This content explores the science behind frying pan materials and cooking performance, revealing that the optimal pan isn't necessarily the most expensive, and a simple burner-pan size match significantly impacts cooking results.
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This is a $4,000 frying pan made from
sterling silver. And this is my $40
carbon steel pan that I've cooked with
for years.
This silver pan sent me down a rabbit
hole of testing. Stainless steel, carbon
steel, cast iron, aluminum, copper, and
yes, silver to find out which metal
actually makes the best pan. What I
learned made me swap my trusted carbon
steel and cast iron pans for a new daily
driver. And no, it's not the silver one.
I also found a simple mistake that makes
every pan [music] perform worse than it
should. Fix that and it almost doesn't
matter what your pan is made from. Wait,
you're probably wondering why anybody
would buy a $4,000 frying pan. I mean,
that's insane, right?
Let me try to explain. I am obsessed
with tools that are thoughtfully
designed, well-built, and uncompromising
in performance. It's the approach I take
with the tools I design and build
myself, like the combustion predictive
thermometer. It has eight evenly spaced
temperature sensors to find the true
core and predict when your food will be
ready. It's built for high heat cooking
up to 900°, Wi-Fi enabled, so you can
keep an eye on your cook from anywhere,
and you can use it with or without an
app using the optional kitchen display.
You can learn more about my products
here or by going to combustion gut. Now,
back to the silver pan. When I came
across engineer turned silvermith Jim
Hammond making solid silver pans at
Duparquet Cookware in Rhode Island, I
rationalized my purchase was rational. I
mean, there's over $1600 of actual
silver in it, so technically it's an
investment that will grow in value. Right.
And then there's the craftsmanship, the
gentle curves and polished mirror
finish. Stout silver rivets bonded to a
handle covered in handstitched leather.
And it has that perfect balance. Not too
heavy and not too light.
On paper, this should be the ultimate
pan because it spreads more heat faster
than any other metal. To understand why,
we need to look at two things together.
Conductivity, how easily heat moves, and
heat capacity, how much heat it holds.
The ratio of those two measures gives
you diffusivity, which is the single
best measure for predicting a pan's
potential performance for even heating
and powerful searing.
Let's start with stainless steel with
about 6 units of diffusivity. It's tough
and non-reactive, but it is actually
terrible at moving heat. Step up to
carbon steel and cast iron, both around
10 units of diffusivity, better than
stainless, but still pretty sluggish.
Then comes aluminum, jumping way up to
about 62 units and six times better than
cast iron at spreading heat. Copper is
renowned for a reason. About 97 units,
which is why old school French cookware
was always copper. And finally, quite a
bit ahead of copper is silver, 147
units. That's about 25 times better at
moving heat than stainless steel. The
only natural material that moves heat
faster is diamond. It sits way off this
chart at about 700 units. Roughly five
times better than silver and 120 times
better than stainless steel at spreading
heat evenly. Unfortunately, I couldn't
find a solid diamond frying pan, so I
But many cooks still swear by cast iron
and carbon steel for a perfect sear,
including me.
That's why this carbon steel pan has
always been my go-to. But you know how
that first pancake never turns out
right? That's because it's telling you
something about the diffusivity of your
pan. So, can a better pan fix that?
Same batter, same cooking, but look at
this. Totally different results.
Pancakes are perfect for showing heat
patterns. Even a few degrees difference
in the surface temperature changes how
it cooks. So each pancake literally maps
the hot and cold spots of our pans. Each
pan was preheated until its temperature
was stable, adjusting the burner so the
center of every pan started at the same
temperature. Cast iron and carbon steel
look almost the same. A burned bullseye
in the middle that fades fast towards
the edges. That maps to the surface
temperature swinging over 100° from the
edge to the center of the ironbased
pans. The diffusive metal pans far more
even, less than 20° in most cases. The
first pancake knocked down those hot
spots and even the surface temperature a
little, but even the later pancakes
cooked in the ironbased pans still look
rustic. The hot spots never really go
away. With high diffusivity pans, you
don't need that sacrificial pancake.
