Anon recommends a cast iron pan

Don't these pans last like generations, being passed down? I doubt your grandma and her grandma were bothering to apply 8 coats of flaxseed oil and heating it up to 1000 degrees and the pans would still perform as expected for ages

I bought a $20 cast iron pan at target, I season it like once a year. I just wash it and make sure to dry it, I’m sure this is against the rules. Seems to work fine for me though. I wouldn’t say it’s nonstick but it’s mostly fine.

A $20 Teflon pan would be flaking and unusable, so for $20 it’s a good deal.

Skillet issue

Most of this is true, I've never used cast iron in my life

In all seriousness my cast iron never looses its seasoning and is the best non stick I have in my house. I refuse to go back to PFSA

lol look there's one main benefit of cast iron: it holds heat really well. it is not easier to use or maintain than steel, but if you want something that holds a lot of heat, look no further

This has been my experience with cast iron. There's so, so, so much conflicting information on them. Even in this thread.

I wish the Mythbusters would come back just to test via experimentation all these conflicting claims.

Cast iron is cheap, indestructible, gets better with time, does want some care but nothing outrageous. I do have a good stainless skillet as well, call it the "stick pan", if you want something to stick and then deglaze, it's good.

But the cast iron is my joy, my kids joke that I love it more than I love them (it is older than they are) and already argue about who will get it when I die. Have never bought a nonstick pan, they seem unhealthy, and old cast iron is satiny and nonstick. It suits the way I cook, or perhaps the way I cook has been shaped by the pans. I don't worry about tomatoes or wine sauce but wouldn't slow cook spaghetti sauce in one, would use stainless or the Le Cruset one for that.

Mostly I think it's like flannel, not great at the start but improves with use, ends up better than everything else and then stays better for a long time. In the case of cast iron that could be several generations.

I just like how I can use my metal scrapers and spactulas without having to worry about damaging it.

Nothing beats the feeling of pouring cold water on the still hot cast iron pan.

I like to avoid the hassle of taking special care of a cast iron and just use a stainless steel pan from IKEA. Spray on cooking oil works really well to keep food from sticking if your don't crank up the heat and anything that does get stuck can be easily scrubbed off with a copper scouring pad. Best part is that there's no need to worry about rust. Ultimately just use what you like most.

I have a cast iron pan. Pros - it'll last forever if you look after it, it doesn't contain PFAS and generally it is non-stick enough to not be a nuisance. Cons - heavy AF, needs to be cleaned and dried after use & not in a dishwasher. I haven't tried to cook anything acidic in it yet but it does okay for steaks, eggs, mushrooms, sauces that I have used it for.

I still use soap and a plastic scrubber on mine and just dry it on the hob for a bit. I haven't had to reseason it yet but I imagine it will be a pain in the ass when I do. I have seen part of the seasoning flake off but it normally self heals with more cooking.

So it's okay overall but I think lack of PFAS and the fact that this thing will last a lifetime are the clinchers. Even if you have non-stick buy one of these and use it by default. I expect a stainless steel pan would be good too for same reasons.

why use a forever pan when you can have forever chemicals?

I use a wok and I wish I could use it for everything. I love that little damn thing to bits. I have only seasoned it twice (removed the previous one due to rust) and it can fry an egg fine.

It handles soap, tomatoes and other acidic foods fine as well. Didn't use any fancy oil, just avocado oil.

My mom's 300$ tephlon pans don't even last more than 8 months without getting nicks. My Lil fella is 15 years old.

They want to brainwash into using expensive, disposable, products.

Counterpoint:

It doubles as a weapon that can induce blunt-force trauma.

Don’t care, use carbon steel

My cast iron cookware exists out of survivors bias. Everything else has fallen apart in one capacity or another.

My biggest gripe with Teflon, after the whole PFAS problem, is that you have to baby it. I never was able to find a plastic spatula that worked well for any application. At worst, some are so darn floppy it's like trying to flip an fried egg with another fried egg. Not to mention, the leading edge would eventually melt and deform sending plastic shreds everywhere over time.

The things you can do cooking-wise with metal tooling just get you more control and better results. Any pan/pot that lets you do that is going to help your overall cooking experience. Plus, even if you don't go carbon steel or iron - say, stainless or even glass - de-glazing the pan with some water and heat from the range can make short work of cleaning.

One last point to this rant: your favorite cooking shows are lying to you softly. Your cookware are tools - they're gonna get fucked up. Used things eventually get scratched, stained, singed, dented, and that's okay; I promise you they're not unsanitary because they're in this state. Those stainless pans with mirror-perfect surfaces, or carbon steel skillets with that pristine golden hue, they're new; you usually see new product on camera thanks to sponsors and the general optics of the thing. Teflon pans hold out this false promise of pristine cook surfaces that just aren't realistic. And in practice, even those awful things do not go the distance. So yeah, reject modernity and all that. You'll be okay.

