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Mar 29, 2024

Getting Around

Non-stick

Non-stick refers to a pan's ability to keep food from adhering to the pan's surface while cooking is going on. Nearly any surface can be made non-stick (put enough lard on a rock and nothing will stick to it) and nearly any surface can be made to stick. I once put calamari? in a stock pot with water, put it on to simmer and went away to work on something. Several hours later the house was full of smoke and the calamari? was permanently adhered to the bottom of the pan. Not a recommended cooking method, by the way.

Properly seasoned cast iron cookware is just about as non-stick as you'll ever need, but it requires taking care and re-seasoning and work. Anodized aluminum has a hardened surface which can also be seasoned. Circulon? goes even further by creating little ridges that are supposed to lift the food slightly off the bottom of the pan to increase the non-stick nature of the pan, while retaining it's hardness. And it works...sort of.

Enter chemistry. Teflon is the most slippery substance on earth and once a French housewife asked her engineer husband to try coating her pans (ah , the French!) history was made. T-Fal, Teflon, Silverstone are all forms of chemical coatings that make the surface of a pan slippery enough that food doesn't easily stick to it. For the purposes of this article, when I say non-stick, I mean a chemically coated pan. And it works very well as long as you keep its limitations in mind.

  1. Non-stick pans cannot stand high heat. If you get the pan smoking, you will be breaking down the coating, eliminating its benefits and eliminating your parrot at the same time. Just as the canary is in the coal mine to die before the miners, birds can be killed by the gas that comes off a very hot non-stick pan. So keep the heat down, or keep food in it.
  2. Non-stick pans are somewhat fragile. Scraping the warmed surface with a metal spatula? will scratch it and remove hunks of the surface. Whether that affects the flavor and looks of your food is beside the point; it will wreck the non-stick nature of your pan.
  3. Non-stick is non-forever. No matter how carefully you take care of your pan, it will become less non-stick as time passes and usage continues. While a cast iron skillet can be passed down from generation to generation, a non-stick skillet is good for 2-3 years.

When buying a non-stick pan, make sure that the metal is heavy enough to not warp and to evenly distribute the heat, but don't spend a ton of money on the pan because you will be replacing it in a few years. I buy heavy aluminum pans at Sam's Club?. They come in 2 packs, so I end up with more pans than I need, but at $15 for two 8 inch skillets, I can't go wrong. You can probably find similar pans at your local restaurant supply? store for about the same price. But watch for the dollar store cheapies. The metal is thin and the non-stick surface cheap and you will just have a miserable time of it. Save money, but get quality. While these pans won't last forever, you will use them a lot, so there's no sense in saving a couple of bucks just to be miserable for the next two years.