Ok, honestly, is cast-iron really any better than a non-stick, stainless, copper (anything else?) pan?

Non-stick chemicals have been historically poisonous, don't know about the modern stuff though.

Also, cooking with cast iron increases iron intake.

It lasts forever, you wont scrape whatever "non-stick coating" they use off. If you want a pan that will outlive your grandchildren and is permanently non-stick once it's seasoned, for most things a cast iron is perfect. If you have that, some pots of various sizes, and a wok, youre set.

I prefer induction or infrared stovetop. We dont need to burn more gas.

Induction gives you the speed and control of gas, without the exhaust gases. Induction is more efficient than infrared, because you're heating the pan directly. The cooktop only gets hot from the pan resting on it.

Get induction, it's by far the best!

The reason cast iron is useful for searing a big cut of meat is that it has a reasonably high specific heat capacity (less than aluminum, more than copper, similar to steel) combined with considerably more mass than typical cookware made of other materials. It takes longer for the meat to cool the pan, so more heat transfers into the outer surface of the meat.

Cleanup of properly seasoned cast iron should be about as easy as non-stick pans because the seasoning (polymerized cooking oil) is, in fact a non-stick surface. Contrary to popular belief, it's fine to use soap on it, but aggressive abrasives can strip the seasoning. Fortunately, that's not hard to fix.

Yes. Our house only has cast iron and stainless.

There's a small learning curve with cast iron, but the less you worry and over think it, the easier it gets. I fry eggs every other day in mine, and it's about as non-stick as anything else. Preheat the pan or griddle, that's all. Cleanup is a wipe with a paper towel or a rinse and quick scrub.

Cast iron works 95% of the time, but acid can strip the seasoning. So anything simmered an hour or more in tomato or win,e or sauted with lemon juice, get stainless. Don't put it in the dish washer. Not a lot of rules, really. My pan is 15 years old. My Mom uses ones that might be older than her.

When I travel and have to use someone else's non-stick pans, I hate the delicate little snowflake pieces of shit. Flimsy, toxic, someone else showed it a fork once so now it has damage and sticks anyway in a line across the middle, can't go on the oven, can't sear, handles all wobbly. Generally just disposable trash. Why would you love trash?

Stainless steel can be plenty nonstick but you have to get it good and hot. Seasoned cast iron is a little more forgiving, but heavy. Carbon steel may be the best of both world because it's similar in weight to stainless, but takes a season, but I don't have enough experience with it yet to say for sure.

I got started when I inherited my grandmothers Le Creuset dutch oven. She purchased it in the 1950s and it's still going strong...

Then I found they had an outlet store near me...

Non-Stick, no matter what brand, will need to be replaced every 3-5 years. So, yes, enameled cast iron is more expensive, but when you compare 1 set of cast iron to 15 to 25 sets of non-stick... yeah...

Cast iron also retains heat better than non-stick, carbon or stainless steel, aluminum or copper.

But it is HEAVY AS SHIT. You aren't hand flipping pancakes in cast iron.

This is a HUGE "Yes, but."

Entering adulthood, I got cheap run of the mill non stick pans, they work until they dont.

Then we tried cast iron. Gotta oil it, cure it, and don't use soap to wash it. Some extra work, but it worked great.

Now, I'm rocking stainless steel. Less work than the cast iron, but you need to preheat the pan before you put anything in it. If you do this, it's just as nonstick as the others, and it's a lot lighter and easier than the iron, and I think they are less expensive than cast iron, but I haven't compared in a very long time.

I like carbon steel, mainly for two reasons

1. Heats up insanely fast
2. Super easy to clean

Metal hot. Makes food hot. Yes.

But!!

Cold food makes hot pan cold.

Cast iron has a lot of thermal mass, so when you put a cold piece of meat on it it doesn't immediately get cold and stop cooking for a bit. Thin pans without it don't keep hot, hot so they don't sear long enough and you don't get the maillard reaction and the tasty brown crust.

Depends on what you're doing. Yes, it's better for most things where you'll need to sear.

