Quote:
Originally Posted by boar_d_laze  eediot,
I haven't read the artice you're citing to, so my response is solely to what you've written.
Cast iron ("CI" if you prefer) is not a particularly good conductor. As cooking materials go, it does make a decent heat bank. These properties are very much affected by mass -- and thickness in particular. Oddly, your analysis failed to address this.
Quaity CI cookware, which is to say heavy CI cookware, may be an inefficient conductor compared to aluminum or copper, but is suffiencienty efficient that a couple of minutes on the on the stove top is enough to preheat a pan to high heat, evenly. Half an hour in a hot oven is unnecessary.
Quality CI will heat more evenly than cheap stainless, which tends to be very spotty both as a consequence of its material properties and of its low weight. With cookware, quantity frequently trumps quality. That's why stainless with a copper washed bottom (like old fashioned Revere Ware) works no where near as well than a heavy aluminum cladding over stainless (like All Clad).
I have no idea what is meant by "even browning." But an attractive sear doesn't have much to do with it. A sear shouldn't be even, but variegated.
Stove top browning other than searing usually requires enough oil in the pan that the actual browning is more about immersion conduction than contact conduction. This usually breaks down into sauteing and pan frying. Cast iron is by no means the best material for sauteing. The pans are too heavy to handle properly. On the other hand, few things fry as well.
BDL |
BDL,
Even browning was perhaps a poor word selection - I meant even heating throughout the pan and in this particular study CI didn't hold up as well as clad stainless. The clad stainless in question was All-Clad so you're right, the cheaper, flimsier, thinner, lighter stuff would probably have even more stark hotspots on stovetop cooking. As for getting the pan hot on stovetop vs. oven, i hear your point - I guess the study is suggesting that when compared to higher quality stainless (read: All clad), CI just doesn't heat as evenly despite it's capacity to retain lots of heat.
Obviously, pan frying (or any immersion conduction technique) takes away the necessity for even pan heating as the liquid becomes the cooking conduit; and even cheap stainless will yield adequate results. I'm assuming we're all talking about old fashioned searing where the pan is doing the work, not oil or water.