Reject tradition. Embrace forever chemicals.

I had a housemate who fried sausage patties and eggs in my cast iron skillet every morning for a couple of years. Gave it a good wipe and that's it. I'd cook other things in it sometimes and wash it up if needed. The seasoning on that thing developed into a deep black that was so smooth you see your reflection in it and you could fry an egg without oil and it came off clean with just a nudge from the spatula. It was beautiful.

We went our separate ways and it quickly degraded back to a more normal "good enough" level of seasoning. It was great, but I'm not frying up a fancy breakfast every morning for it.

it's so much better than stainless

debatable but i think so

it takes a little maintenance

everything needs maintenance in the sense that you have to clean it. jokes aside, the only maintenance it needs is to burn oil in it if the seasoning got a little damaged for any reason

can't cook anything tomato based

you can, it's not great but won't ruin it

eight coats of oil you have to burn onto it before you can use it

that's not true, all cast iron pans come pre-seasoned from the factory

you can cook fried eggs and steak

that is true

even after seasoning it everything will still stick to the pan

not really, it's pretty non-stick

to clean it you gotta heat it up then dry salt scrub then re-season

not really, you only need to do that if the seasoning got damaged

if water ever touches it the entire thing will disintegrate

that's not true, you'd have to leave it in water for days to get it to rust

things that aren't mentioned: you gotta use it regularly otherwise it gets sticky; you can use metal tools like knives and spatulas directly in the pan that would demolish any teflon; the seasoning is more resilient than people think, you can even wash it with dish soap; the seasoning actually gets stronger when you fry fatty things in it (grilled cheese, steaks, eggs, sausages); it's very simple, durable, rustic, old technology, and incredibly cheaper than skillets of a similar quality (excluding cheap teflon pans); you can unrust it in your garage and even weld it back together if it breaks, which is sick as hell.

That and they’re very heavy. I think I’ll go with carbon steel instead. Yeah you still have to season it, but at least its easier to handle.

I bought like a $30 one at the grocery store a few years ago and it's still going strong. If I forget to use it for a long time it'll get a patina of rust, but it scrapes right off. I only seasoned it once when I got it with beef tallow.

Honestly if I threw it away today and bought a new one it still would have been cheaper than buying a Teflon pan for like triple the price and having it only last maybe a year before it gets completely ruined, and you get those forever chemicals in your body as an added bonus.

It's not like it's some huge investment, just give it a try and see if it works for you. Buy a cheap one at a big box store, season it with oil or fat, and don't put it in the dishwasher just hand rinse it with lye-free dish soap and a soft sponge. Maybe that's too much work for you and you prefer your nonstick or stainless, that's fine too, good quality stainless can last a lifetime if treated properly and ceramic nonstick pans are getting better and cheaper all the time and pretty much outcompeting PFA-based products because people are becoming more aware of how shitty they actually are.

Yeah, but one hit with this baby and you'll send any ghost straight into the afterlife.

Nah my cast only washes with hot water and small Scraper. If you need soap. We'll you don't like actualy don't. Seasoning? Just cook bacon, dump the grease leave a bit in put it back on the stove for a hot minute or while you put your blt together. Done it's hunk of metal not much you can do to fuck it up. And if food is sticking to it probably cause you didn't get the pan hot enough before you put the food in.

I'm honestly surprised it took this long before Teflon and PFAS in general became a more public issue.

Especially after project farm showed how easy it is to scratch the coating material. I think only like 2 pans actually held up somewhat in hardness.

Not objective by any measure, but I don't think ingesting dissolved iron is as bad as dissolved Teflon.

I'm a stainless steel enjoyer. Get that cast iron and teflon shit out of here.

The only thing I would use cast iron for is to fight the ninjas hiding behind my fridge

Also work very well for oven pizza 👍👍

I’ve had one for roughly 15 years and use it almost every day. I most often use it as a baking pan or for grilling things. Not much sticks to it and what does is easily scrubbed off. I don’t season it in any meticulous way, just put a coat of cooking oil on and toss it in the oven every few months. I don’t cook acidic things in it - that is the rare time I use the stainless. I definitely understand why some don’t like the weight but I’m used to it.

call me lemmyml but I fucking love using a carbon steel wok to cook anything

i tried cast iron pans many summers ago. but i found myself never using it because cooking is already inconvenient enough and cast iron pans just add a whole other dimension of inconvenience. it also makes me nervous that they’re never/rarely ever cleaned with soap and water. it was also very difficult to find consistent instructions on how to care for them and use them safely. so now i just use stainless steel instead.