Carbon steel frying pans good as well.

Alternative to cast iron: carbon steel.

Same seasoning process, better heat conduction, lighter, cheaper.

For me, cast iron are by far my most used pans. You know how flannel starts out sort of awful but gets better and better as it gets older? That's cast iron. Starts out sticky PITA but over time becomes satisfying satiny nonstick surface. I've always used them a lot so that's how my cooking style evolved.

We also have one steel pan we call the Stick pan, sometimes you want food to stick so you can deglaze. My kids use it for potsticker dumplings, and they like it also because it's lighter, cast iron is heavy. And of course a rice and pasta pot, those are steel.

I don't buy "nonstick" pans, they don't last and I'm not convinced they are safe.

Metal hot. Make food hot.

Think a bit deeper. How quickly is that heat transferred, and at what peak temperatures? Does the metal keep any heat of its own and impart that into the food, or does it just convey the heat from the burner to the food? And how quickly does it do that?

but my wife seems to think cast-iron is necessary for certain things (searing a prime rib roast, for example.).

Look at the thermal mechanics of this.

Take the cast iron pot. You can throw that on the stove and let it get ripping hot, like the metal itself is carrying a ton of heat energy. When you put the prime rib in it, the metal dumps its heat into the meat much faster than a flame alone would. This helps you get a strong sear on the outside, without dumping in too much total quantity of heat to cook the meat on the inside more than you want.

then I gotta figure out gas vs. electric vs. induction vs infrared…

Heat can be transferred 3 ways- conduction (flows between two touching objects), convection (hot object heats air, air blows against cold object, air heats cold object) and radiation (hot object radiates energy through space and it warms cold object).

Electric- coils get hot, the pan touching the coils transfers heat by conduction. Downside is uneven heating- neither the pan nor the coils is perfectly flat so you get hot spots.

Infrared- coils under the glass get hot and radiate heat through the glass. This works pretty well.

Induction- coils under the glass but they don't get hot. Instead they create a magnetic field modulated at low radio frequencies (15-150 KHz). This fluctuating magnetic field interacts with any ferrous metal close to it, creating small but powerful eddy currents inside the metal and thus heating the metal up. So the stove doesn't create any heat at all, it's the pan that actually gets hot. This by the way is neither conduction convection nor radiation, because heat isn't being transferred, it's created inside the pot.

Gas- flammable gas (usually propane or natural gas, which is mostly methane) burns creating high temperature exhaust gases that rise against the pot and thus heat the pot. Many chefs like this. Gas stoves should ideally be used with an overhead hood as gas stoves have been proven to drastically reduce indoor air quality.

Of the options- induction is usually the best these days, because it's the most efficient, cleanest, and also in many cases has the highest output (in terms of watts of heat pumped into the pot).

When cooking, you want a stove capable of very high output. The more output you have, the faster it will boil water for example.

Teflon and certain ceramic non-stick pans can't handle the heat needed to sear a steak. You can look up the heat range of your pans, but generally if it isn't cast iron or steel, it's going to warp or degrade the coating. That means they won't last as long.

On the other hand I've never had to toss a cast iron pan. Sometimes I've needed to scrape off seasoning and redo it, and it's rare to ruin a cast iron pan to the point it can't be redeemed. But I've just bought my first carbon steel wok because it's much lighter than cast iron

Cast iron is fairly cheap and reliably buy it for life. Non stick pans are so delicate that you can't even use metal tools with them and their handles are usually plastic so melt if you put them in the oven, and even then they won't last more than a few years.

All of my pans are cast iron. For saucepans I have stainless steel. Never really had a problem with cleanup, what are you doing?

Non-stick has to be cleaned by hand, whereas stainless steel can go in the dishwasher, so for me that's easier to cleanup.

Non-stick has Teflon on top, which shouldn't be heated above a certain temperature, and to sear steak you need to leave the pan in the stove for long without anything on it so it gets extremely hot (which would damage the Teflon coating of non-stick and release poisonous gases on your kitchen, not enough to kill you, but still can't be healthy).

