You can get a nice carbon steel or cast iron pan nonstick enough to do things like classical omelets through seasoning alone. (Though the shape of cast iron generally makes it impractical in that particular example.) All the French old timers did. But they need to only be used for that and most home cooks aren't willing to have a pan they only use for one thing. Also, most home cooks-- even the ones that really think they do-- just don't have the kind of pan/utensil handling and heat management experience to make that happen because it's super fussy. Even thin light fishes can be totally fine with enough fat. I wouldn't consider making a sole meuniere in a nonstick pan because you can't build a fond... but most home cooks won't use that much fat either. I never worked in a professional kitchen that used nonstick for anything other than eggs, and they were ONLY used for eggs, and most of the cooks brought their own egg pans when they needed them. All the fish went into regular aluminum skillets or carbon steel pans. At the temperatures required to cook eggs, there's like zero danger using a modern teflon coated pan. It's the people cranking those pans up to smoking temperatures that you have to worry about. That shit is nasty.
> But they need to only be used for that and most home cooks aren't willing to have a pan they only use for one thing.
I have a cheap 10" Lodge skillet that we use for everything. It pretty much lives on the stovetop. We make omelets every morning, wash it off, and put back on the stove to dry. Quesadillas at lunch. Red sauce for dinner. Potato gratin. Pineapple upside-down cake. You name it, it goes in the skillet, often without any oil.
The only time I ever have trouble with stuff sticking is after several days in a row of tomatoes or similar. Acidic stuff like that does damage the seasoning, and if you let it sit it will stick. Other than that, stuff comes right off even after hours of sitting around.
So many people seem to think you have to baby these skillets, and that's just not been my experience at all. It's not as nonstick as a brand-new teflon pan, but it's better than that same pan will be after 6 months, and if I damage the seasoning on my cast iron it really does repair itself through normal cooking (with a bit of extra oil in the meantime).
Sure. You don't need to baby a cast iron skillet to get decent stick protection for those applications. Even an egg dish like Tortilla Espanola or an American omelet would fare fine in a decently seasoned home cast iron skillet with proper heat control. But a classical french omelet requires vastly more stick protection and surface smoothness.
In Jaques Pepin's well known video on making classical french omelets, he laments that he uses a non-stick pan because his carbon steel omelet pan isn't in the proper condition to make a proper french omelet. I guarantee you that Pepin has better pan and utensil technique than damn near anyone you'll meet in your life, but a surface for that dish requires babying.
There are good reasons that the only place you'll see cast iron skillets in a commercial kitchen is for cute presentations. They work decently for home cooks in many circumstances but they're too inconvenient to replaces the trusty commercial aluminum sautee pan as the classic blunt instrument, and not precise enough to perform the more specialized duties of commercial nonstick and carbon steel pans.
>> At the temperatures required to cook eggs, there's like zero danger using a modern teflon coated pan. It's the people cranking those pans up to smoking temperatures that you have to worry about.
go look it up, if you keep teflon (PTFE, and not PFOAs which are all but gone in pans less than 10 years old) under 500 you're golden. No one is going to give you a bibliography for something you can google easily in seconds.
If you do, and you take the ‘first hit’ for the truth as parent suggested in a reply (it says it is not safe), does that lead you to believe that this issue is so simple as ‘don’t let your pan get hot’, or could there be other factors to consider, like, for example, exposing the pan to other chemicals, abrasion, etc?
PTFE is basically completely safe for humans because it goes right through you as it doesn't break down anywhere along the digestive path and basically completely unreactive in the human body, it is used often in biological implants. PFOAs are the villains and yeah if you have cheap nonstick pans 10+ years old then toss them. Yes I know exactly what I'm talking about and what kind of pans I have because I did my own research on the topic t-fal, hexclad, etc are perfectly fine.
