It's not about cleaning. It's about the increased amount of oil needed to prevent delicate foods like eggs and fish from sticking. That adds cost and calories.
Carbon steel solves this issue. You can get nonstick eggs and fish with a very minimal amount of oil. You can also do this with stainless steel but it takes more practice to get the temperature control down.
Maybe one day we’ll all have affordable temperature controlled induction ranges similar to the Breville/Sage control freak. If you have the ability to preheat your pan to an exact temperature then getting nonstick results with tiny amounts of oil or butter becomes rather trivial.
The Control Freak is fantastic, but it doesn’t work all that well with some cast iron pans. I think there are a couple reasons:
1. Too much thermal mass and too little thermal conductivity. This causes poor feedback and unnecessarily high delay between heat being added and the measurement reflecting it.
2. Manufacturers love to cast their logo right in the bottom center, which means that the sensor doesn’t make good contact with the pan.
I wonder if someone makes a nice stainless-aluminum-carbon steel clad pan.
I wonder if someone makes a nice stainless-aluminum-carbon steel clad pan
This pan exists! It's made by an American company called Strata. Stainless steel on the bottom/outside, carbon steel on the inside/cooking surface, and aluminum sandwiched in between. It came out this year. I've seen a few cookware YouTube channels do some first looks, unboxing, seasoning, and first cook tests but no long-term reviews so far.
Cast iron is definitely the most challenging cookware material to use with any flat-top cooking appliance. Whether induction or traditional ceramic, flat-top ranges tend to be quite poor at creating even heating in cast iron. Gas on the other hand works quite well because of the natural upward draft produced by the hot combustion gases which wrap around the sides of the pan, enveloping it in a blanket of heat from below.
I think eggs and certain fish recipes are the primary use of non stick. But there are also ways to cook those without non stick.
For scrambled eggs you can use a double boiler (you’ll never have had fluffier eggs). An extremely well seasoned carbon steal pan will also work wonders (basically what fry cooks use)
For fish, cooking fish whole on a grill is amazing. Another technique with stainless pans is to get the pan searing hot first. Then add a tiny amount of oil and cook the fish and don’t touch it. This should set the surface protein quickly and create a crust that prevents sticking (requires a little practice but not too hard)
Counter-intuitively, it doesn't really add calories.
What a lot of people don't realize is -- in non-stick, virtually all the oil winds up in the food. Since it doesn't stick to the pan. With steel/iron, most of the cooking oil stays in the pan.
So yes you will end up using 3x or more oil. But you're not consuming 3x oil calories. It probably isn't any extra calories at all.