So, in short, stainless steel is a good middle ground, easier to clean and maintain than non-stick and cast iron.

As for gas/electric/induction it's about efficiency, induction heats the bottom of the pan, electric heats the glass where the pan is resting, and gas heats everything. There's a video from a YouTuber that measures time for a pot of water to get to 100° in all 3 (I don't remember who, I thought it was technology connections but can't find it), and in short induction is the fastest, electric takes a while longer, and gas melted his thermometer before the water boiled (which shows you just how much heat you're putting in a place that's not the pan).

That being said there's certain stuff that is easier to do on gas stoves, possible on electric and impossible on induction. Namely anything that requires the pan to be heated at an angle. It's very niche, I would say most people wouldn't even notice or care about this limitation, but professional chefs sometimes prefer gas because it allows to be used like this.

I have Lodge cast-iron skillets, Le Creuset and Staub ceramic-coated cast-iron dutch ovens, Le Creuset stainless saucepans, and one non-stick frying pan (which I bought for my wife).

I use the skillets for pretty much everything that isn't going to be simmered in tomato. Had them for years and they are non-stick. I happily fry eggs in them with no worries whatsoever.

Cast iron is vastly superior to non stick. You can get it hotter, it stays hot when you put food in it, you can use metal utensils, no horrible chemicals like pfas.

I bought an carbon steel pan about 5 years ago, best pan ever! Highly recommend 😊

Thin hot pan get cold fast when big meat on it.

Thick hot pan get cold slower when big meat on it.

Thick pan good for make big meat hot fast.

Thin pan good for make thin meat hot or thick meat hot slow.

Cast iron is pretty good at almost everything, but isn't the best at anything.

For searing meat at high temps, I've settled on stainless steel. It's easy to clean and maintain, and the typical 3-ply or 5-ply cladding has much better heat transfer characteristics than cast iron (which is a mediocre heat conductor masked by the fact that it's so heavy and thick that it takes on a lot of thermal mass to aid in searing). You don't have to worry about metal utensils or harsh scrubbers scratching the surface. And you don't have to worry about acidic ingredients messing with the surface, either.

For things that need nonstick characteristics, like eggs, I cycle through nonstick on a short replacement cycle (once every 2 or 3 years). I might get a carbon steel one day but I'm not in a hurry.

Reddit has a fucking hard-on for cast iron. I'm not really a fan.

I don't use teflon non-stick but have had good results with ceramic-based non-stick. My second choice would be carbon steel, which has a similar "seasoning" process as cast iron, but I find carbon steel easier to work with compared to cast iron.

I've been enjoying my carbon steel more than cast iron. It's the same as cast iron for seasoning and non stick, but much lighter.

Everything has it's pros and cons. There is no 'better'. A stocked kitchen will have variety of different cookware types, a professional kitchen will have more than one heat type as well. most people for whatever reason, only use one cookware type and convince themselves it's the 'best', but that isn't true at all. i've taken professional cooking classes and they use every type of cookware and tell you to but certain types for certain styles/dishes.

choose your heat source first, then your cookware. non-ferrous cookware won't work on induction stoves.

personally i have non stick, stainless steel, cast iron, and ceramic. i don't bother with carbon steel because i don't do high heat cooking that works best with it. i have a couple of basic alloy stock pots too, because they are lighter.

Cast iron sears better for sure.

I use decent stainless steel for everything else. Non-stick scares me.

Just about everything is better than non-stick pans. Like others pointed out the non-stick chemicals will eventually flake off into your food so you're eating that stuff. And non-stick pans sort of have an expiration date, they will eventually lose all their non-stick abilities at which point you'll wonder what's the point of using it anymore.

Beyond that the other stuff is maybe more personal preference. Stainless steel is great keeping in mind you'll always have to oil it and always have to clean it well. On the other hand cast-iron is essentially always oiled and ready to go so you typically don't worry about that part of the cooking.

re: your other question I was forced to use something electric at my current home and ended up getting an induction stove after a lifetime of using gas stoves. I love the induction stove so much I'm not sure I'd want to go back to something else. It heats up so fast that I had to re-learn some of my cooking since the pan always reaches the desired temperature in a few seconds. Induction stoves are also safer, there are no open flames and no gas fumes hanging around.

