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RSS FeedCookware choices: Stainless steel vs.nonstick
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| Stainless | 60% | 354 votes | Total: 587 votes | |
| Non-stick | 40% | 233 votes |
Stainless
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Add to FavoritesI have had cheap, medium priced and expensive stainless steel, cheap, medium priced and expensive non-stick and at all price brackets stainless steel beats the non-stick. Although I have also learned that one should buy the best (which, if you look for one indicator, means the heaviest and thickest-based) cookware one can afford, unless it's only for temporary arrangement.
I have been cooking for about 15 years now, and I tried almost the whole gamut of cookware products. All have their benefits, and I wouldn't be without my cast-iron enamelled Le Creusets or silicone loaf tin. Copper pans have fantastic uses too. Overall, though, for pots and pans for the majority of cooking tasks you can't beat stainless steel (although I do keep my eyes open for hard anodised not-non-stick finishes, but these, so far, have been too expensive for the relatively small extra benefit).
Why?
1) Stainless steel will last longer. Whatever you do, if used regularly and in a normal manner, the non-stick coating will, eventually, develop scratches, and peel and crack. In fact, it's recommended to change the non-stick cookware every few years! Excuse me, but I can't afford (and in all honesty, don't want to) use a product that seems to have built-in obsolescence. If I spend 40GBP ($80) on a cooking pot, I expect it to last for many years, not to need replacing almost as soon as I get used to it.
2) Stainless steel is much more forgiving. With most non-stick surfaces, you are limited in the range of cooking tools and cleaning implements that you can use. Even the ingredients of your dish (bones and shells for example) can scratch the surface! I am busy and cook in a flurry of creative chaos (to call it nicely) and I think the effort to keep special plastic or wooden tools for the pot or pots I am using is just not worth the additional benefit. Plus, once those little scratches appear, something will stick and as you try to clean it, the surface will get damaged more, and then stick more, and so on.
3) Non stick sticks. I am yet to see a truly non-stick non-stick. It might be my personal talent for burning things, but they do, occasionally, burn, cook dry, overheat and similar. With a stainless steel cookware it can pretty much always be scraped, scrubbed and sanded off. With a non-stick surface, although it might take longer for the disaster to happen, once it's stuck, that's it: you can't resort to Brillo pads or sharp blades, you can only throw the thing away.
4) Stainless steel is more heat resistant. It can be used in the oven at all temperatures (including over 200C), and if you accidentally overheat it on the hob, it doesn't start to emit mysterious fumes, but just goes, well, very, very hot.
5) Non stick produces noxious fumes. Overheated stainless steel fumes won't give you a headache, kill your canary or cause bad reaction in your child. In fact, there won't be any fumes at all, just a very hot pan. Overheated non-stick can produce pretty noxious fumes that have been known to kill pet birds and cause people to suffer to.
6) Stainless steel doesn't chip and the chips are not a health hazard, like chips of non-stick are often considered to be.
7) Non stick is more fragile. You can stack stainless steel pans inside each other, chuck other things made of metal into them and generally store them with much less care than you have to give to non-stick.
8) Good stainless steel doesn't clean any worse than non-stick with a bit of a soak, and is in fact much easier to clean if anything does stick.
My favourite stainless steel cookware brand is Stellar (I like Lamina & 1000 series, but if you are sill unconvinced, they do lots of non-stick too!).
Learn more about this author, Magda Healey.
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Non-stick
Are you like me, do you love to cook but dread to clean up after? Have you tried to convince your husband or partner that they should do all the clean up if you do all the cooking? Not having much success? You are not alone. Most of us have better things to do with our time than scrubbing pots and pans.
You have to make a choice, either you can spend your time cleaning or you can just go with non-stick. You can try good stainless steel pans with copper bottoms. Within a short time you may have copper bottoms that are more black than copper. How to get and keep them clean is the problem. One option is to move away from the copper bottoms to just stainless steel and with plenty of butter or shortening they are relatively non-stick, if you keep a close eye on them. However, if you make a mistake and burn something in the pan it can be very difficult to remove the black burn from the pan bottom. It involves a lot of elbow grease and scraping and some sort of cleansing agent.
How has Teflon changed our lives? In the early days clean up was easy at least for the first few months. Then invariably someone would forget to use only plastic utensils and what followed was a big scratch. Shortly the big scratch would begin to peel and now you need to buy a new pan or else you will poison the family.
That was then, this is now. There is a new generation of Teflon. So what if you use a metal flipper, you can laugh when you use you metal whip in the pan. Nothing happens. No scratches, no peeling and best of all no sticking. These are pieces of cookware that you can use and love, every day of the week. I love my teflon Cooks Essentials pans, I can make sticky and gooey sauces without worrying that cleanup will take me hours.
Now I am not going to suggest that you will never own a stainless steel pan. We all still have a large stock pot, a roasting pan or other pieces of stainless. When it comes to deep frying or boiling large pots of pasta, stainless steel can work very well. One thing that stainless steel has going for it is that it is offered in many more options than non-stick is. It is much easier to find a nice stainless steel double boiler then it is to find one with Teflon. So for most of us our kitchens will include a combination of both stainless and non-stick pots and pans.
Will we replace the stainless ones with non-stick? The answer is yes, if it is possible to find the equivalent. It really is all about the ease of cleaning and the fact that we are all looking for ways to get out of the kitchen as quickly as possible. As more and more pieces are available to us we will soon be stainless steel free and enjoying the extra time with our families and friends.
Learn more about this author, Belle Starr.
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