Put cheap boards in the dishwasher if you want to. If you got a year’s worth of hard use out of a board that didn’t cost that much I’d say you were doing great. Most will get well more than that, even boards that go into a dishwasher.
I think she treats her wood cutting as more frequent disposable (change once every 6 months to 12 months), and I don’t believe she buy any great or expensive cutting boards ($100+). I think hers were like $20-30. I have never seen her cutting boards. We spoke in her office and she was asking me why her cutting boards do not last long. Somewhere in the conversations, she revealed the cutting boards are put in dish washer. Now that I think about it more.
In grand scheme of things, $20-40 per year is not a lot, but it does seem wasteful to do so to the cutting boards.
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It’s more like $40-$60/year. If she just took care of even a cheap board properly, it’d last at least 10 years. Over a cook’s lifetime, the savings could be in thousands of dollars.
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The more I cook, the more obvious this very obvious sentence becomes:
For the last 5-6 years I’ve tried adapting to the ‘rules’ of using carbon steel pans, non stick pans, clad/stainless steel pans and on the way I naively thought I also would improve my skills as a home chef.
Well in a way it did improve my skills, because I was forced to understand how different type cookware behaves in different scenarios in the kitchen. So it has made me a better cook to be honest.
But in this process I also realised that you don’t necessarily have better technique and understanding of cooking processes because you for instance know a carbon steel pan needs to be heated to a certain point before you can cook with it efficiently without eggs or potatoes sticking to the pan. It’s nice to know IF you use a carbon steel pan for eggs and fried potatoe, but TOTALLY IRRELEVANT information, if you have settled on using the far more effective non stick plastic covered cookware for these delicate items and you get foolproof delicious tasting results far superior to what a carbon steel pan can manage !!!
I really like my carbon steel pans - but there’s also only one thing where they to me excel over anything else including 2.5 copper and 7-ply - HIGH HEAT SEARING. They don’t excel at anything else in my 6-7 years of experience cooking with these type pans.
We still have an electric stove in our cabin. It took me probably two dozen omelettes to figure out the exact heat setting for my favorite carbon steel pan, and sometimes I still don’t get it exactly right (perfect thin skin barely holding the custardy interior without splitting). My wife walks to the stove and knocks her first few out of the park with her GreenPan. I honestly think the GreenPan heats more evenly. The CS pan sometimes seems to have a mind of its own, but I’m sure it’s probably the stove.
Lesson in there somewhere…
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This is funny: Both you and Claus are actually making the case that cookware choices matter, and are relevant no matter how good your technique.
Familiarity matters. I could do the omelettes in a hubcap, once I’m dialed in. An omelette mostly defies cooking by sight and smell. Most everything else, doesn’t.
By the end of May the cabin kitchen remodel and expansion (and other general improvements and upgrades) will be complete and we’ll be rid of the electric range. Yay. I have my retirement kitchen. The cabin and acreage are in a trust, fully funded to pay property taxes and maintenance essentially in perpetuity. The girls have a place to live for the rest of their lives, and future grandkids as well, if needed. At a minimum it’ll be there for the holidays. Not bad for a cook like me.
The GreenPans are probably better cookware than they’re given credit for. Or my wife makes them look good. Take your pick, or maybe a little of both. She’d rather cook in them than vintage copper. When she’s in the kitchen, she’s boss.
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I bought a Green Pan and returned it.
The instructions stated that extra virgin olive oil can’t be used in a Green Pan. For me, this is a limitation I can’t work with.
Interesting limitation.
Weird! Do they say why? I use EVOO with almost everything (even when neutral oils are called for) 'cause I just luv the flavor.
"Please remember that olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, butter and oil sprays quickly start to smoke and burn when the pan is hot. This causes carbonization of the pan, which can damage the non-stick layer. "
The woman at Green Pans said that extra virgin olive oil has a low smoke point. She then listed other oils that I could use including butter, clarified or not clarified and coconut oil, virgin or filtered.
I pointed out that unclarified butter and virgin olive oil have lower smoke points than extra virgin olive oil. She kept repeating that extra virgin olive oil has a low smoke point.
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There just seems to be so much wrong with that article. First is that if I am gonna shallow fry, why in the world would I use a non-stick pan?
Re: “Another consideration if using (expensive) oil, is that it will turn your healthy fats into unhealthy/saturated fats. Avoid using them in combination with a ceramic non-stick pan.”… WTF?
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Yeah… EVOO has a smoke point of 375-390°F. If you need a hotter pan than that why would you use non-stick. Not for eggs, battered foods, or anything else I can think of. And if you really need those higher temps (like for a sear on meats), you’ll want a CI pan that can keep those temps.
Good decision on returning it as they seem clueless.
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I saw those purported limitations when I got a Green Pan and just ignored them. Doesn’t seem to have caused any problems. My instructions at the time also said “butter can carbonize/harm surface” and indicated clarified instead.
I’m mostly cooking eggs and sausages in the thing, but do sauté veggies in olive oil a fair bit. And I am not going to be doing any high-temp cooking in it (like Scott mentions - uses non-coated for that), or any other non-stick, so I just don’t worry about it.
Sometime it is tough to tell the difference between a serious warning vs a mild warning. They may do this warning as a line-in-the-sand to keep their warranty intact. e.g. if a customer uses olive oil, then Greenpan considers the warranty is out.
Anolon also considers the warranty is void if cooking spray is used on their nonstick cookware.
“The use of aerosol cooking sprays is not recommended for use on non-stick cookware as cooking sprays burns at lower temperatures and will damage the non-stick coating of your product. If you want to use cooking sprays for flavor, spray the food before putting in the pan. Butter, margarine, peanut oil, coconut oil and olive oil are some alternate choices for flavor and will also assist in browning your foods. Please note that the use of cooking sprays on your non-stick coating will void your product warranty.”
Why You Should Never Use Cooking Spray On Your Nonstick Pans (southernliving.com)
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This is funny -
Won’t one still then have cooking spray in contact with the pan? But to be fair, maybe people transfer less of the spray oil onto food than they would if spray coating the pan bottom.
As an aside, I always thought the problem was the dimethyl silicone which can build up over time and block up the surface structure of traditional PTFE coatings like Anolon and All-Clad’s hard-anodized aluminum nonsticks.
I thought so too, but maybe both situations are true. I think the Greenpan warning for not using any olive oil (even if highly refined) is just a way for them to not take any chance. e.g. it is easier to tell me not to use any olive oil instead of going into the highly refined, partally refined… cold pressed, so they threw an easy statement of “No Olive Oil. Period.”
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I used to put hot non-stick pots and pans in the sink immediately after use and then turn on the faucet to fill them with water. But one day I saw something on TV here in Japan that said doing so is a common cause for early failure of the non-stick surface AND for causing the cookware to warp. I stopped putting them in the sink after and let them cool off on their own not even leaving them on the stovetop with the heat turned off. Sure enough, my pots and pans last longer and the non-stick surface remains non-stick! If I’m worried something in the pots/pans will stick to the surface after cooking/before washing, I quickly wipe the insides with a slightly damp dishcloth or paper towel. I’m so glad I saw that on TV!
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Not saying I agree with it, just posting the company’s rationale. 
One gets the idea reading that page that perhaps Green Pan doesn’t think its client base…knows how to cook?
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