Second cast iron. We use ours daily - and it's a handmedown from my grandmother who also used daily for 20+ years. Once seasoned properly, it is non-stick, cleans easy. We just be sure to put a little oil on it after each use. Really the only skillet you need.
I would like to throw in a strong rec for carbon steel.
I was (and to a degree still am) a big cast iron guy, but I find that these days I use my carbon steel pans much, much more frequently. They share many of the benefits of cast iron in terms of durability, oven safety, high temp cooking, natural non-stick, etc. However they can be much, much lighter and their heating properties make them superior for many, and I would argue most (but not all!), applications.
These days if someone said they needed 1 quiver killer pan, I would unquestionably recommend a carbon steel skillet over a cast iron one.
If you're someone who likes using cast iron, I think you are doing yourself a major disservice by not trying carbon steel.
I bought a set of carbon steel pans and my cast iron ones fell into complete disuse.
Especially carbon steel crepes pans (https://www.debuyer.com/en/poele-a-crepes-mineral-b-1472.htm...) are completely unbeatable. I have two of them and I can feed a small crowd of family and friends faster than they can eat. Nothing sticks if you take proper care.
Same here. After getting rid of our scratched teflon pans, we bought large and small de Buyer carbon steel pans. We have 2 cast iron pans also, but barely use them anymore. The lighter carbon steel ones are much more versatile.
We do, however, still use our cast iron griddle for making bacon in the oven. Comes out perfect every time.
For anyone reading who is new to carbon steel, the trick to non-stick cooking is making sure the pan gets hot. And if something does stick? It pretty much wipes right off while the pan is still hot.
Another trick is to use sharp metal utensils. If you use wood it will just smear stuff on the pan, not helping at all.
By complete accident my spatula is also from DeBuyer (https://www.debuyer.com/en/flexible-turner-slotted-fkofficiu...). It is very sharp and it easily scrapes anything that dares to stick (due to my mistake of not getting it hot enough), without smearing it.
I am not very experienced in the world of cooking but don't most chefs recommend _not_ using metal utensils on metal pans? I've never heard of carbon steel prior to today so is it special in some way?
Almost all woks and sometimes flat top grills in restaurants are made from carbon steel. Flipping burgers with metal spatulas has never been a problem for cooks. Same thing here. Although I've never really had to scrape mine with a metal utensil before. Just turn food. Seriously things rarely stick, unless I'm impatient about preheating.
Pros are they can take very high temperatures, you can be rough with them, are non-stick when seasoned and at a proper temperature (like cast iron), and much lighter than cast iron.
Cons are you don't want to cook liquidy acidic foods in them that often (removes the seasoning off the pan), they can rust easily if not seasoned, and require slightly more maintenance then stainless steel or Teflon pans. Basically you're not washing these with dish soap. Just a rinse, maybe some scrubbing with kosher salt, and heating it on the stove to dry and sterilize it.
Keeping it lightly oiled when cooking or storing it helps too. They're a great work-horse pans. We got ours after having to throw out our last scratched Teflon pans. Making scrambled eggs in carbon steel was hard at first, but over time as a better seasoning developed and figuring out the right temperatures to use, I now get the same results as I use to in Teflon.
The big win for cast iron is its higher heat capacity. It takes longer to heat up, but once hot, the temperature drops much less when you add cold / room temperature food to fry, resulting in crisper and less soggy output.
Heat capacity is not a straight win, it's a double edged sword. Like you said temp drops less when food goes in, and that can be great in certain applications. However, you also lose a lot in the way of temperature control. The slow rate at which it heats up and cools down means finer temperature adjustments are much harder to do.
In my experience the searing/frying performance of carbon steel is not an issue for the overwhelming majority of things I cook, ergo I don't really care that cast iron has a higher capacity. The tighter temperature control, on the other hand, is always nice.
I still use my cast irons sometimes for things where that heat capacity is really nice (searing a huge steak or something like that), but I use carbon steel much more frequently.
It also depends on your stove. Mine’s electric and alternates the heating element on and off to try to maintain the desired temp. The heat capacity helps to smooth out temperature fluctuations but if I had a nice gas stove I’d probably switch to carbon steel.
I bought a cheapy Lodge skillet -- 12", I think? -- a while back because I succumbed to the cast iron craze and really wanted to try cooking on induction. I figured I'd just upgrade to a bigger skillet when necessary.
It's now like 7 years later and my skillet shows no signs of giving up, and I don't think buying yet another kitchen device would make my wife happy. Should have gone with a bigger skillet to begin with.
