The answer is wood and metal tools with stainless steel, carbon steel, cast iron, glass, stoneware, and enameled cast iron cookware and bakeware. Aluminum bakeware is also great once you put a layer of seasoning on it to protect the aluminum from corrosion.

I also do 70% of my cooking in that pan!

I make up for the lack of seasoning by using more butter or oil.

The true reason why I use these cast iron pans is that they have a very long lifecycle (going 12 years now for some of my pans) and they sear way better than other cookware.

That doesn't sound (and isn't) healthy.

Do not put them in the dishwasher though, or you'll have to re-season them.

Good tip with the coarse salt, I'll have to try that sometime.

Soap is more of a cleaning aid for removing flavor than a safety control.

That said, I usually use tumeric in liquid dishes with a stainless pot. What are you cooking?

We switched from gas stove to induction and now they work even better since the handle doesn’t get as hot and it’s easier to control the temperature.

The whole seasoning thing is extra credit, the only failure mode I’ve seen is trying to fry an egg on a completely unseasoned pan, which just means some extra soaking and scrubbing is needed. The pan seasons itself after a few uses. Hand wash the pan instead of sticking it in the dishwasher, done.

Either that or use a stainless steel pan.

Those are wrapped with enamel. Pretty hard to notice seasoning with that.

My big realization was that there’s a lot of macho information there about the care of cast iron, and it’s pretty much all pointless because the stuff is indestructible and the seasoning doesn’t matter much. Every time I make tortillas in a pan the seasoning gets wrecked, and it’s just not a problem. So long as you get the pan to the right temp and have enough fat, nothing sticks regardless of the quality of the seasoning. Skimp on the oil or set the temp too low, and stuff sticks no matter how good the seasoning.

I wash the pans with soap and water (and not too much scrubbing), I never season them deliberately, and they work wonderfully. It’s a very forgiving cooking surface.

I accidentally removed a little of the "seasoning" of a cast iron and in the following uses it started to come out around the scratch.

Where I live there's another plus to wood utensils, I can help the people that make them locally

Man, I'm so turned off by the entire cast iron hype cult. I've tried so hard to make it work for me, and it just doesn't, and everyone's advice is totally different so it's impossible to know what to do. Wash it. Don't wash it. Scrub the shit out of it. Just remove the chunks and leave the rest.

The reply will inevitably be "it's simple, just...." where the words following "just" are different from anything ever written on the topic before.

It's a piece of iron. It's cheap. It just works™

* Let the pan cool (if I'm lazy or it's late, possibly this is overnight and then I do the rest in the morning).

* Scrape out any easy solid waste (burnt food bits, etc) with a wood spatula edge and throw the waste in the trash.

* Toss a healthy amount of salt into the pan and scrub the pan using the salt, with your hands/fingers. The salt is a great abrasive, like sand, but I don't want sand ground into my cookware, while salt is fine for food.

* Rinse out the dirty-salt-mess with plain water from the sink.

* Occasionally, if stuck-on things are particularly stubborn, repeat some of the above steps as necessary until the pan surface is smooth and clean.

* Wipe off most of the remaining wetness with a paper towel (the towel will probably look pretty dirty, that's ok).

* Throw the pan back on the cooktop, pour a few tbsp of cheap olive oil in the middle, and turn the burner on as high as it goes. Wait a few minutes for the oil to thin, spread, and smoke. Once it's smoking pretty well, shut off the fire and leave the pan to cool again.

* Later when it's cooled off again (possibly overnight or hours later, whatever), gently wipe off any excess liquid oil with a paper towel and store the pan back in the cabinet, ready for next use.

People use them for cooking different things, so the advice is bound to be different. Maybe they don't work for your cooking, and thats OK.

At least once a week I give my vintage cast iron a good scrub with Dawn powerwash and chainmail, dry on the stovetop, apply a layer of Crisco, and then wipe it all off as if I put it on by mistake.

cast iron, stainless steel.

There’s also a potential health argument against cooking with Teflon pans to begin with, but people do and those people shouldn’t be using metal if they want their pans to stay non-stick for any reasonable length of time.

I switched to carbon steel as a daily driver two years ago and it is is trivialy non-stick with a little maintenance. The non-stick properties are infinitely refresha le, unlike "non-stick" pans.

I also have cast iron and stainless pans for other uses.

Unfortunately try as we might to get people to switch, the fact is that undamaged Teflon is more non-stick than anything else and most people don’t want to put the effort into seasoning their pans.

Teflon is popular, and Teflon owners could do with utensils that don’t destroy their pans or give them cancer.

They're my least favorite to clean and most likely to throw away because I can't get them cleaned.

>Wood food working implements get stained, develop cracks and chips that may retain bacteria

This happens after years of use ... buy a new one? They're like 1 dollar. Lol.

Usually you would use different materials for different tasks.

Silicon is much more resistant to heat and chemicals. I believe the polymers are also more tightly bound.

I also think people cook too much on nonstick. Non stick has a place in the kitchen for specific dishes. But for the most part you can cook most things in a combination of high quality stainless steel pans and cast iron. Some food sticking in stainless is a good thing (Maillard reaction), deglaze the pan and scrape it up with a good wood spatula.

Maybe one day we’ll all have affordable temperature controlled induction ranges similar to the Breville/Sage control freak. If you have the ability to preheat your pan to an exact temperature then getting nonstick results with tiny amounts of oil or butter becomes rather trivial.

1. Too much thermal mass and too little thermal conductivity. This causes poor feedback and unnecessarily high delay between heat being added and the measurement reflecting it.

2. Manufacturers love to cast their logo right in the bottom center, which means that the sensor doesn’t make good contact with the pan.

I wonder if someone makes a nice stainless-aluminum-carbon steel clad pan.

This pan exists! It's made by an American company called Strata. Stainless steel on the bottom/outside, carbon steel on the inside/cooking surface, and aluminum sandwiched in between. It came out this year. I've seen a few cookware YouTube channels do some first looks, unboxing, seasoning, and first cook tests but no long-term reviews so far.

Cast iron is definitely the most challenging cookware material to use with any flat-top cooking appliance. Whether induction or traditional ceramic, flat-top ranges tend to be quite poor at creating even heating in cast iron. Gas on the other hand works quite well because of the natural upward draft produced by the hot combustion gases which wrap around the sides of the pan, enveloping it in a blanket of heat from below.

What a lot of people don't realize is -- in non-stick, virtually all the oil winds up in the food. Since it doesn't stick to the pan. With steel/iron, most of the cooking oil stays in the pan.

So yes you will end up using 3x or more oil. But you're not consuming 3x oil calories. It probably isn't any extra calories at all.

For scrambled eggs you can use a double boiler (you’ll never have had fluffier eggs). An extremely well seasoned carbon steal pan will also work wonders (basically what fry cooks use)

For fish, cooking fish whole on a grill is amazing. Another technique with stainless pans is to get the pan searing hot first. Then add a tiny amount of oil and cook the fish and don’t touch it. This should set the surface protein quickly and create a crust that prevents sticking (requires a little practice but not too hard)