears meat like a cast iron pan, we should say that non stick pan are a poor replacement for cast iron pans.

The reason I moved to cast iron pan (more than health concerns or caring about the environment) was to cook meat like chefs on youtube do, after years of cooking mediocre dishes on non stick pans.

The only major downside is the weight (2kg) and how hot it gets - which makes it hard to use for the miss.

I suspect that accounts for a lot of the variance that people experience using cast iron.

Eating a meal always implies eating your cookware and packaging. I don't want to eat chromium and friends, or PFAS. Non-stick is gonna get banned eventually, mark my words.

If a person is already near optimal iron levels, could cast iron push them over into just a bit unhealthy territory? Maybe not enough that people complain, but what would a sensitive study show?

I could be wrong, but I thought that cast iron has higher thermal conductivity (53 w/mK - watts per meter-Kelvin) then stainless steel (14 w/mK). Both are relatively poor thermal conductors compared to aluminum, however (>200 w/mK).

If you dry it with a kitchen towel (you don't even have to do it carefully) and then hang it up overhead instead of placing it flat in a cabinet or on the stovetop, it will never rust.

I don’t get the big deal about seasoning. I always cook with some sort of fat, so nothing sticks usually.

However, I converted all non-metal stuff to pure carbon ash by heating the pan to 750 F with my 25 year old electric range. At this heat it was very uncomfortable to keep a flat palm hovering one foot over the pan for any period of time. But it cleared up very nicely after some smoke that I extracted with a dedicated kitchen fan. The ash was scraped off like dust. I wouldn't do this without an exhaust under any circumstances though.

I stopped using my pans that required oil because of that.

Thin layer of oil out in the open goes bad quicker than oil closed in a bottle.

I got the enameled cast iron pan, so it actually works out nicely.

I’d recommend putting just a little oil on a paper towel and spreading a very thin coat across the surface. Only takes a few moments.

But non-stick is just terrible.