I personally cook with a mix of stainless, high carbon, and cast iron and have moved on from gas to induction, with loving my induction and steel pan combo.

I don’t care for non-stick due to its short lifespan, not great a searing, and having to replace them every couple of years creating waste and chemicals.

I’ve found that cast iron with a properly done seasoning and just a little bit of oil, which come on almost no one is cooking without a little bit of oil, I’ve got a perfectly great non-stick surface that can do eggs, including omurice, and salmon without anything sticking and cleanup is fine, if I get some stuck bits, just take a plastic scraper and then just clean as normal with or without soap depending (yeah, keep it to yourself purists)

My two cents

I like it. I got rid of all my non stick pans. They eventually get scratched and at that point they leak toxins. I have two very old pans and a hundred year old lid that I got for nothing. They were being thrown away from a camper that was being scrapped. They work well and after I finally learned the ins and outs of seasoning them they dont stick, much.

Some answers here are close.

It depends on what type of person you are.

If you’re the kind of person who has a neat, clean kitchen who does all their dishes after every meal, go cast iron.

If you’re the kind of person who has a messy kitchen and you really only do dishes once or twice a week, go primarily with stainless, a nonstick pan for eggs, and a 10-12 inch cast iron pan for occasional use, like that rib roast.

It’s a tool. Like a hammer.

Hammer hit nail, nail go in. But if you look for hammers you’ll quickly find that there’s a dozen or so different hammers available, all of which make nail go in.

Different hammers are for different types of hitting things.

Different cooking pans are for different types of cooking. All of them make food go hot.

Stainless steel make food go hot and also make pan sauce and clean real easy. But food sometimes stick. This is considered a feature, not a flaw.

Non stick make food go hot but food no stick. Doesn’t last very long but it’s very easy to clean. If you really love eggs they’re a necessity.

Cast iron make food go hot and stay hot longer. But they don’t heat very evenly and they’re hard to clean, this is also considered a feature by… Certain people…

For some reason there’s a community of gooners for cast iron. I cook a lot and have long since abandoned 99% of my cast iron cookware. The only things that survived was a burger press and a Dutch oven that has a ceramic glaze on it so it’s easy to keep clean. I find that for just make food go hot, cast iron is not as good at it as stainless steel is. But if I’m making a stew, or bread, or frying something, a really big cast iron vessel really is the best thing. It stays at a temperature longer than anything else does, and that matters in specific applications.

Never buy non-stick unless it’s labeled PFAS-free. PFAS, also called “forever chemicals”, are persistent organic pollutants which are a great way to fuck up the whole ecosystem

Pan make food hot. But cold food make flimsy lightweight pan less hot too. Food just sort of simmers while sometimes you want scorching.

Cast iron, or heavy bottom stainless steel pan, stays hot while food touches the pan. More energy is stored in hot heavy bottom pan. Food gets scorched and this gives more roasty toasty flavour, which is better in my opinion. If you don’t care for this, don’t.

Also, heavy bottoms spread heat more evenly so everything is cooked at same speed (not the middle of the pan faster like most non-stick pans).

Induction > glass ceramic (infrared) > gas > cast iron electric > fire

Why ceramic over gas? Because gas is a bit more responsive but

1. Needs extra infrastructure
2. Safety risk
3. Not sustainable and climate warming

And btw, why is induction still more expensive than ceramic? It’s not that new a tech anymore.

Yes. Cast iron is best. It and high carbon steel are the only real “non stick” because thyre the only ones you can season. Dont use “nonstick” pans they are just pollutants and give you cancer. Seasoning cast iron is easy (really… Do less! Stop reaming it and scrubbing it to death… just get it really hot and wipe it). Cast iron last forever… these other things become garbage in 1-5 yrs

It fits the bill of cheap and reliable, but not “modern”*. The heat retention is very useful, and handling the surface of the pan itself is easy when you’re using it to cook constantly.

