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In general I find that cast iron is very overrated. > Here's a list of myths about cast iron skillets: (...) You can't cook with acidic foods (e.g. tomatoes) b
by jstx1 4y ago
In general I find that cast iron is very overrated.
> Here's a list of myths about cast iron skillets: (...) You can't cook with acidic foods (e.g. tomatoes) because it'll destroy the seasoning
You might not destroy the seasoning but you will get metallic tastes in your food. I don't get why anyone would pick cast iron over stainless steel for an acidic sauce that needs to be cooked for a longer period of time.
Also not mentioned downside of cast iron - you need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily.
Stainless steel has better heat retention and distribution, doesn't react with acidic foods, is easier to clean, and never rusts. Nonstick pans are better at being nonstick than cast iron. So cast iron ends up being second best for most use cases but the cult around it is certainly strong. (And I admit that they do kind of look cool).
Cast iron = the Python of cooking pans.
- twiss 4y agoRe. your analogy, aren't they more like the C of cooking pans? Hard to use right, easy to make mistakes, etc. The initial even matches :)
- noninc 4y agoHa :) Though cast iron pans are not a tool, that no one ever managed to succeed entirely.
- Swenrekcah 4y agoA downside of non-stick pans are the unknown side effects of the non-stick substance used, though.
- eutectic 4y agoTeflon is inert unless you really overheat it.
- sgt101 4y agoIt's not the teflon that is my concern, it's what they have used to get the teflon to stick to the pan. read this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX#Pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX#Pollution
- eutectic 4y agoPans themselves don't contain significant levels of PFAs, but I agree about the environmental issues.
- brudgers 4y agoThe 'f' in 'teflon' is the F from the periodic table. 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.
- gruez 4y agohttps://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-food/questions-and-answers-pfas-food https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-food/question... >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
- southerntofu 4y agoI can't access the page from tor, but i'd be interested in seeing those studies. Do they account for extreme heat applied, or for mechanical harm to the coating? These two scenarios are mostly inevitable over the lifespan of a non-stick pan, and they're typically blamed for being the cause of the actual food poisoning.
- perlgeek 4y agoI might be concerned about teflon and similar non-stick coatings, but not really about ceramics. Humanity has been using ceramics for ages, and we haven't found any adverse affects yet.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- frazbin 4y agoJust make sure it's PFAS free and not just PF(X) free for some X; 3M is hell bent on getting this shit into your system
- bch 4y ago> Humanity has been using ceramics for ages, and we haven't found any adverse affects yet. Ceramic glazes have been problematic [0]. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/12/08/563808879/can-your-ceramic-cookware-give-you-lead-poisoning https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/12/08/563808879/ca...
- amluto 4y ago> Humanity has been using ceramics for ages, and we haven't found any adverse affects yet. 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.
- rich_sasha 4y ago> Cast iron = the Python of cooking pans. Python is a top choice for a number of applications..?
- ta988 4y agoPython is the best second choice for everything.
- myko 4y agoI like Python a lot but this does resonate Swiss army knife of languages
- rich_sasha 4y agoData science, ML at least it is the uncontested #1. R and Julia are making strides but are second or third fiddle. Webpage programming with Django, you might not like it (?) but for many people it's the top choice.
- jstx1 4y agoPython's being 2nd best for everything is kind of a meme that's been around for a while, not necessarily a rigorous evaluation of Python's viability for all possible use cases. And this is a thread about pans. :)
- bayindirh 4y agoHowever, for ML and Data Science, it’s just an abstraction layer for C/C++/FORTRAN code. All underlying stuff is implemented in !Python.
- the_third_wave 4y agoThe seasoning has no problems with acidic foods, you do not get a metallic taste units you leave the food in the pan overnight. Once seasoned it does not rust easily but even if it does this is not a problem, just clean it with some cooking oil and use it and the rust is gone. Clean it while warm and it'll dry by itself. Use some fat and your food won't stick - you need fat anyway. No problems with overheating plastic pans giving of noxious substances, no need to buy new cookware every other year. Cast iron doesn't warp like carbon steel does either, it stays flat and as such works better on old-style cast iron resistive electric cookers. 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.