From the get- go, pancakes cooked in
aluminum look pretty good. Mostly even,
just a hint darker in the middle. Copper
is noticeably better, more uniform
browning and silver. It is annoying how
perfect the pancake looks. Pancake after
pancake came out flawless from the
silver pan. Among the high diffusivity
pans, aluminum is nearly as good as
copper and silver, though, which is
weird, right? I mean, silver's twice as
diffusive as aluminum. Turns out
aluminum cheats. This pan is twice as
thick, 4 mm, instead of two.
That extra thickness gives heat more
room to move around, like adding lanes
to a highway. Now, you might be
thinking, why not do that with iron or
carbon steel, but you'd need about 70
mm, nearly 3 in, of metal, and the pan
would weigh more than 40 lb. So,
diffusivity wins for pancakes. But
searing's different, right? For a hard
sear, you want a pan that can hold a lot
of heat, which is why I've always
trusted carbon steel and cast iron. If
you multiply the weight of the pan by
the specific heat of its metal and its
temperature, you get a measure of its
heat capacity, which is the total energy
held inside a pan. Stout cast iron holds
about 135,000 jewels. The slightly
thinner carbon steel pan around 117,000.
But aluminum isn't that far behind at
100,000. Copper trails at 88,000 and way
behind all the other metals is silver
with about 62,000 jewels of store heat
energy, about half that of iron and
steel. These rankings are the reverse of
So, which wins the race for a hard sear,
To keep it fair, I'm taking the burner
out of the equation. Every pan starts at
the same surface temperature of 600°
before the flame is turned off and a
single pork chop is placed in the center
of the pan.
All that matters is the energy stored in
the pan. I'm recording two things. The
sound of the sizzle
and what the infrared camera sees. The
sizzle tells us the surface is still hot
enough to flash water to steam. No
sizzle, no sear. And by spray painting
the surface of all the shiny pans black,
they all have the same emissivity so the
infrared camera can see how the heat
flows to where it's needed in each pan.
High diffusivity silver. Its heat flows
fast towards the food from every
direction and the surface of the pan
cools evenly as the sear uses up all of
the heat in the pan. This is exactly
what you want. Copper is nearly as good
with a steady and even temperature drop
across most of the surface, while the
sizzling lasts longer from its higher
Aluminum's half as diffusive as silver,
but its thicker base gives heat more
lanes to flow, so its surface also cools
evenly as the heat moves around to keep
the sear going.
carbon steel. You can still see hot
spots around the edges of the pan that
aren't contributing to the sear. That's
just wasted heat. Cast iron is the same
story. The pan is still glowing hot
around the food after the sizzle has
stopped. Its stored heat simply can't
flow through the sluggish metal fast
enough to keep the sear going.
In the end, Fast and Nimble Silver
dumped all its heat into the pork chop
in a quick 2 and 1/2 minutes, while my
heavy cast iron pan kept the sizzle
going longer than all the other pans at
over 8 minutes, a bit more than 3 and
1/2 times as long as silver.
So, iron and steel hold more total heat,
but it doesn't really matter if the heat
can't go to where it's useful, which is
under the food. Despite its lightweight,
aluminum actually holds nearly as much
heat as my carbon steel and only about
26% less than cast iron. Its high
diffusivity means it can move that heat
around the pan to where it's needed,
which is why it kept the sear going for
well over 6 minutes, vesting all but the
cast iron pan. So, it's kind of the
perfect middle ground. Good diffusivity,
plenty of heat capacity, and light
enough to easily handle. Maybe there's a
reason this pan is ubiquitous in
restaurants. Okay, but how do the pork
chops actually look?
Not fully seared yet. Even when starting
the pans at 600°, they all ran out of
steam before the chops were fully
seared. And these pork chops all look
very similar despite significant
differences in both the heat capacity
and diffusivity of the pans.
So, that's pretty strong evidence that
what's underneath the pan matters as
much or more than the pan itself. Now,
you probably think I'm about to compare
gas, electric, and induction burners.
They all have their pros and cons, and
honestly, they can all be made to work,
but that's a topic for another video.
[snorts] Now, in restaurants, I mostly
cooked on carbon steel pans on all kinds
of burners, and I never once gave a
thought to hotspots. The pans just
worked. But when I started testing
cookware at home, the results were not
the same. Professional stoves aren't
just powerful. They're oversized. Large,
powerful burners, or even enormous
French tops that act like one massive
even burner. But domestic gas burners
are nothing like that. Smaller rings and
smaller flames. And the most common
stove in the US isn't gas at all. It's
an electric coil about 6 to 8 in wide.
