To me, someone who celebrates a bit more of the spectrum than most: Metal hot. Make food hot.
Non-stick means easier cleanup, but my wife seems to think cast-iron is necessary for certain things (searing a prime rib roast, for example.).
After I figure those out, then I gotta figure out gas vs. electric vs. induction vs infrared…
I don’t like non-stick anymore because the coating eventually gets all scratched up and doesn’t work as good. Idk how it gets scratched up, I never used metal. My ex did, so maybe it was her.
Cast Iron, if maintained well (i.e just don’t cook anything too acidic. You don’t usually need to re-season), lasts forever. It’s also great for when you want to sear something without the pan cooling down once you put your food on it. Because it’s thick and stores a bunch of heat. Yet somehow it also gets hot pretty fast.
I don’t get stainless steel personally. Apparently to get things to not stick, I should be using MORE heat? But I already use a lot of heat! On the up side, they get hot really fast.
Copper and carbon steel I’ve never used. I hear carbon steel is similar to cast iron in many ways, but easier to maintain?
If you’re doing a new build, definitely go induction. Electric sucks because it’s kinda slow-ish to get started, gas sucks because either you need to have a gas line built to your house if you don’t already have one, or you change out the gas container every now and then (and that thing is heavy, mine’s 17 KG of gas + whatever the huge chunk of metal weighs, which is definitely more than 17 KG). Plus the whole issue of, y’know, freshly burnt hydrocarbons (yay CO2 and potentially other gases). Oh and gas explosions aren’t common, but they can happen!
Only downside of induction is that if you lose power, you can’t cook. A wood-burning stove as a backup is excellent in this case, because depending on what your heating system is, you may also lose heating if power is gone.
May be a little expensive but they sell batteries to run a home, usually in connection with solar but doesn’t have to be. You should be able to handle a power outage for a day or two (and after that is when it’s great have solar to recharge them).
For a house in town it’s likely expensive but you also are less likely to have long outages. For a rural house it may be cheaper than the alternative of propane
Tbf I’ve never had to go more than a couple of hours without power. Which is good because a couple of days of power with heating could be couple hundred kilowatt hours once I actually replace my wood furnace with a heat pump. Right now I just have one air to air heat pump to help out, but eventually air to water is needed. Can’t do ground source unfortunately.
Solar doesn’t really do anything here in the winter when the batteries would likely be drained. We get like 6 hours of daylight and you it’s almost always overcast all day. It’s great in the summer though, assuming said batteries can be drained to sell to the grid when power is expensive and recharged when the prices are too low to sell to the grid.
A propane BBQ works as a backup cooking option.
It’s not particularly good to use indoors and very impractical to use for multiple meals when it’s like -30 outside. Also I’mma gatekeep now and say that BBQ should be wood or charcoal, not propane. More smoky flavor.
That said, obviously one should own a BBQ of SOME sort if they own a house. I think it’s legally mandated in my country that any home with even a tiny bit of land around it, needs to have something that can be used to produce burnt shashlik and sausages.
Seconding your thoughts on nonstick and cast iron. I haven’t used other kinds of pans, but I like cast iron enough that I’d consider having at least one of them to be essential.
Getting a good sear is pretty helpful towards avoiding something sticking.
non stick is fine if it’s seasoned or anodized.
i have anodized non stick and it’s worked for over a decade. it’s not cheap though, easily $80 a pot/pan.