Your wife sounds smart, listen to heerrrrrr.

Also I don't know, but since hearing about non-stick pans leaking cancer into your food (if you scrape them with a fork, etc), I just like to use a normal pan.

We were told that the teflon coating is "inert", implying it's harmless. But, now we have microplastics in every cell in our body, of which, teflon is one. I'm not sure that chemically inert equals harmless.

Cast iron is great once you learn to cook with it. Food does stick sometimes, even in a "seasoned" pan. But, it's not a big deal. Also, you can clean and polish it with power tools, if you need to. It's virtually indestructible.

Induction stoves? You WILL break the glass, and the glass is expensive to replace. If I got electric, I'd go with an old-school coiled heating element type, literally buy an old, used stove, because new appliances are crap construction quality. You can get them refurbished, and they're easy to fix if anything goes wrong--very simple machines.

If you choose gas, you NEED good ventilation, a hood that vents to the outside. At least, you need to open a window while you're burning the gas.

Cast iron is nice because it's lower conduction rate means you can get a lot more radiant heat without burning whatever's on it. (Also I guess the "seasoning" adds flavor but eh.)

All day every day I vastly prefer cooking with stainless. It's infinitely tougher than any coating can be, sheds no flavor to the food when cooking with acids, you can scrub the shit out of it, and it doesn't warp like aluminum.

I use cast iron on electric and am 100% happy with both. I have a mix of pans that I bought new and acquired used. One of them was quite rough and I restored it. I find them extremely easy to use and cleanup.

Cast iron is great if you use it a lot. It does take a little more work to maintain because after you clean it it's best if you dry it and coat it with a thin layer of oil, but you don't have to if you use it all the time. Mine is non stick enough to fry an egg with no oil, so it's better than my old ass Teflon pans in that sense, but probably not as good as a new Teflon pan

I don't like non-stick anymore because the coating eventually gets all scratched up and doesn't work as good. Idk how it gets scratched up, I never used metal. My ex did, so maybe it was her.

Cast Iron, if maintained well (i.e just don't cook anything too acidic. You don't usually need to re-season), lasts forever. It's also great for when you want to sear something without the pan cooling down once you put your food on it. Because it's thick and stores a bunch of heat. Yet somehow it also gets hot pretty fast.

I don't get stainless steel personally. Apparently to get things to not stick, I should be using MORE heat? But I already use a lot of heat! On the up side, they get hot really fast.

Copper and carbon steel I've never used. I hear carbon steel is similar to cast iron in many ways, but easier to maintain?

If you're doing a new build, definitely go induction. Electric sucks because it's kinda slow-ish to get started, gas sucks because either you need to have a gas line built to your house if you don't already have one, or you change out the gas container every now and then (and that thing is heavy, mine's 17 KG of gas + whatever the huge chunk of metal weighs, which is definitely more than 17 KG). Plus the whole issue of, y'know, freshly burnt hydrocarbons (yay CO2 and potentially other gases). Oh and gas explosions aren't common, but they can happen!

Only downside of induction is that if you lose power, you can't cook. A wood-burning stove as a backup is excellent in this case, because depending on what your heating system is, you may also lose heating if power is gone.

My family uses our cast iron skillets daily. We have one that is almost exclusively for eggs, and one for meat.

Cast iron wants to be used often and if you really like cooking, will eventually become your go-to. But not everyone gets there; for a lot of people it is counterintuitive to have a pan that you only scrub any bits off and rinse with plain water. Actually, our egg pan only gets wiped out with paper towels because its so slippery now. I don't think I've scrubbed it in months.

If you really want to use your pans:

1. Best: cast iron
2. Better: stainless steel or enameled
3. Good: high quality nonstick like HexClad
4. Never: cheap non-stick

We use the absolute hell out of our cast iron and our stainless steel. They all get scrubbed with a metal Chore-Boy scrubbee. Only the stainless gets soap.