Just wait until your kids get their hands on it. Mine is literally inherited from somebody's grandmother and it's awesome. Though sadly, its sibling died doing what it loved -- making bacon.
Also got a Lodge (two now, as you say, needed a bigger one as well). Took an angle grinder to it with an abrasive pad wheel installed. Smoothed it right up.
I did the same thing to mine. They have a rough surface when you buy them unlike old cast iron pans, apparently - though I don’t know if they’re smooth from use or came that way.
In the glory days, cast iron pans were milled perfectly smooth on the cooking surface.
Lodge casts their pans without surfacing, so you have a porous surface. I have a lodge and it's okay, but I prefer my antique Wagner when I can. It sticks less and it also has been in my family a really long time.
Everything! Boiling a pot of water is twice as fast if not more. More control over temperature. No risk to burn yourself, kitchen towels or other unwanted items. They never need deep-cleaning due to spilled food being burned onto the glass, one wipe with a cloth and it looks like new.
One drawback is they are often bundled with ridiculous touch-controls rather than knobs, even though that shouldn't need to be the case. You can find those without.
Youll probably want stainless steel or enamled cast iron for anything with fond.
Anytime you are cooking something acidic, tomatoes, vinegar, wine. I try not to deglaze meat brownings into sauce in cast iron.
A stainless steel dutch oven is a great universal pan as well. For a "first pan" I'd probably suggest tri ply stainless over cast iron. The main thing I like about cast iron more is the pan temperature not dropping when I put something on it, so its great for reverse searing baked steaks inside the house. Most other things I find functionally equivalent in stainless and cast iron, including browning meat before I cube it or break it apart. (brown cuts of meat and ground meat whole!)
> Anytime you are cooking something acidic, tomatoes, vinegar, wine. I try not to deglaze meat brownings into sauce in cast iron.
I wouldn't simmer an acidic sauce in cast iron for hours, but this is poor advice. Deglazing will not damage the seasoning on cast iron pan once it is properly seasoned (and maintaining that is easy, contrary to lots of what you hear).
Unlike to your experience, I don't find them functionally equivalent for a number of things, which is why I have both (and enamel cast, much better than almost all clad steel dutch ovens that aren't really expensive, as most of them don't clad far up the sides)
I've had one dish, with multiple deglazings, that tasted funny after. Ill admit it may have been in my head, or the pan was light on seasoning. Tasted almost like the metallic taste of Hoegaarden.
I have both, and I use 5-ply fully clad more than I use cast iron. My 9 qt is bottom clad only, but the lack of clad up the sides hasnt been an issue. The bottom surface is hot which is what needs to be hot on the stove. The sides arent getting hot spots in the oven, during brazing and stews.
YMMV obviously. I've got a 12" cast skillet that has had literally many hundreds of deglazings done in it, never once an issue. I suspect mostly when people have a taste issue in a cast iron pan it's because they've read nonsense about never using soap on it or whatever, and haven't cleaned it properly.
I did once ruin a seasoning making a tomato sauce, which was a way to learn about acidic interactions - but that was over hours.
FWIW I had a 5 qt like that calphon but found I was always using my enamel cast one instead, so gave it away.
One thing I really like about the cast iron skillit is you can treat it roughly and use it anywhere. Mines been in fire pits, on bbq, stovetop, oven, even a bread oven. Handles temperature changes without issues (unlike enamel and some clad) is unbeatable to sear things. Doesn't care what tools you use in it. Nonstick property is pretty good (better than steel pan, worse than teflon) and will still be pretty good in 20 years.
It could have been over a long period of time, more than an hour. Im not trying to spread misinformation, ive just "ruined" (I still ate it) a dish before, or imagined it.
I'm not discounting your experience, I was pushing back on the idea that you shouldn't deglaze in a cast iron pan.
Deglazing itself is a very fast process, usually seconds. If you are doing something over an hour, it's likely simmering. If you did that in a sauce that was still acidic (rather than had some acid thrown in to deglaze or whatever) then I could see that being a problem.
I gotcha. Honestly, I mostly like deglazing in stainless steel because I can see what I'm doing. I can tell I've scraped the brown off. And I prefer deglazing in stainless to enameled, because it feels like less effort.
I'm not super careful about not using acidic things in cast iron, and I do deglaze in it on occasion, it's just a little harder imho. I can see how my original comment reads.