Watch how my favorite 12-in cast iron
skillet heats on this 6-in electric burner.
burner.
There's about a 200° variation from the
hottest to the coldest spot. Now, an 8in
pan on an 8-in coil burner, which
reduces the variation in temperature to
less than 50° across the bottom of the
pan. Same stove, same temperature, and
metals with very similar diffusivities,
but the pan that fits the burner heats
evenly and will cook evenly. I don't
know how else to say this, but um size
matters. Here's a pancake cooked in my
8-in carbon steel pan on an 8 in burner.
And here's the same pancake in the same
pan on a 6-in burner.
You can pretty easily see how much more
evenly cooked the pancake is when the
burner is sized just right. Here's
what's happening. When your burner is
smaller than your pan, heat has to
spread sideways through the metal before
it reaches the food. And that spread is
limited by the pan's diffusivity.
Professional stoves avoid this by
putting the heat everywhere. At home,
you can't make your burner bigger, but
you can match the right burner to the
right pan. For low diffusivity metals
like carbon steel or cast iron, having a
burner that's at least 90% of the
diameter of the pan makes a big
difference. Because if the heat only
needs to travel straight up from the
burner through the pan to the food,
diffusivity matters far less. That's why
matching your burner to any pan feels
like a better pan. So far, we've looked
at pans made from single metals, and
each has its strength and its weakness.
Silver, for example, is impressive for
both its performance and its price.
Copper is similarly beautiful, but high
maintenance. In restaurants where I
worked, like the Fat Duck, polished
copper like this was for the dining
room, not the line.
The workh horses were aluminum, carbon
steel, and stainless. But you've
probably noticed I haven't shown
stainless steel in the results so far.
That's because a pure stainless steel
pan mostly doesn't exist. And that's
because pan manufacturers know that
stainless is an absolutely terrible
metal for moving heat around. Twice as
bad as cast iron or carbon steel. But
stainless is wonderful for durability,
strength, being non-reactive and
induction compatible, and not needing
any maintenance. In that sense,
stainless is nearly a perfect metal.
Cookware engineers know this, which is
why they laminate stainless with high
diffusivity metals like aluminum or
sometimes copper, or they braze a thick
aluminum plate to the bottom. So, nearly
every stainless steel pan is actually a
combination of stainless and usually
aluminum. And testing a pan like this
would have been misleading since it
performs more like the metal at its core
and not pure stainless steel. The
aluminum core heats quickly, spreads
heat to the edges, and buffers small
burner mismatches so the surface is
evenly hot. The stainless exterior makes
it induction compatible and durable, and
you can scour it clean. It's not the
fanciest pan I own, but it is a very
forgiving daily driver. And no
sponsorship here, by the way. I bought
this pan from Maiden with my own money
and I like cooking with it. My wife
likes cooking with it too because it's
lighter than our carbon steel and cast
iron pans and that is another benefit of
aluminum cores. They're lighter. Its
only real downside is that because it's
stainless steel, it never develops that
self-healing semi-nonstick patina that
is really useful for certain dishes like
a classic French omelette where a
seasoned surface is unbeatable.
And that is why I actually have a second
pan for day-to-day use. And it is very
close to being my ideal pan. This is an
8 and 12 inch frying pan from Strata
that I bought on Amazon. It's a sturdy
triply pan with a stainless steel
exterior, a diffusive aluminum core, and
important to me, a carbon steel
interior. You can see I've built up a
nice non-stick patina of seasoning from
a lot of cooking.
It's not perfect, though. The handle's a
bit too heavy, and it throws it out of
balance. I'm willing to overlook that to
get the benefits of carbon steel that I
love with the performance of aluminum.
And while it isn't as non-stick as
Teflon, it's nonstick enough that with a
bit of practice, you can make a very
nice French omelette. And then there's
my silver pan. It is absurdly expensive
and not a practical purchase, but as a
work of craftsmanship, of unrivaled
performance, it is impressive. Plus, and
I must be honest here,
I love cooking with it. It is no choice.
If you have the means, I highly
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