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pecuniumPots and pans
Cooking is, by and large, the application of heat to food. It can be done over open flames (spit roasting is a wonderful thing, and too rarely done), but the more common methods involve putting the food into a pot, heating the pot, and then the pot heating the food.
It’s done that way because it’s easier to control the way the heat affects the food.
Which means the pots and pans have to be good at several things.
1: Absorbing heat
2: Conducting heat
3: Apply heat to the contents evenly.
What sort of stove you use matters some. Electric has the advantage of spreading the heat more evenly. It has the disadvantage that changes in heat take place slowly. The only way to reduce heat quickly is to take the pan off the fire.
Gas stoves have a different problem, where the actual flame hits the pot, the heat is more intense. This can be used, but mostly it presents a risk that food in the middle of the pan will scorch. Using a heat diffuser moderates this. I have three, for my four-burner stove, all they are is a piece of cast iron, enameled on the top. When they are in place it takes a couple of minutes longer to heat the pan, but the hot spot is larger, and not so prone to spikes of temperature when I up the flame.
They also allow me to finish a dish by turning off the heat, and letting the residual energy in the diffuser, diffuse into the pan.
Which brings us to the pans.
There are four materials, commonly used as pans; cast iron, steel, aluminum and copper. Corning made a line of glassware for the stovetop. It has it’s own quirks, but I like it. It can often be found second-hand. It is mostly found as sauce-pans and pots, not skillets.
There are two factors in how a pot conducts energy, it’s ability to conduct heat (conductivity), and it’s ability to store heat (capacity). Combined those make up it’s qualities as a pan. They are affected by one more factor, the ability of the pan to release the heat, once it’s been absorbed (call it diffusion)
Copper happens to be very poor in conductivity, but good at capacity, which means it has the best, overall, diffusion; so the better stainless steel pans are often covered, on the bottom, with copper. If it weren’t that copper is very reactive (which is a different aspect of pans which has to be considered) and toxic, we’d just use copper for everything. Since it is toxic, and reactive no one makes pans with it. It does cool down quickly, so unless it’s clad, that has to be taken into account. It can be useful, so long as the food won’t react too it. It’s heavy, and expensive.
To deal with that the pans made from it are lined, or clad, with steel, aluminum, or tin. They are expensive, and tempermental. If the bonding isn’t good, it will separate. If the copper is exposed, it can scratch, and tarnish. If acids get on it; it will tarnish, and get a green scale.
Steel is the worst of the lot. It has high conductivity, and mediocre capacity. Put a thin steel pan on the stove, and it will have a hot spot right over the heating element, and be much cooler where the heat isn’t in direct contact. To fix this, pot makers can thicken the bottom, or apply another metal to it, copper is the preferred metal.
Steel comes in two varities, stainless, and carbon. Carbon steel is treated much as cast iron.
Aluminum is right behind copper in diffusion, but it’s also reactive. To keep it from affecting foods flavors (and from leaching into the food, which has been implicated in Alzheimer’s) professional aluminum cookware is anodized. From a design standpoint I don’t care for most aluminum cookware, because the inside of the pots have bossed rivets, and they make it hard to clean.
Less expensive are teflon lined pans. Usually cheap pans with teflon coatings aren’t worth the money. They tend to be thin, which makes for hot-spots. If they get too hot the lining will separate. One can’t use metal utensils on them, or the finish will scratch. The same, basic complaints apply to the more expensive teflon-lined pans, though the heavier pans are less likely to separate the bond, and the thicker linings are less likely to be scratched all the way to the base.
Cast iron is worse than either steel, or aluminum, in conductivity, and in capacity, though it’s not much behind steel, pound for pound.
That qualification is why cast iron has such a beloved place in the kitchen, no matter how delicately it’s made (and Griswold made some fairly light cast iron) it’s massy. That makes it a great battery, and means it releases that heat slowly. Put it over a diffuser and it makes slow-cooking on the stovetop really easy. On a simmer burner, with diffuser, one can keep a pot of water below the boil.
Care and feeding.
All except the cast iron are washed pretty much the same, soap and water. If something is baked/burnt on, a stiff brush/scrubbing pad is needed. For anodized aluminum avoid hard scrubbing, whenever possible, because the layer which is anodized is only a few mils thick.
Teflon, doesn’t get scoured. On the plus side, it should never need it. If something gets burnt onto the bottom, the lining is toast, and the pan is trash.
Cast Iron.