I put quite a bit of effort into doing things "right" when I tried to board the cast-iron train. Pan was pre-seasoned, but I did one of those elaborate multi-step seasoning rituals online, using the expensive oil they recommended and everything, just in case. Horrible, smoke all over the house, smelled for a couple days. Everything sticks anyway, like I've never seen on any other kind of pan. Suitably-gentle cleaning (according to cast iron fans online) takes forever because there's so much crap on it after every use. Re-seasoned it again after a bit, thinking I'd screwed up. No improvement, everything sticks. My wife refuses to cook with it at all, and I'm pretty sure just seeing it in the drawer annoys her.
Oh, and if a tomato or anything else somewhat-acidic touches it then the entire dish will taste like blood. So that's fun.
It's alright for cooking steak (preheating for a few minutes on high is a must, though, it's gotta be terrifyingly hot or everything will stick, including steak), and if I drown things in scorching-hot oil or fat (say, from bacon) they they don't stick much, but that sure isn't healthy. The pan has zero inherent non-stickness, only what it acquires from whatever lake of oil I put in it.
They never get as non-stick as a Teflon coating, but over time they’re usable for pretty much everything.
Screw babying it. Get a chain mail cleaner for it (and you definitely can use soap), use the pan often and especially when you’re doing something oily, and soon enough you’ll use it a lot.
I'm going to second this. I don't understand why people keep buying cast iron when steel has the same core traits(durability primarily) but so many more upsides. Thinner, lighter, heats faster. Steel is where it's at IMO. Enameled for anything acidic otherwise your seasoning is gone.
And iron leached into whatever your eating. I know thats considered in the myth category, but I have at least one dish Ive prepared that ended up tasting pretty metallicy. Could be expectations manifesting reality.
I think people get turned off to steel when they put a new pan on the stove, dont let it heat up, bake something to it, and its an arm and a leg to clean the first time. Unlike nonstick, it has a bit of a learning curve. Cast iron doesnt show stains the same way, and you can use a chain mail scrubber. Scratching steel does slightly change its nonstick properties, so dont use steel wool.
I have a cast iron skillet and a stainless steel skillet, and I almost always use the stainless. The cast iron almost always only comes out when I need a second skillet.
When I'm searing something, I even prefer that it sticks slightly more to the stainless as it typically releases when it's done anyways -- and my anecdotal experience is that I get a better sear from the surface of the meat sticking to the skillet more firmly.
Cast iron gives additional radiant heat because it's black, so if I am cooking steak in the oven I pretend like it gives me more uniform temperature increase than depending on conductive and convective heat. If I am browning meat and not baking it after, Ill use steel.
I like cast iron for potatoes too. Hashes. Not sure why. Holds temp better?
Professional cooks use a ton of stuff, and not all of it would be what they choose at home.
Carbon steel is great, requires a little upkeep, but part of what makes it great is how it works with a really high heat source; the stoves in a restaurant behave very differently than your home one.
An extreme case of this is woks. There is very little you can do at home to reproduce the effect of an 80k BTU burner and a carbon steel wok.
I agree, 15k BTU is not 80k, but with a little patience on preheating (I don't have waiting customers) I still enjoy working in the wok I own. Also, it is not a restaurant sized wok, but for flash frying chopped food, or getting a nice quick sear, it works great.
I received a Griswold cast iron skillet from my grandmother, who received it from her mother (my great grandmother) many years ago. True heirloom, I cook with it nearly every day and it still looks and performs beautifully.
We have a couple cast irons. When I was first introduced to them I was pretty turned off by the idea of not doing the same soap and water scrub process I do with everything else.
But handling them now is just part of the ritual.
The biggest change I’ve had since starting using them a couple years ago is moving from the ball scrubby disposable two a Chainmaile ringlet style scrubby.
Using the chain mail has a different feel it slides easier and it washes clean much easier.
I recommend checking out the chain mail style scrubbers for cast-iron.
> I was pretty turned off by the idea of not doing the same soap and water scrub process I do with everything else.
You can mostly do the same soap and water scrub as everything else. Assuming you use a reasonably modern dish soap an not something harsh, if you don't leave it soaking in the soapy water it will be fine.
Yep the “don’t use soap on cast iron” is a holdover from older soaps that had lye in them that could strip the seasoning (hence why you can use lye to reseason your pan).
If your seasoning is perfect (it isn’t) you could in theory leave it to soak too since it would be completely encased in the polymerized fat.
Yeah, the "don't soak it rule" isn't because it will explode if it's underwater for long, just that there are inevitably gaps and it doesn't do you any good. Just get it in there, have a good scrub, and rinse off.
Staub iron cookware has an enamel, so it does not require seasoning nor does it have issues with tomatoes or other acidic things. I use their cocotte, since I often put things in the oven but it's also good for e.g. steaks at max temperature.
