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To Do
This seems like a relatively simple question, but it
is an important one. When you are thinking of
getting a new piece of cookware, dont think I
want a new skillet. Rather ask yourself, what do
I want to do that I cannot do with the cookware I
already own? Why? What is it about my cookware
that does not allow me to do what I want?
Sometimes it may be something as simple as
wanting a skillet that doesnt have hot spots.
Other times it may be more complex... Maybe you
want a small pan for making delicate sauces like
Hollandaise and mounting reductions with
butter. Then, you have to ask yourself what it is,
exactly, that might make a pan good at
performing these tasks. In this instance, you
would want a pan that had absolutely even heat,
that responded immediately when you adjusted
the flame up or down, that was able to maintain
its temperature when cold ingredients were
added, that conducted heat into the sauce from all
sides so everything was exactly the same
temperature, that had a relatively large surface-
area-to volume ratio for efficient reduction and
that was nice and wide at the top so it was easy to
get in there with a whisk. In short, you might
want a stainless-lined heavy copper sauce pan, or
for a little less money, a stainless lined heavy
aluminum pan, or for a little less money, a
stainless pan with a copper bottom. A big part of
this article will be working to build a basis for
understanding why, exactly you would want a
sauce pan and what, exactly, would be gained
and/or lost moving from a stainless lined copper
pan to a stainless lined aluminum pan to a
stainless pan with a disk bottom.
What Is The Basic Pan Shape?
This section will provide concise descriptions of
the various pans used in the kitchen.
Saut Pan (Sauteuse; also Curved Saut Pan and
Slant-Sided Saut Pan): This pan has a large
cooking surface and short straight sides that are
approximately one quarter the diameter of the
pan. The large cooking surface provides ample
contact with the heat and the straight sides help
contain ingredients as they are flipped around
inside the pan to brown them evenly on all sides.
A long, high handle helps the cook agitate the pan
for even more movement. This is what it is to
saut. The French verb sauter means to jump
-- so foods that are saut are jumped around in
the pan. A lid allows the addition of liquids to
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Reactivity
Materials that are highly reactive tend to have
chemical reactions with other substances around
them. A good example would be iron, which tends
to react with oxygen to form iron oxide or, as we
commonly know it, rust. This is significant to
cooking because there are certain ingredients and
certain ways of cooking in which it is
disadvantageous to have a reactive cooking
surface because the ingredients will react with the
cooking vessel and produce undesirable colors
and/or flavors. Highly reactive cookware
materials include iron, copper, aluminum and
carbon steel. Nonreactive cookware materials
include stainless steel and enamel. A special case
is anodized aluminum, which is aluminum that
has been treated with an electrolytic process to
create a harder surface that is still somewhat
reactive, but significantly less so than untreated
aluminum. Similarly, a process called annealing is
used to turn reactive carbon steel into harder, less
reactive black steel and blue steel.
As it so happens, materials that are highly
reactive also tend to have highly desirable
thermal properties (and vice-versa), as we will see
below.
Thermal Properties
Thermal properties refers to those aspects of a
material that have to do with heat. So, before we
begin, perhaps we should have an understanding
of what heat and temperature are.
In all substances above absolute zero there exists
a certain amount of movement in the atoms or
molecules that make up that substance. This is a
kind of kinetic energy, which is a fancy physics
term used to refer to the mechanical energy a
body has by virtue of its motion. Temperature is a
measure of that kinetic energy. The greater the
kinetic energy -- i.e., the faster the particles are
moving -- the higher the temperature reading will
be on the thermometer.
Heat is a little more difficult to nail down. In the
scientific sense, it is a measure of the amount of
energy transferred from one object to another
because of the temperature difference between
those two objects. In other words, if you put a
cold object down on top of a hot object, the
energy that is transferred from the hot object to
the cold object would be measured as heat. Heat
is not, strictly speaking, a word that describes the
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Quote
When thermal energy is exchanged from one
particle to a nearby one by means of a collision or
a movement that induces movement (through
electrical attraction or repulsion) the process is
called conduction. Though it is the most
straightforward means of heat transfer in matter,
conduction takes on different forms in different
materials. For example, metals are by and large
good conductors of heat because, while their
atoms are fixed in a latticelike structure, the outer
electrons are very loosely held and tend to form a
free-moving fluid or gas in the solid. This
same electron mobility makes metals good
electrical conductors. But in nonmetallic solids
like ceramics, conduction is more mysterious. It
seems that heat is propagated not by the
movement of energetic electrons -- in solids of
ionic- or covalent-bonded compounds, the
electrons are not free but by the vibration of
individual molecules or of a portion of the lattice,
which is transferred to neighboring areas. This is
a much slower and less efficient process than
electron movement, and nonmetals are usually
referred to as thermal or electrical insulators,
rather than conductors.
***
As we have seen, heat conduction in a solid
proceeds either by the diffusion of energetic
electrons, or by vibration in crystal structures. A
material whose electrons are quite mobile is likely
to donate those electrons to other atoms at its
surface: in other words, good conductors are
usually chemically reactive. But inert compounds,
by the same token, are poor conductors.
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So, what does this all tell us? It tells us that the
thickness of cookware materials is important, and
that less conductive materials can potentially
provide even heat just as well as more conductive
materials but the less conductive materials must
be thicker and it will take more time for the pan
to come up to temperature. The issue of time is
an important one, and brings us to the second
effect of thermal conductivity: responsiveness.