- SeanLuke 4y ago> The seasoning has no problems with acidic foods, you do not get a metallic taste units you leave the food in the pan overnight. Epicurious's taste tests indicate that the proper figure is 30 minutes.
- arcticbull 4y agoThis also aligns with my experience, especially with tomatoes.
- the_third_wave 4y agoThis is not my experience, it probably depends on the resilience of the seasoning. I use these things every day with either olive oil or butter so the seasoning get a reworking nearly every day - I have 4 different skillets in regular use so there tends to be a day or 2, 3 between each use per item. It takes a night in the scullery for that irony taste to develop. 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.
- brudgers 4y agoWhat works for me. 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.
- horsawlarway 4y agoPersonally - I find carbonsteel pans are basically my favorite ever. 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?
- mhb 4y ago> What's not to like? All true, but if you're steelmanning it, you really need to mention the weight. Also it doesn't conduct heat well.
- xeromal 4y agoAgree with the browning. My favorite brussel sprouts are made in a cast iron. They become perfectly crispy.
- dontlaugh 4y agoAgreed. I use carbon steel for eggs and similar, they retain seasoning much better than stainless steel. I also use cast iron for other things though. They have different strengths.
- novok 4y agoWe used cast iron for quite a while. It wasn't that non stick for things like eggs, was way more annoying to clean properly and get all the cooking residue of food that got stuck on the pan, and was too heavy and after months of use never really developed that 'seasoning'. And we babied it a lot, with special brushes, avoided acidic foods and lots of soap in cleaning it. It was annoying. So eventually I just got the triple clad cuisinart you had and I find the stainless steel way nicer and easier to clean.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoMost serious chefs use stainless steel. Triply steel is so beautiful and sturdy. My parents have been using their pan since before I was even born.
- evolve2k 4y agoMy friend is a chef and looking after their pans properly also involves wiping them down with oil before storage, not sure I’m up for that level of pro maintenance.
- jitl 4y agoIt takes 2 seconds to wipe the inside of a pan with an oily cloth
- arcticbull 4y agoOr spray it down with Pam or something.
- smarks 4y agoI’d recommend against using spray oils such as Pam because they include lecithin, I think so that the oil coats surfaces more easily. Eventually lecithin will build up and make the cooking surface less effective. You can scrub it off with detergent but it’s kind of a pain. 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.
- krzyk 4y agoBut oil goes bad after some time (I think the proper term is oil goes rancid). I stopped using my pans that required oil because of that.
- xyzzyz 4y agoI guess if you cook once every few months, that might be a concern.
- frazbin 4y agometallic taste == nutritionally available iron. Also rust is trivial. We once put our cast iron through an oven clean cycle by accident. It rusted all to hell, turned solid orange, but re-seasoning returned it to better-than-ever condition. 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.
- eternityforest 4y agoWhat's the latest science on whether more iron is a good thing? 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?
- ronyeh 4y agoEach tool has its own strengths and weaknesses. I have tried them all, including pans with aluminum cores but steel outer layers. 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
- southerntofu 4y agoToo bad the Rust pan has not been invented yet, with zero-cost abstraction enabling lightweight non-stick cooking on bare metal ;)
- bch 4y agoWith the right (lack of) attention, cast iron can evolve to rust. After enough time, you'll never cook with it and have things stick (you'll also simply never cook with it).
- dgunay 4y agoand it would cook food "blazingly fast" too, right?
- ronyeh 4y agoI was going to think of a good pan for Rust... But it would be a pan no one I know uses, but one that everyone claims is amazing.
- waynesonfire 4y ago> you need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily. I just put a little evo on a paper towel and apply it all over the pan.
- twoodfin 4y agoI have a Lodge skillet I’ve been using and seasoning for a decade+ with a simple technique: After use, rinse, lightly scrub, with water and a little dish soap (basically what comes out of one squeeze of a sponge). Towel dry, apply a thin layer of canola oil over the cooking surface with a paper towel. Throw on medium heat over the stove for ~5 minutes. Done. 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.