Lots of people are afraid of cast iron. They think seasoning it is arcane, and that care is difficult. Both are false. Seasoning is the process of varnishing the inside of the pan. The first time is the only one that take work.
Coat the pan with oil (I like grapeseed, because it has a high smoke-point, but any oil will do, and in a pinch solid vegetable shortening can be used).
Place the pan, upside down, in the oven, and turn it to 350-400 degrees.
After 30-45 minutes, turn off the oven.
That’s it.
Because the surface is made of oil, boiled to a hard finish, soap isn’t used on cast iron; it would remove the season, and things would stick. For the same reason, metal implements aren’t the best idea. If you do get metal spatulas, don’t get curved ones and see to it the corners are rounded.
Instead the pan is wiped out, heated and then either buffed with rag/paper towel, or water is added, and then stirred. I’m not worried about bacteria that can survive that treatment.
*Warning* Do this only with high quality cast iron. Poorly cast iron can be “foamy” and the shock of the water can cause it to break. If you buy cheap cast iron, test it for hot spots. That’s a sign of foaming. If you have hot spots, don’t clean it that way; best to just chuck it and buy better pans.
When things get baked on, salt, or baking soda; rubbed with a rag, will clean it out. The same thing will smooth the surface, and make it less likely that food will stick.
After the pan is clean, a wipe of fresh oil, and a couple of minutes on the heat are all that needs be done. All in all, cast iron is at least as easy to maintain as any other pot.
It does, however, need to be used. If it sits too long unused the season goes stale, and starts to smell a trifle rancid (artificial shortenings will go bad faster. As a general rule, the higher the smoke point of the oil, the better). If you are going to store the pan, put it in a 350F oven for about 30 minutes to harden the finish. If it has a lid, use a piece of cardboard to let some air in.
If it goes off, just put a little oil in it, turn it upside down, and bake it again.
Brands I think are worth the money.
Steel: Revere Ware.
Copper: All Clad, Copper Core (treat at steel)
Aluminum: Calphalon
Cast Iron: Lodge is the only maker of new cast iron I recommend, but there are a couple of brands which can be found second hand, Griswold, and Wagner. Griswold will say, Erie, on it, even if it doesn’t have the name. It will also have a + shaped symbol. Wagner will say Wagner. Other than that, heavy is what you’re looking for. If it has good weight, and the price is nice, buy it. Then put it on a diffuser, and make pancakes, big pancakes; pancakes which go from edge to edge.
Then look for abnormal spots on the pancake. If there are burn marks, which aren’t concentric to the heat source, it’s a bad pan. Use it for roasting coffee.
There is a special category of cast-iron; enamel ware. There are basically two styles, those which line the whole pot, inside and out, and those which line the exterior, but not the inside. Le Crueset makes the former (except for the omelette pan, which they line with teflon. I wish that was an option, but it isn’t). If the interior isn’t lined, treat just as you would cast iron. If it is, treat it as if it were steel, or aluminum.
There’s a Danish brand, Deska, (which I think you can only find second-hand) notable because the handles, which are wooden, are on a fast-pitch screw. That means you can move something to the oven to stay warm/brown the top. Just spin the handle and close the door. When you want to take it out, just open the door and put the handle back on. It’s great for a gratin&eeacute;e.
Reactivity: Aluminum reacts to acids, and gets a white bloom. It can lend a metallic taste to food.
Steel: Stainless steel is, largely, non-reactive. The thing to be careful of is corroding the trace metals which make it rostfrei. The big culprit is salt. The easiest way to avoid that is to never put it directly onto the pan. When boiling pasta, etc., boil the water, then add the salt.
The second culprit is acid. Don’t let acidic things sit in the pot for long.
Cast Iron/Carbon Steel: They can add a metallic taste to acidic foods. Carbon steel does this more than iron. Mostly it’s not obvious, but it does increase the iron content in acidic foods. As with stainless steel, don’t let acids sit in the pan too long. It’s not as permanent a problem, but it can strip the season, and make it needful to reseason the pan.
Cooking is, by and large, the application of heat to food. It can be done over open flames (spit roasting is a wonderful thing, and too rarely done), but the more common methods involve putting the food into a pot, heating the pot, and then the pot heating the food.
It’s done that way because it’s easier to control the way the heat affects the food.
Which means the pots and pans have to be good at several things.
1: Absorbing heat
2: Conducting heat
3: Apply heat to the contents evenly.