Different tools for different jobs. There's a ton more variables at play. Oversimplifying does just that.

Play with it all. Try to do both. Then you will have a better idea. Or post on lemmy asking everybody and read a lot of incomplete and possibly misleading explanations that might help you find the detail(s) you lack to edge your mind into a wider hunger for deeper understanding.

Mine? Cast iron is just different. Like using a truck vs using a car.

In real life, nothing is clear. So, when people give you clear explanations, they may be making the decision to not invest a lot of energy trying to get you to understand or know more. Like right now, I know that spectrum people take a lot of explaining sometimes, and I am really tired and going to bed, so my best advice is to understand they're different. Learn by doing if you can, and learn from others if you can. But, if it means anything, I use two cast iron skillets, three types of stainless steel pans, some of them tri-ply, and an aluminum with a nonstick coating. I have my preferences not just for different things, but styles of certain things, and even times for different things (like just cooking for me, or one other person, or multiple other people).

Also, generally with non-stick, using high heat or metal utensils on it will ruin it and expose you to pretty bad chemicals basically immediately. But also so does any smoke in general.

Literally pick your poison.

Get a thick bottom stainless steel pan and don’t be afraid to use butter, it’ll take care of all your needs and doesn’t require special or gentle treatment.

The cast-iron I've been using for the past 16 years was probably made in the 1940's in Ontario and will likely still be around after I die, unless someone leaves it in the rain or something. With coated pans I'd have to buy new ones every four years or so (which is not only costly but environmentally unfriendly)... not to mention the health risks of using non-stick, which are negligible IF you never forget it on a hot burner; it will overheat and the coating will break down and leach into your food.

Gas ranges also release toxins into the air which can only be properly extracted if you cook under a fume hood, like one you might find in a chemistry lab... even the best kitchen exhaust fans can't exchange the air that well and you're left breathing in carcinogens everyday when you cook your meals. So, if one uses a coated pan on a gas stove... well.

IMO the best choices are anything except coated pans on an induction stove. I read somewhere induction stoves are more efficient but I've never actually looked into it. Cast irons can certainly be a pain in the ass to maintain, but once you get a good coating on there it's smooth cooking until something acidic is cooked with it, or a roommate puts it in the dishwasher for you... which is why it's good to also have a steel pan also. I've never eve heard of copper pans lol, sounds expensive.

Induction FTW and cast iron does work the best with induction since it heats up the most. However, I also enjoy non-stick since it being slower is an OK trade-off for the easy cleanup

For gas vs. electric vs. induction vs. infrared:

I've never cooked on gas so I can't speak to it. I always had normal electric ranges.

Then I got an induction stovetop and it was a game changer. Instead of using a heating element to heat the pot, it uses magnets to agitate the atoms in the cookware and that turns the pot into a heater.

For example, I can boil a pot of water in 2 minutes, faster than a microwave.

The downside is you HAVE to use magnetic pans for it to work (like cast iron.) If you have, say, an aluminum pan, you have to get a stainless steel plate, which will heat the pan and the pan heats the food, just like a normal electric stove.

Infrared works the same way as electric, it heats the pot which heats the food.

Some answers here are close.

It depends on what type of person you are.

If you're the kind of person who has a neat, clean kitchen who does all their dishes after every meal, go cast iron.

If you're the kind of person who has a messy kitchen and you really only do dishes once or twice a week, go primarily with stainless, a nonstick pan for eggs, and a 10-12 inch cast iron pan for occasional use, like that rib roast.

Cast iron pans are fucking heavy. As soon as I tried picking one up, I knew I don't want to cook with that on a regular basis.

I have gone through several non stick pans and they all suck because they will wear out relatively quickly. Eventually things will start to stick, and then you are in trouble because you have to treat them gently to avoid scraping off the nonstick coating, so you end up in a catch 22 situation where you can't actually scrub stuff off without making it worse.

