Whether you are a novice in the kitchen or you have a good background, cooking in a frying pan can certainly make or break your experience. You can have all the most premium ingredients and recipes in the world, but without a high-quality frying pan, you have nothing. Literally!
The chance to create a flavourful dish and achieve that deep, golden crust when frying, while controlling heat, is only possible with the right fry pan. This essential kitchen tool comes in several materials. However, stainless steel and non-stick fry pans are among the two most popular options available on the market.
Why Choose Stainless Steel?
Three words can be used to describe stainless steel frying pans: durability, hardness and non-corrosiveness. Aside from being durable frying pans, they are also perfect for cooking all types of food because they don’t react to acidic foods. They also provide even heat distribution, which is why stainless steel pans are the go-to kitchen tool for professional chefs. In fact, the material itself has been the first choice in professional kitchens for decades, which also explains its use in these tools.
This pan’s material is made from the most powerful combination: chromium, iron, and nickel, which results in creating the perfect pan for sautéing vegetables, frying and creating a golden crust, and searing.
These all-time-favourite fry pans are built for high-heat cooking. It’s non-reactive, fully oven-safe (if the handle is entirely metal), resistant to scratching and staining, making it ideal for use with any kind of utensil, even metal ones.
Why Choose Non-Stick?
Easy-to-clean, non-stick and lightweight are the words that best describe non-stick frying pans. These pans have gained popularity mainly because of the minimal need for oil or butter. In other words, these kitchen tools are the perfect choice even for those with zero cooking experience, because they make cooking and frying super easy. Whether searing delicate pieces of meat, frying eggs or potatoes, these pots make everything effortless, easy and fast, and the main reason is their material.
The main material of these pans is stainless steel or aluminium, or even a mix of the two, howeter their interior is finished with another material, a special coating. The most common special coating of the kind is Teflon. More and more manufacturers and users avoid its use because it’s a PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) chemical. Even though this chemical coating can’t react with food or leach anything into it unless it’s used at 260°C, many people still avoid it.
To stay on the safest side of the story, it’s best to choose pans with safer non-stick coatings like enamel or ceramic coatings.
These pots are certainly the most common choice for those who aren’t good in the kitchen because they don’t allow food to stick to them. They are significantly lighter in weight than a good-quality stainless steel pan and require less cooking fat, making them the perfect choice for everyday cooking.
Which Pan Is Better?
The truth is that both of these cooking pans are great choices. They’re both durable and good for cooking. The one you choose certainly depends on your requirements, needs, skills and time. But generally speaking, there’s one trick that can help you make the right choice: choosing a pan for ingredients, oven and clean-up.
Ingredients
For cooking food like pancakes, grilled cheese, scrambled eggs or fish fillets, you should certainly have a non-stick pan in hand. But when it comes to deep caramelisation, searing, crisping and sautéing, you should certainly rely on the use of a stainless steel pan.
Oven
If you plan on grilling or frying food, especially meat, and then putting it in the oven to obtain that needed softness, tenderness and juiciness, then you should certainly use a stainless steel pan because it’s oven-safe.
Clean-up
In those times when your busy schedule doesn’t align with time to scrub a pan after cooking, a non-stick pan can certainly come to the rescue.
When comparing both of these pots, cooking on stainless steel is better, safer and even tastier than cooking on non-stick tools. However, the non-stick ones can certainly come in handy. The only thing to keep in mind is cooking at a low-to-medium temperature to avoid damaging the coating.
How to Care for Them?
Stainless Steel
One of the greatest benefits of these kitchen tools is their resistance and ability to cook anything in them. In other words, these pots don’t require any specific care. They are dishwasher-safe and can be hand-washed. Even if there’s stuck food on them, simmering baking soda and water in them can easily remove anything.
Non-Stick
Non-stick pans aren’t suitable for the dishwasher because the coating can be easily damaged by hot water. Not to mention that this coating is prone to scratches, which is another reason why tossing it in the dishwasher isn’t recommended. In fact, they should be cleaned by hand with warm water and a soft sponge to avoid any scratches.
