All these metals are reactive. Tin is far less so than carbon steel.
Here’s a shocker: the chromium in stainless steel is more reactive than either of those metals. The reason SS doesn’t “rust” is that the chrome DOES “rust” at the surface, aka “passivates”. And that oxide layer is relatively unreactive (Much like the paasivation layer formed on aluminum or applied by anodization). The beauty of SS is not that it’s nonreactive, it’s that it self-heals and is monolithic. From a reaction perspective, it’s stain-less, not stainless.
If you don’t want ANY reaction with foods, stick with enamel or glass. But reactivity isn’t the issue even our resident self-claimed supertaster claims it is, IMO.
Your methodology and philosophy are in perfect alignment with those of a lot of really great chefs.
That’s a pretty good place to be.
I like integral sauces less as I’ve gotten older. I tend to like the counterpoint of certain sauces, rather than ones that just magnify what I’m already tasting in the protein on the plate. And I like making sauces. My wife doesn’t call this stuff my mid-life crisis, but my 3/4’s life crisis. Wait until she sees the 911 due for delivery in August.
I’ll be sure to contemplate material science when I’m at Per Se this weekend, eating food that will have a 99.99999% chance of having been prepared in stainless steel pots and pans.
By the way, do you have an academic qualification in material science and/or physics?
Like I’ve asked – do you have an academic qualification in any scientific discipline relevant to the material used in cookware – metallurgy, materials, physics, anything? Otherwise, you’re just finding stuff that amounts to little more than confirmation bias. Sure, a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then, but that would be the extent of it.
Yes, all of the above, and all together in actual cookware development, manufacture and consulting.
What academic credentials do you have in those fields, Charlie? For that matter, what academic credentials have you in food science? You seem to have cooked in some restaurants, is all I see.
I have no problem with pan reactions with foods as long as I can’t taste the reaction in the food I eat.
The downside to carbon steel to me was, that I could taste the reaction as soon I cooked anything with a liquid. That’s why I ended up using my carbon steel pans for high heat searing and not much else.
I still don’t miss any of my carbon steel pans and I’m glad I got rid of them all.
I respect that view. Liquid foods, especially acidic ones, are likely to “get past” the seasoning to some degree. You may have been tasting some combination of dissolved seasoning and the reaction products themselves.
At first I thought carbon steel pans were the most versatile pans out there - I read that carbon steel pans could be used for everything, except cooking acidic sauces for hours.
What I found out after testing them and using my carbon steel pans for a year or two was, that for me they weren’t that versatile at all. In fact I ended up using my carbon steel pans for high heat searing and not much else.
I still didn’t like the fact, that I couldn’t soak them in water after using them. And if I forgot a carbon steel pan after making dinner, my wife would often clean the pans for me the next day and that meant she also soaked them, no matter what type of pan it was. Hence I had a rusty carbon steel pan the next day I woke up. This happned numerous times for me. I also got tired of not being able to really wash my CS pans in detergent thoroughly without having to oil the pan afterwards.
In short - carbon steel pans are simply not for me.
The Demeyere Proline pans are now the pans I use for high heat searing, and they do a better job at it than even my thickest Darto pans. The Proline pans sear far more evenly and is just a better pan for my preferences.
It’s not a suitable material for an integral sauce made with the fond left from “searing.” It never was. Any suggestion otherwise was a fundamental misunderstanding of the process of making a pan sauce, which almost always include an acidic component.
I graduated from LCB Paris in 1984 (in my profile) and then cooked in France and Switzerland for the next 20 years. My late mother was French, and virtually all my living relatives other than my own immediate family, are French, and I have an ancestral home in France near Lyon. All of this I’ve posted before, either here or on Chowhound. My mother taught me to cook, and she was a devastatingly accomplished cook.
In addition to all that, I have a degrees in accounting and finance and am licensed as a CPA in D.C., Maryland, and New York. I run a small ($75M) private equity fund that invests in restaurants, mostly in Manhattan, where I live with my wife and youngest daughter. Our oldest daughter is a sophomore at NYU.
So all the recipes for pan sauces that suggest deglazing the pan after a high heat searing process are not really grasping how a real original pan sauce should be made ?
When I think about it, having dark charred small pieces of high heat seared meat remainings in a pan sauce as the so called ‘fond’ really always struck me as being too bitter and not that particularely tasteful as the fond part of a pan sauce.
How do you personally prefer to make your pan sauces after searing a piece of meat/steak, Charlie ?
If you burn the fond, you don’t have a flavor base for the sauce so “high heat” is taken with a grain of salt. The fond should never be more than a medium gold/brown or it will be bitter.
Pan sauce:
Pour off the fat
Sweat aromatics
Deglaze with wine to a syrup
Add dark chicken stock and tender herbs if desired.
Reduce
Strain aromatics, sauce back in pan
Reduce
Add cream and reduce or mount with butter off the heat if not using cream
Should nap the back of a spoon or something like
There are variations. This is one way to go about it. Thousands of others. Literally.