Non-stick more often than not is going to be cheap and modern, but not reliable because high quality non stick pans are expensive (or people opt for enamel instead because of low quality PTFE/PFAS that both scrapes off easily and can’t handle high heat which is dangerous, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-eBmPSqd4g)

I would argue the “upgrade” to cast iron is carbon steel, which is much more common as a wok material. You get a nice balance between affordable, reliable, and modern.

• *By modern, I just mean the underlying technology. Cast iron is pretty old and has its own flaws you have to deal with, and it lacks some of the nice features of newer materials.

gas vs. electric vs. induction vs infrared…

The tier list is: Induction (most responsive heat control) Gas (Slightly less responsive heat control Infrared (Electric, much slower) Electric (direct heating element, as slow as infrared but lacks the heat retention, have not seen these outside bargain basement cheapo units landlords like to put in apartments solely to screw with your ability to cook food normally)

Gas and Induction is always preferable because infrared is slow enough to be at the best annoying and at the worst less forgiving if you mess up the temperature. Induction comes with the great advantage that it doesn’t require a special gas line, and you can actually buy single unit cooktops for pretty cheap, but do keep in mind that induction only works on magnetic metals (won’t work with pure copper or aluminum).

Reddit has a fucking hard-on for cast iron. I’m not really a fan.

I don’t use teflon non-stick but have had good results with ceramic-based non-stick. My second choice would be carbon steel, which has a similar “seasoning” process as cast iron, but I find carbon steel easier to work with compared to cast iron.

Different tools for different jobs. There’s a ton more variables at play. Oversimplifying does just that.

Play with it all. Try to do both. Then you will have a better idea. Or post on lemmy asking everybody and read a lot of incomplete and possibly misleading explanations that might help you find the detail(s) you lack to edge your mind into a wider hunger for deeper understanding.

Mine? Cast iron is just different. Like using a truck vs using a car.

In real life, nothing is clear. So, when people give you clear explanations, they may be making the decision to not invest a lot of energy trying to get you to understand or know more. Like right now, I know that spectrum people take a lot of explaining sometimes, and I am really tired and going to bed, so my best advice is to understand they’re different. Learn by doing if you can, and learn from others if you can. But, if it means anything, I use two cast iron skillets, three types of stainless steel pans, some of them tri-ply, and an aluminum with a nonstick coating. I have my preferences not just for different things, but styles of certain things, and even times for different things (like just cooking for me, or one other person, or multiple other people).

Also, generally with non-stick, using high heat or metal utensils on it will ruin it and expose you to pretty bad chemicals basically immediately. But also so does any smoke in general.

Literally pick your poison.

My family uses our cast iron skillets daily. We have one that is almost exclusively for eggs, and one for meat.

Cast iron wants to be used often and if you really like cooking, will eventually become your go-to. But not everyone gets there; for a lot of people it is counterintuitive to have a pan that you only scrub any bits off and rinse with plain water. Actually, our egg pan only gets wiped out with paper towels because its so slippery now. I don’t think I’ve scrubbed it in months.

If you really want to use your pans:

1. Best: cast iron
2. Better: stainless steel or enameled
3. Good: high quality nonstick like HexClad
4. Never: cheap non-stick

We use the absolute hell out of our cast iron and our stainless steel. They all get scrubbed with a metal Chore-Boy scrubbee. Only the stainless gets soap.

Metal hot. Makes food hot. Yes.

But!!

Cold food makes hot pan cold.

Cast iron has a lot of thermal mass, so when you put a cold piece of meat on it it doesn’t immediately get cold and stop cooking for a bit. Thin pans without it don’t keep hot, hot so they don’t sear long enough and you don’t get the maillard reaction and the tasty brown crust.

Cast iron is vastly superior to non stick. You can get it hotter, it stays hot when you put food in it, you can use metal utensils, no horrible chemicals like pfas.

Cast iron has a crap ton of mass compared to other pans you mentioned, so if you’re searing a stake you’re going to have a more consistent temp as the temperatures of the pan and the steak equilize. Enough to make a difference? No idea but it could possibly have something to it there