To me, someone who celebrates a bit more of the spectrum than most: Metal hot. Make food hot.
Non-stick means easier cleanup, but my wife seems to think cast-iron is necessary for certain things (searing a prime rib roast, for example.).
After I figure those out, then I gotta figure out gas vs. electric vs. induction vs infrared…
/thread
All technically true & correct.
I’ll add that cast iron consistently works better for longer: My ceramic or PTFE pots start great, but after a while become so terrible they’re useless in spite of silicone spatulas etc. I cook almost daily, so I found the new tech pans fully degraded within a year or less.
Cast iron, I’ve car camped and daily stove topped, no problem. I season it once every couple of years, works great.
This is true.
My partner and I are currently having a laugh because a couple years back I bought a fancy expensive set of ceramic coated pans. Best ones on offer in the store at the time. Coating applied with plasma vapor at 40,000°F or some such nonsense, hard as diamond, good for use with metal utensils, coating guaranteed for life, yada yada. Good brand too (Calphalon). I said the tech on these is amazing and the coating has insane hardness and it will last forever. Partner laughed and said I fell for marketing BS, all non stick pans degrade.
Guess what happened? The nonstick ceramic coating started rubbing off in some places. I’m quite annoyed. Partner laughs at me.
Meanwhile go on YouTube and there’s videos of people restoring cast iron skillets from the 1800s to like-new condition.
😬 damn, sorry homie. I guess if it’s lifetime warranted, resell the replacements?
Not particularly relevant, but it’ll help you see through marketing dreck no matter how it evolves: Plasma arcs can go that high in temp, but has no effect on what makes something “hard” or “soft”: interatomic bond strength. I’m certain you know this, but carbon (as in the diamond) holds hands really strongly with other carbon, more strongly than iron to iron as in a steel spatula.
In theory, an actual diamond surface (not sprayed on, but grown) would be impervious to steel implements. But in reality, making a fully uniform diamond coating is extremely difficult, and thus tear-jerkingly expensive.
Spraying chunks of diamond onto a surface as the mfgr has done really means there’s a thin sticky coating on the pan before they start, so that these hot pieces of diamond partly melt into it and are “glued”. Safe bet that later is PTFE. That means when your pan is hot on the stove, the layer softens and you wind up eating little bits of diamond with each meal. One day, food sticks, as you’ll have found a spot missing too many diamonds, it’s just the substrate with a bunch of tiny holes to make food stick even worse than a smooth plastic surface.