- arcticbull 4y agoPersonally instead of using soap as part of the seasoning process, I pour a bunch of Morton sea salt into the pan and a little bit of water, and abrade it that way with a sponge. It also has the benefit of creating a lovely matte finish at the end of the seasoning process. I've also found the seasoning process works better at each iteration this way. It's also how I clean the pans if I have to.
- mod 4y agoI clean the pan about 80% of the time with just salt and a paper towel. Pour salt in, rub it around, dump salt in the trash, marvel at how nice the pan looks (seriously, I have to admire it every single time). 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.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoYou don't have to do all that, I clean mine, wipe it off and hang it up and never have any problems.
- marssaxman 4y ago
- twobitshifter 4y agoFor sauces I would suggest an enameled cast iron pot that won’t rust and can handle acids.
- copperx 4y agoWhat are such enamels made of? Are they risk free?
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoCeramics, pretty basic stuff similar to what we use for plates and such. You wouldn't want to eat the pigments in large quantities, but there's zero safety concern from enameled cast iron and the like. They're as inert as it gets.
- arcticbull 4y ago> Also not mentioned downside of cast iron - you need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily. 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.
- UpstandingUser 4y agoCast iron's real strength is the huge amount thermal mass and the relatively low rate of heat transmission. You preheat it, throw whatever you're cooking in it and the residual heat alone will brown it perfectly, even a huge slab of meat. It holds tons of energy and releases it relatively slowly. Steel pans will sometimes have all the heat sucked out of them before you're done searing (lower thermal mass, higher transmission) and it doesn't come out right, especially if you have a low output stovetop because it can't keep up with the cooking and maintain proper temperature. 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.
- SergeAx 4y agoI thought about challenging you with writing a thermal energy transfer equation, but will stop at writing two constants: heat capacity of cast iron vs stainless steel: 540 vs 500 J/(Kg*°C). So just buy a stainless steel cookware 7.5% heavier than cast iron - and you are all set.
- renlo 4y agoAren’t cast iron skillets usually made heavier though? Ie, sure heat capacity is similar per kg but if one is almost always 2-3x heavier than the other then it’s going to retain more heat
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoBut see, noting that banal fact would get in the way of their very impressive nerd sniping... That said, if you do a lot of baking a nice thick sheet of steel is definitely the tool.
- timecube 4y agoGood luck finding a stainless steel pan that even weighs as much as a cast iron, let alone more.
- honkycat 4y agoWow I haven't read such a confidently wrong post in a while. > 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.
- thechao 4y agoI aspire to treat my cast iron like garbage; my wife says what I do is a crime. One of my griddles I found buried in the yard. Cast iron is the bomb.
- bsder 4y agoThe real problem I have is that modern cast iron pans are extremely rough. Old cast iron pans are extremely smooth, by contrast. I suspect that accounts for a lot of the variance that people experience using cast iron.
- jdougan 4y agoIt is possibe to have the cookimg surface in a cast iron pan smoothed and in my experience, worth it.
- marssaxman 4y agoI spent an afternoon sanding down the inside surface of a cheap new cast iron skillet last month, just to see what would happen, and I have really been enjoying the result. The bare metal, after polishing, cooks better than the factory seasoning did. I look forward to seeing how it develops over time as I get a new seasoning built up.
- WheatM 4y ago
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoYou don't need to perfectly dry a seasoned pan. 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.
- nsxwolf 4y agoWhen my cast iron gets rusty I just keep cooking with it. The rust goes away. I assume into my food where it becomes an essential nutrient. I don’t get the big deal about seasoning. I always cook with some sort of fat, so nothing sticks usually.
- orangepurple 4y agoI badly screwed up my cast iron pan by frying shredded meat with lots of blood (Korean BBQ). 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.
- throwaway16374 4y agoCast iron = iron(val)
- jokethrowaway 4y agoIndeed, just use stainless steel pots for your tomato sauce. 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.
- 8bitchemistry 4y ago> Stainless steel has better heat retention and distribution 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).
- wyclif 4y agoyou need to dry it perfectly every time or it rusts very easily 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.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoi just put mine back on the gas burner, plenty heat there to help dry it out if you've toweled it off well.
- thayne 4y agoCast iron and stainless steel are both good depending on what you are cooking. Use the right tool for the job. But non-stick is just terrible.