What sort of stove you use matters some. Electric has the advantage of spreading the heat more evenly. It has the disadvantage that changes in heat take place slowly. The only way to reduce heat quickly is to take the pan off the fire.
Gas stoves have a different problem, where the actual flame hits the pot, the heat is more intense. This can be used, but mostly it presents a risk that food in the middle of the pan will scorch. Using a heat diffuser moderates this. I have three, for my four-burner stove, all they are is a piece of cast iron, enameled on the top. When they are in place it takes a couple of minutes longer to heat the pan, but the hot spot is larger, and not so prone to spikes of temperature when I up the flame.
They also allow me to finish a dish by turning off the heat, and letting the residual energy in the diffuser, diffuse into the pan.
Which brings us to the pans.
There are four materials, commonly used as pans; cast iron, steel, aluminum and copper. Corning made a line of glassware for the stovetop. It has it’s own quirks, but I like it. It can often be found second-hand. It is mostly found as sauce-pans and pots, not skillets.
There are two factors in how a pot conducts energy, it’s ability to conduct heat (conductivity), and it’s ability to store heat (capacity). Combined those make up it’s qualities as a pan. They are affected by one more factor, the ability of the pan to release the heat, once it’s been absorbed (call it diffusion)
Copper happens to be very poor in conductivity, but good at capacity, which means it has the best, overall, diffusion; so the better stainless steel pans are often covered, on the bottom, with copper. If it weren’t that copper is very reactive (which is a different aspect of pans which has to be considered) and toxic, we’d just use copper for everything. Since it is toxic, and reactive no one makes pans with it. It does cool down quickly, so unless it’s clad, that has to be taken into account. It can be useful, so long as the food won’t react too it. It’s heavy, and expensive.
To deal with that the pans made from it are lined, or clad, with steel, aluminum, or tin. They are expensive, and tempermental. If the bonding isn’t good, it will separate. If the copper is exposed, it can scratch, and tarnish. If acids get on it; it will tarnish, and get a green scale.
Steel is the worst of the lot. It has high conductivity, and mediocre capacity. Put a thin steel pan on the stove, and it will have a hot spot right over the heating element, and be much cooler where the heat isn’t in direct contact. To fix this, pot makers can thicken the bottom, or apply another metal to it, copper is the preferred metal.
Steel comes in two varities, stainless, and carbon. Carbon steel is treated much as cast iron.
Aluminum is right behind copper in diffusion, but it’s also reactive. To keep it from affecting foods flavors (and from leaching into the food, which has been implicated in Alzheimer’s) professional aluminum cookware is anodized. From a design standpoint I don’t care for most aluminum cookware, because the inside of the pots have bossed rivets, and they make it hard to clean.
Less expensive are teflon lined pans. Usually cheap pans with teflon coatings aren’t worth the money. They tend to be thin, which makes for hot-spots. If they get too hot the lining will separate. One can’t use metal utensils on them, or the finish will scratch. The same, basic complaints apply to the more expensive teflon-lined pans, though the heavier pans are less likely to separate the bond, and the thicker linings are less likely to be scratched all the way to the base.
Cast iron is worse than either steel, or aluminum, in conductivity, and in capacity, though it’s not much behind steel, pound for pound.
That qualification is why cast iron has such a beloved place in the kitchen, no matter how delicately it’s made (and Griswold made some fairly light cast iron) it’s massy. That makes it a great battery, and means it releases that heat slowly. Put it over a diffuser and it makes slow-cooking on the stovetop really easy. On a simmer burner, with diffuser, one can keep a pot of water below the boil.
Care and feeding.
All except the cast iron are washed pretty much the same, soap and water. If something is baked/burnt on, a stiff brush/scrubbing pad is needed. For anodized aluminum avoid hard scrubbing, whenever possible, because the layer which is anodized is only a few mils thick.
Teflon, doesn’t get scoured. On the plus side, it should never need it. If something gets burnt onto the bottom, the lining is toast, and the pan is trash.
Cast Iron.
Lots of people are afraid of cast iron. They think seasoning it is arcane, and that care is difficult. Both are false. Seasoning is the process of varnishing the inside of the pan. The first time is the only one that take work.
Coat the pan with oil (I like grapeseed, because it has a high smoke-point, but any oil will do, and in a pinch solid vegetable shortening can be used).
Place the pan, upside down, in the oven, and turn it to 350-400 degrees.
After 30-45 minutes, turn off the oven.
That’s it.
