Cast iron is the healthier option. You dont have to completely clean it, just get chunks off that you can feel. Let dry and drip a bit of oil to further season. If you hate cast iron because you’re OCD, Stainless is a great option over the other options like teflon but keep in mind that stainless steel does have trace amounts of nickel which you do not want to ingest in any quantity. 🧡👊🏻🍳

Where does ceramic fall into this in your opinion?

Get out

Why no both? 🤷‍♀️

Ah, i see caught a bunch of snobs with your comment. Don't worry, im a ceramic maxi myself, fuck all that high maintenance bullshit that requires some fucking phd in cooking or order not to fuck up your food. Im just trying to prepare sustenance, i dont give a fuck about food, let alone cooking for that matter

Yeah I more or less want something that isn't coated with a bunch of garbage and will cook the food. I like the set that I have. I know stainless is probably "better" in some way that I can't be bothered to grasp at this point. And for some reason cast iron is always going to be king.

I kinda dig the ceramic ones. What I use for eggs. Cast iron is just durable as fuck and not toxic so its an easy choice.

I use them exclusively for fried eggs when I’m not camping. Based on how cheap they are, 10 years from now, we’ll probably find out they are made from recycled chinese computer parts or something 😂

Everytime i use a stainless one, i spent waay to much time trying to mitigate the cleaning rather than focusing on cooking the food properly. Too much oil, not hot enough etc. then spending too much time scrubbing it anyway. I’m sure there’s a learning curve just like everything but cast iron is easy to me. I can put it on a camp fire and abuse it and it will still be used by my grandkids lol

Yeah cast iron seems like a real workhorse after you have it properly seasoned and what not (only one I have is in storage and was seasoned when I got it). But yeah stainless is an intimidating thing for me to get into especially for the investment. So most recent pans I got were ceramic for ease of use without the chemical coatings.

It begs the question though, how does some trace amount of nickel from stainless steel constitute some potential health issue, whilst a thick layer of carcinogenic crap does not? i don't care either way, insofar the body is not capable of dealing with whatever marginal stuff you confront it with, im not particularly preoccupied with longevity or health-neuroticism as it is. Just...you know....i don't see this supposed magical non-toxic property of cast iron as such.

If I’m being honest, I don’t know. I can tell you that I hate pampering or spending cookware and thats a bigger factor to me.

Again, i have no dog in this fight. I did some digging into teflon at some point though and if are making demands of user skill level when using cookware, teflon is pretty good actually. The issue arises when the layer gets damaged, mostly due to user error. Teflon is used all over the chemical industry for the fact that it does not react with anything. If teflon coating is used by chemical plants that operate on these insane levels of purity and what not, i don't see how it all the sudden behaves completely differently inside of a pan, outside of people jamming their fork into it. At the very least i understand why they thought it was this great thing at the time (to be clear i am not a fan). Insofar durability it remains a ''consumable'' at the end of the day, not some intergenerational tool. In general, a lot of these discussions (the PFAS one for example) would benefit from some contextualization, which is that our ability to measure has increased a bazilliontrillion (a meme factor, obviously, because im too lazy to google the actual number but it is beyond insane) fold in the past decades. The fact that things as such can be measured has been rendered meaningless due to this (because we can measure basically anything), and always requires scale for context.

I would default to CI for a number of reasons, although I would caveat that with saying "good" cast iron, not the 20 dollar Lodge pan. Those can be made to be great, but out of the box notsomuch. Cast Iron has a far better heat retention which is great for a number of things, but needs to be considered as there are no quick changes to temp, it's also something I can throw onto a campfire, in a smoker, on a kamado style grill, or the stove/oven, so will stainless although I am fairly certain stainless would warp badly on a kamado that is at top temp, and likely if placed on a camp fire as well. I personally love my CI, and have a wall of it in my kitchen because it's awesome, some if absolutely gorgeous, and has history as well, something you won't get with stainless.

I love my cast iron cookware. Being able to use stainless steel spatulas and other metal utensils is great. People think it's hard to maintain but you can hand wash them like a normal pan. Been looking at getting a high end polished cast iron pan for things like eggs but some say it's way easier to damage the seasoning with them being smooth and polished.

😂😂 Probably something like this