Lower your temps. Stainless only sticks like that if you get it too hot.

It takes practice and making sure it's at the correct temperature. If I can fry eggs in stainless steel without sticking you can too friend. Follow the instructions on this page to get you started:

https://theskillfulcook.com/how-to-know-when-stainless-steel-pan-is-ready/

Heat up the pan on medium setting and then apply oil, if it smokes it is too hot. And don’t use olive oil, use an oil with a reasonably high smoke point. And you need to use more oil/fat than you’d normally do on other (non-stick) pans.

no, medium-ish temp.

stainless steel has pores that close at the right temp so food wont stick.

you need to practice it on your cooktop yourself to find out what setting. after its heated, drip a big drop of water on it and it should dance around and sizzle. too hot or too cold it will stay where it is in the pan. theres prob a video you can watch to see what the drop of water should look like

IIRC, powdered dish washing detergent is mildly abrasive, and it gets jetted around at relatively high speeds (compared to hand washing). That's also why it's bad for knives.

at least Godort didn't use The Good Scissors

And you will break the floor too

I did warp one slightly one time by getting it super hot and allowing it to cool unevenly. I still have it and use it. It might not sit flat on a cooktop but it's just fine for camping.

This. Just leave it on your stove with oil / food in it til you're ready to clean it. Then use soap water and a chainmail scrubber. Be as aggressive as you want. The smoother it is the better. If you have a cheap lodge, taking the time to actually use a sander will bring it to high quality smooth like a more expensive finex or other.

After cleaning toss back on the stove on the heat for like 1 min to dry it out and you're good to go. Ideally toss a little oil in the pan after heating and use a paper towel to rub it around, but if you are in a rush don't even have to do that.

A) you don't know someone's situation so don't pass judgement when there are very valid reasons theg may not have the time of energy, as if mental health isn't a valid reason already

B) soaking for 5 minutes is definitely not the same getting a good long soak

There is actually a lot we don’t really know about the polymerization and how it layers and adheres. Particularly about how certain heating regimes and oil type effect it. There are a handful of papers about it, but there is a lot missing particularly about what effects the resiliency, porosity, and toughness of the layers. Best practice for what oils to use for seasoning, and how to best apply them and get them to form even layers is up in the air.

We understand generally what is happening, but the specifics are poorly understood and not well researched.

I cook everyday and throw them away as soon as there's any visible sign of wear. Then after the third buy that damaged so soon, stopped buying nonstick.

But also, yes, I was buying cheaper pans. (Edit: tramontania i think?) Those aluminum ones with the nice red silicone handles. Fantastic pans, but degraded far too fast.

Now, I just use my cast iron skillet from a hundred years ago and it's easier to cook in AND makes better eggs AND I can use my metal spatula.

To clean it, I'll wipe it out with a paper towel, rinse it with warm water really fast, then every week or few days or if it smells, use a dollop of dawn and some warm water and sponge wash it for like 10 seconds and rinse it out, then one paper towel it clean, add in a tiny bit of canola oil, wipe it around, heat it until it starts to smoke on the stove, then turn it off. That process takes like, maybe 30 seconds, not including heating it until it smokes, which realistically is like only another 30-90 seconds.

The eggs are runny yolks and browned and crispy bottoms. And I'm not eating teflon, which to me is absolutely fantastic!

Sometimes brown bits get stuck to the bottom of the pan while cooking and the best way to get them off is to toss some water into the pan before those bits can burn. Not much, maybe like a tablespoon - it dissolves all the brown bits into a very tasty brown sauce that coats the rest of the food in the pan. It's really not complicated, but the added moisture sometimes makes the cooking take a bit longer and isn't ideal when your goal is to cook something very dry and crispy (like when frying tofu)

The best ones imo. No microplastics, zero maintenance, extreme durability, not hard to wash and not so expensive nowadays.

My grandmother still uses her stainless steel pans that are like 50 or 60 yo, and they still look perfect, almost like new, if not for the scratches. They were a gift when she married, and she literally never bought pans for herself in her life.

They're better than cast iron for some things in my experience. Acidic dishes, eggs (scrambled always stick to cast iron for me). But cast iron's heat retention is superior, providing a more even cooking surface on electric ranges - good for searing meat and most other applications.

A common misconception, the teflon molecules are very stable and don't react with almost everything, when ingested it usually just goes through your system in and out, no considerable interaction.

Now the other chemicals used to make Teflon ARE TOXIC, and are present literally, and I mean literally, everywhere on the globe.

