Cast iron pan for me. Holds it’s heat really well so nice to cook with as well. This is an old fashioned black cast iron pan that luckily is really common in the charity shops here in Sweden. I think I have 5 of them of various sizes and none of them cost more than £7. 🙂

@dyna-ti,
Here you go mate, turns out we’re both correct!
https://www.valleymill.co.uk/blog/baking-in-lockdown-welsh-cakes/#:~:text=%20Seasoning%20instructions%20%201%20There%20is%20a,blacken.%20After%20around%2020%20minutes%20the…%20More%20

From that link above:

Protect your hands with an oven glove and carefully rub a mixture of fat or vegetable oil and salt onto the cooking surface, using a thick cotton cloth.

The essential thing for seasoning cast iron is fat. Salt alone won’t do it. Fat alone will.

Here now, haud on a wee bit. I was told it was salt, Johnny was told it was oil. Is this now a third way, salt mixed with oil.
This is getting complex 😆

Oil and salt is the way I know to season cast iron or steel.

As I understand it, the mechanism of seasoning is that the oil gets burned into the surface and forms a non-stick surface. Hot salt will not do this, if it does anything, it will just cause the pan to rust. No idea what difference it will make adding salt to the oil, but salt alone is not going to form a non-stick surface.

Cast iron steak pan has been on the go for 15 years, like my aforementioned wok, it was mega cheap, sub tenner IIRC. Seasoned with oil, it’s been superb. As above, oil forms a nice seal, canny really see what salt does.

I’m a fan of Serious Eats, and this is how they do it:
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-season-cast-iron-pans-skillets-cookware

No salt involved. And I’ve never heard of anyone using salt to season a pan… wonder if someone, somewhere along the line, got confused when they heard the word “season” and thought salt would be necessary?

Nonstick pan in the dishwasher?!? Just rinse and wipe.

Next you’ll be saying your knives are a bit dull after dishwashing. Got a real shock when a relative described how my global knives were much sharper than theirs. The secret of bluntness was putting them in a dishwasher.

pans. I used an IKEA non-stick for a while. Worked well but after ~4 years the non-stick coating started flaking off. Went to John Lewis. Saw a wide range of pans. Picked 2 Tefal ones. Not expensive. Nice sizes and shapes. Plastic handles (one of my children asked for ‘not metal handles. They get hot’). Robust-looking non-stick surface. So far so good. The plastic handles wobble a bit already though. Would go for metal, riveted, handles if my children didn’t have such sensitive hands.

I expect to replace the Tefal pans at some point. Non-stick surfaces do not last forever even if well cared for.

by the way, non-stick Teflon®? Seen ‘dark waters’? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/

cast iron. Great. Not quite as non-stick as some suggest but if used properly they’re great. Especially for flash-cooking on an induction hob. Much better at searing sequential stuff than lighter pans.

to season a cast iron pan: fat. Rub it on. Bake it for an hour at ~200Celsius. Repeat. Salt? Not come across that before as a seasoning technique.

Edit fixed idiot autocorrect

Some people apparently use salt as an abrasive to clean cast iron pans. My guess is that somewhere along the line instructions got confused, the proper sequence being to clean it with salt to remove stuck on food then re-season with oil to repair the non-stick surface. That’s the only thing I can think of, no idea why people would think hot salt would do anything useful.

Another cast iron/carbon steel pan user here who’s never heard of the salt thing.

BTW Serious Eats is a pretty nerdy source I’d be surprised if they’d got it wrong/missed anything.

I’m happy with my Tesco one.

It’s pointless trying to preserve them, my OH and the MIL insist on using metal utensils, I’m just being an arse insisting on wood or silicone apparently.

Plus I bought a dishwasher precisely because I don’t want to wash things up by hand. So sod it they go in the dishwasher and die in about 18-24 months.

That said my favourite pan is actually a stainless one without any coating, easy enough to scrub and every so often gets the wire wool treatment… Lasted far longer than any non-stick ones so far.

Just take better care of them. Dont’ use metal implements (plastic only), dont’ overheat them, and only handwash (wipe out with kitchen paper first), keep a few layers of kitchen paper in them if you stack them inside each other.

Our non stick frying pans get used a lot. We’ve got a fancy le cruset one with a glass lid, one that came free with our induction hob and a small high end tefal. They’re all at least 6 years old now and while they’re showing a few signs of wear they look like they’ll be good for some years yet.

TK Maxx always have some good quality nonstick pans – I’ll buy some from there when ours do need replacing .

Recently got a Scoville that seems great so far. Our local Asda seem to have a job lot of them which they’re selling pretty cheap (I got a big frying pan for I think £12).

I’m a convert to De Buyer Carbon steel pans which are lighter and more “glass friendly” than cast iron (although I do also have a couple of skillets).

Seasoning is simple* and the pans are pretty cheap and will very likely outlast me.

*I also like that you can nuke them (with oven cleaner as one option) if you like and start completely from fresh.