memes

Cooking has been a hobby of mine for decades now. I have gone through a lot of phases in cooking, especially early on.

I have used cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, and a dubious flirtation with all aluminum.

16 years on now and this is what I reach for 100% of the time:

Skillet/sautee: cladded stainless. Both standard side and high sided.

Dutch Oven: Enameled cast iron.

Pots Pans: Cladded stainless steel. For smaller 1qt to 2qt I like All Clads D5 for its heat retention. Larger than that I like the D3 for its lighter weight

Grill Pan: cast iron. Hate the excessive weight though

Non-stick: Ceramic coated aluminum. What ever Americas Test Kitchen recommends that year. I consider these disposable items. I stopped using TEFLON a long time ago.

I used cast iron skillets for several years. I found them to be finicky. Heat retention was stupidly high and that's not always a good thing. Excessively heavy and god forbid you attempt any sort of tomato based sauce or anything acidic for that matter. Circumstances forced me to use stainless steel and I just found it matches my needs in a kitchen much better than cast iron. It gets used, it gets cleaned and I put it away. No having to have the vaginal juices of a thousand virgins on hand to make sure it doesn't destroy the next egg I try to cook.

I consider cast iron skillets like safety razors. They had their day, but continue on because of a dedicated set of die hard users. Nothing wrong with that, just not my thing.

The above goes for carbon steel as well, although it usually isn't nearly as heavy.

Carbon steel > cast iron. Lighter, basically the same heat properties, and you don't get peer pressured into unnecessarily babying a lump of solid metal.

Seriously no reason to dote on either of them so much. Only real care you need to take is that they can rust, so don't leave them wet. And don't needlessly scrub them with chain mail or angle grinders, or you might need to take a few minutes fixing them with cooking oil and the oven.

You would probably like cast iron more if you stopped committing war crimes against it.

You have to be like at least 50 to get mad over some pan

it's just a pan

You can take care of your pans anyway you want. But it's telling when people treat neglect like it's an ethic.

Why do you hate cast iron?

I used to love cast iron but carbon steel has stolen my heart

Wash it all you want, should be fine as long as you hand dry it after.

Also throw in the metal fork you used to scrape your expensive non-stick pan.

I love cast iron for cooking. It's also very forgiving. Depending what I am cooking it gets treated carefully for the seasoning, or scrubbed with dish soap. The beautiful thing is I can take it camping, come home and scrub all the 'seasoning' off, then re-season with 30 min in the oven an a bit of olive oil.