Here's an educative video from Veritasium about the subject, super interesting watch.

Yeah, it’s not hard to rehab a cast iron skillet after messing it up. 🙂 I still got a cheap stainless skillet after some sauces experiences though.

I do this too, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem most of the time. 🙂

I also regularly cook fatty meat or fry things in it, so it gets some nice work inbetween, which probably helps.

That sounds like the best set of cast iron.

Lol a few minutes with an angle grinder and a flap wheel will take it back down to metal real fast.

So what they do is they tell you you won a free lunch (the irony is not lost on me) from like a raffle or something, which you can claim at location x at time y. Aaaaand then it turns out the free lunch is actually a marketing event where they make you (and the people who come with you) barely any food, while extolling the virtues of their ridiculously overpriced products.

I'd just gone through it with my grandma who's luckily a moderately sharp pencil and invited me and my mom along. We just outright refused to buy anything and ate the cookies and shit (they were demonstrating a cookie maker lmao, made like 3 cookies). But my ex's mom went there I think either alone or with someone who yes-manned her into spending money on the pan. And I think she did it in installments too.

This was like 10 years ago. It's a proper scam, idk if they still do it, but I bet they do.

And yes, the pan was excellent, it came with a removable handle and a kinda cone shaped lid that had a hole in the center, which was useful (lets humidity out, but fat doesn't splatter everywhere). But I was still flabbergasted to hear someone would spend 300€ on a pan. In like 2015 or 2016 Estonia. Her net salary was under 1000€ a month.

Yeah, I understood that, but try saying that to a woman in her 50s in eastern Europe ~10 years ago lol, it's not like she spoke English

They don't mean the underside.

They mean smooth on the inside. The bottom as In where tu out your food to cook.

I mean like, the interior cooking surface is rough.

The glass cooktops are insanely scratch resistant. I use a metal scraper to clean mine.

While you are technically correct, I think essentially tradition IS the excuse to not think rationally.

I heard tradition is the dead telling the living what to do.

Not that all tradition is bad, but many are out dated or were never made for a good reason.

What? You want high smoke point oils for seasoning. You want to season the pans in temperatures higher than you would be normally cooking in, which means higher smoke point oils. I season all of my cast iron and carbon steel with canola, works great.

If you season with Extra Virgin Olive Oil, it's going to burn the seasoning off under normal circumstances.

I mean, there are a lot of types of spray cooking oil I’ve seen. Coconut, olive oil, and soybean (vegetable oil) are what I see most commonly, and none of those have particularly high smoke points.

Never really had a problem with frying eggs on cast iron, often do pancakes on it.

If the yolk directly touches the surface, the emulsifiers could potentially mess with things?

Yep, I didn’t notice a huge difference between All Clad D5 and copper core to be honest. Certainly nothing big enough to justify the cost. The size of the hob matters more than the heat conduction of the cookware itself.

I'm a vegetarian and use mine for pizzas and breads

Ain't nobody got chain mail and pig fat lying about!

The superstition is due to old soaps which contained lye. That will desire you seasoning.

Modern soaps don't contain any lye. You just want to make sure you dry it quickly after washing it.

Does it really make a difference? Personally I want my pan to sparkle but are these people really experiencing any negative effects? I realize food born illnesses exist but it doesn't seem like the practice is bad enough to matter.

Hmm. Well i only have 8 years of experience in professional kitchens so i cant speak for every kitchen in the world, but there are tasks where cast iron is objectivelly better, like tarte tatin, pann pizza searing meat is better and they can be nifty looking when serving the dish from there.

The reason why i use steelpans in work is in fact that they are lighter and i can toss them in to dish pitt. But when im cooking at home i dont need to juggle with six pans and it does not make any difference if waiting for the pan to cool and washin it takes few minutes longer. Also steel pans are generally cheaper so many restaurants buy them.

You really cant compare home kitchen and professional kitchen on same metrics. Things like deep fryiers are abnormal at home and can be a real nuisance, but those are excelent tool at the professional kitchen.

By the way. If you like out door cooking you should take a gander at "muurikka" i have two at home. The older one is from my parents and its close to be 40 years old (older than i am) they can be used on gas or open fire and are borderline impossible to break.

Have a sympathy upvote for your wok hei. I love my cast iron. And my enameled cast iron. And my carbon steel. And my copper. I love my Japanese santoku and my German steel. Different tools for different jobs my friend.

That said, if you had to populate a kitchen, from scratch, on a budget, cast iron as your main skillet is a good idea.

I really need a new wok