Because the surface is made of oil, boiled to a hard finish, soap isn’t used on cast iron; it would remove the season, and things would stick. For the same reason, metal implements aren’t the best idea. If you do get metal spatulas, don’t get curved ones and see to it the corners are rounded.
Instead the pan is wiped out, heated and then either buffed with rag/paper towel, or water is added, and then stirred. I’m not worried about bacteria that can survive that treatment.
*Warning* Do this only with high quality cast iron. Poorly cast iron can be “foamy” and the shock of the water can cause it to break. If you buy cheap cast iron, test it for hot spots. That’s a sign of foaming. If you have hot spots, don’t clean it that way; best to just chuck it and buy better pans.
When things get baked on, salt, or baking soda; rubbed with a rag, will clean it out. The same thing will smooth the surface, and make it less likely that food will stick.
After the pan is clean, a wipe of fresh oil, and a couple of minutes on the heat are all that needs be done. All in all, cast iron is at least as easy to maintain as any other pot.
It does, however, need to be used. If it sits too long unused the season goes stale, and starts to smell a trifle rancid (artificial shortenings will go bad faster. As a general rule, the higher the smoke point of the oil, the better). If you are going to store the pan, put it in a 350F oven for about 30 minutes to harden the finish. If it has a lid, use a piece of cardboard to let some air in.
If it goes off, just put a little oil in it, turn it upside down, and bake it again.
Brands I think are worth the money.
Steel: Revere Ware.
Copper: All Clad, Copper Core (treat at steel)
Aluminum: Calphalon
Cast Iron: Lodge is the only maker of new cast iron I recommend, but there are a couple of brands which can be found second hand, Griswold, and Wagner. Griswold will say, Erie, on it, even if it doesn’t have the name. It will also have a + shaped symbol. Wagner will say Wagner. Other than that, heavy is what you’re looking for. If it has good weight, and the price is nice, buy it. Then put it on a diffuser, and make pancakes, big pancakes; pancakes which go from edge to edge.
Then look for abnormal spots on the pancake. If there are burn marks, which aren’t concentric to the heat source, it’s a bad pan. Use it for roasting coffee.
There is a special category of cast-iron; enamel ware. There are basically two styles, those which line the whole pot, inside and out, and those which line the exterior, but not the inside. Le Crueset makes the former (except for the omelette pan, which they line with teflon. I wish that was an option, but it isn’t). If the interior isn’t lined, treat just as you would cast iron. If it is, treat it as if it were steel, or aluminum.
There’s a Danish brand, Deska, (which I think you can only find second-hand) notable because the handles, which are wooden, are on a fast-pitch screw. That means you can move something to the oven to stay warm/brown the top. Just spin the handle and close the door. When you want to take it out, just open the door and put the handle back on. It’s great for a gratin&eeacute;e.
Reactivity: Aluminum reacts to acids, and gets a white bloom. It can lend a metallic taste to food.
Steel: Stainless steel is, largely, non-reactive. The thing to be careful of is corroding the trace metals which make it rostfrei. The big culprit is salt. The easiest way to avoid that is to never put it directly onto the pan. When boiling pasta, etc., boil the water, then add the salt.
The second culprit is acid. Don’t let acidic things sit in the pot for long.
Cast Iron/Carbon Steel: They can add a metallic taste to acidic foods. Carbon steel does this more than iron. Mostly it’s not obvious, but it does increase the iron content in acidic foods. As with stainless steel, don’t let acids sit in the pan too long. It’s not as permanent a problem, but it can strip the season, and make it needful to reseason the pan.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-25 05:24 pm (UTC)The ability to _store_ energy has minimal influence on cooking performance for any process that takes long enough to reach a "steady state". Flambeing might be an issue, but most cooking isn't going to care too much. Besides which, "storage" is effectively "inertia" here and as anyone used to cooking on gas and forced to use an electric stove will moan, that's a _bad_ thing for cookery.
The conductivity also has negligible effect on storage (if we can ignore external heat losses). Even the density doesn't matter - it's just the total mass that's significant and the relative thickness of the differing materials (except cast iron and Ti) mean that this is less significant between Al, copper and steel than the simple density would suggest (unless you're using cheap thin Al pans).
no subject
Date: 2007-07-25 08:23 pm (UTC)How does conductivty not relate to storage, as the contact with external sources is part and parcel of the equation? Steady state is a hard thing to attain without something that can store enough heat to attain it (which why thin pans are bad, and even cast iron wants a diffuser... the area right on the flame/element will get hot.
I'm confused as to what you are trying to say.
TK