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…
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?
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.
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.
/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.
Pretty good post, I learnt something - thanks 🙏
Glad to help :)