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Aluminum
- As we know, aluminum has good thermal
conductivity, and aluminum pans provide even
heat when the cookware is sufficiently thick.
Thickness of materials is also important for heat
retention because aluminum has relatively low
specific heat per cubic centimeter.
- Highly reactive with both acidic and alkaline
foods, which can cause off flavors and colors.
- Often warps as a result of high heat cooking.
- Soft and prone to scratching.
- Light.
- Inexpensive.
- Common uses: Almost every pan in the kitchen
is manufactured in raw aluminum. Due to its
reactivity, it is best used in cooking tasks where
the food is neither too acidic nor alkaline and will
spend a relatively brief time in the pan.
- Representative manufacturers: Wear-Ever
Anodized Aluminum
- This is aluminum that has been treated by an
electrolytic process which makes the outer surface
both harder and less reactive. Otherwise similar
to raw aluminum.
- Can be incredibly difficult to keep clean.
- Moderately expensive.
- Things to consider: certain cookware
manufacturers claim that an anodized aluminum
cooking surface is stick resistant. However,
owners commonly report that this does not reflect
their experience, and anodized aluminum pans
that are not kept scrupulously clean are often
quite sticky.
- Common uses: Almost every pan in the kitchen
is manufactured in raw aluminum. Since
anodized aluminum is less reactive than raw
aluminum, one need not be so concerned about
minimizing opportunities for chemical interaction
between the food and the pan. Nevertheless,
prolonged contact with acidic or alkaline foods
can still result in off flavors and colors. This
design does not have any particular advantages
for heating large volumes of thin liquids in stock
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Carbon Steel
- Carbon steel has a slightly higher specific heat
per cubic centimeter than Iron and the thermal
conductivity is even lower. At this point, there is
little to be gained by going for maximum
thickness, because it would take forever to heat
up. As a result, carbon steel cookware is usually
manufactured in a medium gauge of
approximately 2.0 mm.
- Similar to cast iron, the heat does even out
somewhat once the carbon steel pan has been
sufficiently preheated. Nevertheless, the heat will
never really be even all that even, and carbon
steel pans are best used for quick cooking tasks
where evenness of heat is not a primary concern.
- Like cast iron, carbon steel is highly reactive and
needs to be seasoned. Unlike cast iron, however,
carbon steel is soft and significantly less porous.
As a result, carbon steel may be seasoned
sufficiently in 15 minutes and old seasoning is
easily removed with a scouring pad if the cook
wishes to re-season the pan.
- Carbon steel cookware is not cast, it is formed
from sheets of carbon steel and pressed into
shape. This allows manufacturers to produce a
wide variety of specially designed pans for
specific cooking tasks (omelet pans, crepe pans,
chestnut pans, etc.). Since carbon steel is cheap, a
cook can easily and affordably accumulate a
number of purpose-designed pans.
- Light.
- Very inexpensive.
- Common uses: Fry pans, saut pans, crepe pans,
omelet pans, woks.
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- Fairly inexpensive.
- Things to consider: Dont be fooled by copper
bottoms that arent clearly a disk of some kind.
This thin metal layer on the bottom quarter of the
pan confers none of the thermal advantages of
copper.
- Common uses: Almost every pan in the kitchen
is manufactured in this design. However, it is
only truly useful for boiling water.
- Representative manufacturers: These pans are
not particularly associated with any
manufacturers, and they are all more or less the
same.
Thus far, all the cookware designs we have
discussed have been straight gauge, which
means that they have the same thermal properties
in all parts. Now we will profile two popular
hybrid cookware designs that have different
thermal properties on the bottom and the sides.
Specifically, these cookware designs have
materials with good thermal properties on the
bottom, and materials with not-so-good thermal
properties on the sides.
Stainless Steel Body with an Aluminum Base
- This design begins with durable, nonreactive
stainless steel and adds the thermal benefits --
evenness of heat, high specific heat per cubic
centimeter, responsiveness -- of aluminum to the
bottom of the pan.
- Because the aluminum base only covers the
bottom, virtually no heat is conducted from the
base up into the heavy stainless steel sides of the
pan.
- Moderately expensive to expensive.
- Things to consider: 1) Due to the way this
cookware is manufactured, the aluminum disk
can never quite cover the entire base of the pan.
The percentage of the base covered by the
aluminum disk varies from manufacturer to
manufacturer and is one indication of quality. 2)
Cooks are sometimes apprehensive that foods will
scorch and burn on the parts of the pan that are
not covered with aluminum -- namely the sides
and the portions of the base not covered by the
aluminum disk -- because these are essentially
plain stainless steel. This is only possibly a
concern in conditions where the flame heating
the pan is larger than the pan itself, and
significant heat from the heat source is in direct
contact with those portions of the pan. Such
conditions are rare in the home kitchen, and can
largely be mitigated by adjusting the flame
appropriately and not using pans of this design
that are too small in diameter for the stove on
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of salt.
- Data: Demeyere Sirocco employs a 2.0 copper
base for casseroles, saut pans, saucepans and
stock pots, while Sitram Catering has a 2.5 mm
copper base for most pans and a 2.0 mm copper
base for pans with the smallest diameters.
- Representative manufacturers: Demeyere
(Sirocco line for casseroles, saut pans, saucepans
and stock pots), Sitram (Catering line).
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