My biggest complaint is the smoking oil really upsets my air purifier, that stuff can’t be good to breathe in. I only season my pans outside and that is not even annually, only as needed and it is basically never needed.

After cooking I wipe the pan out with a dry rag and if it is just oily I let it ride. If there’s any crust stuck to the pan I’ll scrape it and wash with hot water in the sink. Dry it with a towel, light spray of avocado oil, wipe it off, put it away.

I’d like to upgrade my hood over the externally exhausted microwave vent I have, but until then I don’t use them inside in anything hot enough to smoke so we’re not breathing that crap in. Good enough for eggs or browning a sautee but I’m not going to sear meat indoors.

Edit: bacon! I love cooking bacon on cast iron but just can’t do it anymore. The smoke is too much, it coats the entire house in a sheen of oil vapor, and splatters all over the stove. I recently got a blackstone and exclusively cook bacon outside.

I use my 3 cast-iron on a rotation near daily, use soap and water to wash them, and season maybe once every 6 months to re-up it?

I'll cook tomato shit in there no problem, just don't fucking let it sit on there and get stuck or you'll have issues. Never worry about food sticking

Chainmail + warm water + dot of soap and 15s of rubbing and I'll have a perfectly clean pan ready to go for another use immediately if I really wanted. Hand dry, warm over stovetop to evaporate any remaining liquid to avoid rust

Tbh it's less work than my stainless steel was because things get stuck WAY less often, and I'm an ADHD mess who never does dishes

You have to be amazingly shit with kitchenware to fuck them up

The best pan is the $20 no name stainless steel pan from a restaurant supply store. Cast iron is for Dutch ovens that need to retain heat for stews and curries and shit. Anyone that genuinely prefers cast iron over stainless just doesn’t know how to preheat a pan and use cold oil. “Oh I want a pan that requires ongoing maintenance, can never be properly cleaned, isn’t actually non stick at all, and weighs 900 pounds so doing any kind of toss is a total pain in the ass”

None of this is true - I never used cast iron in my life...

Yes, I can't say I've been terrible impressed by cast iron pans. The people gushing about them are pretty funny though.

My gf got me a cast iron pan. I despise it. It's so much work compared to my other pans and I don't see any benefits. I only bring it out if she's watching me cook over my shoulder, so now I cook I tell her to relax on the sofa with some streaming or a book.

I've stopped using cast iron after some experimentation. It has some uses, but none of which can't be done equally well in a stainless steel or carbon steel pan.

I find these respond to temperature changes better and so are easier to control. My big iron pan also doesn't heat evenly enough, so extra care is needed to cook things consistently if it spans a wide area of the pan.

I think the best place for iron cookware is for oven pots, not for hobs and frying.

My cast iron griddle is the most used thing in my kitchen, after grilling something on it I get it ripping hot, pour water on it, scrub it with a rag until its clean, then coat it in cooking oil and wait for it to smoke. Takes like 2 minutes and it never leaves my stove.

Love my cast iron. Got it for free from someone who had bought it and never used it, had to scrub the rust off but since then the only maintenance its required it wiping out the excess grease and oil after cooking with a paper towel.

I have no idea what kind of pots and pans I have. I know they're not cast iron though lol. I just use them and they work.

I love when people that can't be asked to learn something new complain about the people that have.

The pan isn't the problem 🤷

Edit: I see this comment has reached it's intended audience. PS: your struggles to season a pan are pitiful.

I never understood fans of cast iron. Its like still using candles for light, sure it gives a warming light, but electricity is cheaper, safer, and quicker to use for light.
Same for pans, stainless steel have exactly the same use as cast iron without any of the inconvenience. Sure heating behavior is different, but who cares, you can get to the same results with stainless steel with a bit of experience...
If you really want that "hipster cooking" feeling, just use copper, sure its way more expensive and you need to be extra careful, but its still better than to try using cast iron which is a real pain in the ass to use, making cooking twice as long as it should be...
And for Teflon... it's shit, weak as hell and will give you cancer.
Aluminum is shit too, still better than teflon and at least its the cheapest.

Let anon go camp in the woods for a week and report back.

Once again we are reminded of the fact that 4chan is full of bullshit.

I fucking hate cast iron pans. It's way too easy to absolutely ruin one. But more importantly, it's absolutely impossible to cool one down. If you determine that the pan is too hot and your shit is burning, sing your prayers, cus that shit is burning! What's that? You can put it in the oven straight from the stove? So neat, but like, I have a pot for that. Also never ever made a dish that asked for such a maneuver.

I have one that's got some titanium coating so I dont have to deal with the seasoning shit.

... Just get a fucking non stick pan and don't use wooden or iron utensils on it. Done, problem solved.

Sticking to the thing is literally the intended way, its supposed to stick and create a natural anti stick surface, thats why you don't wash these pans with soap.