I switched to a stainless steel pan about a year ago and I love it. The weight is somewhere in between cast iron and most nonstick pans. I've never had anything get horribly stuck to it, and it's not difficult to clean because you can use abrasive sponges or whatever without damaging it.

As someone who learned way more about pans than I really want to know, let me say that a good cook can make good food in any pan, however some pans are more suited to tasks than others.

First off, searing meat in a non-stick pan (traditionally Teflon) is a bad idea, the pan can reach temperatures that produce toxic gases, and are known to kill birds that are more sensitive to them than we are. The coating that makes them nonstick isn't very durable and will at most last a few years before being useless. While other kinds of pans are likely to outlive you.

Other common pans include cast iron, stainless steel, carbon steel, and ceramic non-stick (non-toxic, but are delicate)

Specifically for searing meets, my favorite is stainless steel. It holds heat similar to cast iron, but is slightly more conductive and can transfer a lot of heat to sear meat. Meat also literally bonds to pan and can be used to make great flavorful sauces with deglazing. Cleanup is easy, if anything is really stuck just boil water in it to loosen. Alternatively stainless steel holds up decent in a dishwasher. Cleanup can't be easier than automatic. However, stainless steel is still quite heavy.

For general purpose cooking my personal favorite is carbon steel. It's seasoned like cast iron and can be quite nonstick, but is much lighter making it feel very similar to nonstick pans, which are made with aluminum.
I won't lie, seasoning has a learning curve. Seasoning is very tough under some circumstances, and very delicate under others. Notably acid will eat the seasoning away.

Cast iron is great, but it is so heavy that it is inconvenient to use.

All will work with induction, except for cheap aluminum nonstick pans

I can’t comment on the various toxicities…but I was a high-end chef for 20 years. Stainless (proper stainless, with a high quality underside) and cast iron pans were essential for their respective purposes. Non-stick pans generally weren’t used outside of breakfast in kitchens without a flattop. Copper was a gimmick for homeowners…never saw one in a kitchen. My understanding was the copper was on the outside and the shtick was it was supposed to regulate heat better…BS AFAIK…it just made them look slick and therefore easier to sell.

Stainless are the go-to for searing and sautées…nothing is going to stick if you know what you’re doing and monitor the pan. Cast iron was for things you started on the stovetop and moved to the oven to finish…and/or for things you blacken or crust. In my experience the same effect can be achieved with a stainless pan (never buy a pan with a plastic handle that can’t go in the oven and always cook with a hot-cloth)…but some chefs swear by cast iron for niche purposes and they’re certainly easier to clean and last longer, even if they’re useless for sauteeing (square shape).

Oh…woks can compliment stainless pans for sauteeing if you have people who know what they’re doing with them…you pretty much can’t leave a wok unattended…but they get the best results for what they’re made for (stir fry, fried rice, etc).

Gas is the only choice for proper heat regulation. All the other elements are out of the question for proper cooking.

It's a tool. Like a hammer.

Hammer hit nail, nail go in. But if you look for hammers you'll quickly find that there's a dozen or so different hammers available, all of which make nail go in.

Different hammers are for different types of hitting things.

Different cooking pans are for different types of cooking. All of them make food go hot.

Stainless steel make food go hot and also make pan sauce and clean real easy. But food sometimes stick. This is considered a feature, not a flaw.

Non stick make food go hot but food no stick. Doesn't last very long but it's very easy to clean. If you really love eggs they're a necessity.

Cast iron make food go hot and stay hot longer. But they don't heat very evenly and they're hard to clean, this is also considered a feature by... Certain people...

For some reason there's a community of gooners for cast iron. I cook a lot and have long since abandoned 99% of my cast iron cookware. The only things that survived was a burger press and a Dutch oven that has a ceramic glaze on it so it's easy to keep clean. I find that for just make food go hot, cast iron is not as good at it as stainless steel is. But if I'm making a stew, or bread, or frying something, a really big cast iron vessel really is the best thing. It stays at a temperature longer than anything else does, and that matters in specific applications.