How do professional cooks and chefs manage to cook without needing non-stick pans?

https://www.quora.com/How-do-professional-cooks-and-chefs-manage-to-cook-without-needing-non-stick-pans

Very easily, in fact.

To begin, let’s consider what makes food stick to a pan in the first place.

Pans, being made out of metal, have irregularities on the surface that I refer to as pores.

Magnified view of stainless steel

When a pan is heated, these pores “open up,” or expand. This happens on a microscopic level, not visible to the eye, but it’s happening. When a pan cools, these pores close back up, or contract. When you hear someone talk about “seasoning a pan,” they are taking advantage of this by using oil to fill in these little pores.

The pan heats, oil is applied, becomes polymerized and rubbed into the pores, when the pan cools, the polymerized oil gets trapped in these pores as they close back up (thanks to Andrew Rothman for pointing this out in the comments). Excess oil is removed and the pan takes on a slicker, shinier appearance due to the plasticity of the polymerized oil. To be true, this does not make the pan “non-stick” as many claim, but it does aid the cook by making the pan a little more resistant to food sticking on it.

Now that we know that, what happens when you add food to a hot pan?

Water is in every single food you will ever cook, from a green bean or piece of asparagus, to a filet of meat or fillet of fish. As food heats, and especially when it is cold and touching an extremely hot surface, water will be immediately released and begin to evaporate.

When water hits your pan, it will cool it. Not to mention the food is colder than the pan anyway, which will inevitably cool your pan to a minor degree (especially depending on how much food you add to the pan), but as soon as that food hits the pan, we hear a sizzle. This is the water content being violently released from the food item, and splattering occurs when the water reacts with the hot oil. That water content is most often the reason that food is sticking to a pan.

As the water is released, it cools the pan. It causes the aluminum/steel/iron molecules to contract, making those little pores close back up, but as they do, tiny fragments of your food get trapped in those pores, effectively affixing the food to the pan! Now we know how and why food sticks to pans.

The trick then, is to control your heat so this doesn’t happen. There are many ways to do this…

Oil facilitates the transfer of heat extremely well. Hot oil in your pan will work to keep those pores hot and open despite the release of water. The trick is the oil transferring heat quicker than the water can cool it. This is why “seasoned pans” are more effective than unseasoned ones. As your pan heats and the pores open up, they are also well lubricated, helping to ensure any food fragments can slide out of a shrinking pore when water content is released.

Another trick I like to use when cooking a fillet is to gently slide the surface of the fish across the surface of the pan once or twice before dropping it completely down. This really helps get a good layer of oil under that fish so it won’t stick. Of course you should do this carefully as to avoid splashing and also damaging the integrity of the fillet or skin on it.

It’s also very good technique to gently pat dry any excess moisture from the surface of the food you want to add to a hot pan. If you’re using salt to season first, like in a salt sear, apply the salt the moment before you hit the pan. Salt will draw water to the surface of meat or fish, and salting even a minute in advance will cause that flesh to become wet enough to possibly cause sticking problems.

Here’s an interesting thing… if your food does stick to the pan, consider leaving it stay put. Eventually your pan’s temperature will rise back up again and those pores will open back up, releasing the food stuck to the pan! Trying to move that food before this happens will definitely result in you ripping the food and leaving some behind, still stuck. This small amount of food left behind will heat much faster than the bigger (or whole) piece and burn. This can affect the flavor profile of your food (making it taste burnt). It’s also a pain in the rear to clean afterwards. No bueno.

Not adding too much cold food to a hot pan at once will also enable you to control the temperature of the cooking surface.

Cooks learn this through experience, without necessarily knowing what exactly is happening, just that it does. They learn how to determine the temperature of their pan by sight, touch, timing, or by putting a drop of water on it and observing the reaction.

Good cooks can look at oil in a pan and see if that oil is up to a proper cooking temperature. And that leads me to the number one reason we don’t need nonstick pans. We cook with oil. That might be some kind of vegetable oil, or butter, or animal fat, or even any combination of the above.

Personally I generally prefer to heat some oil, then add whole butter to it and foam the butter. The water in the butter keeps it cool enough to foam while still being hot enough to sear. This adds good rich flavor, so long as you don’t scorch the butter. I usually add more butter as the foaming recedes. Burnt oil tastes like crap.

Even given all this, it is not uncommon to see nonstick pans occasionally used in pro kitchens. Lots of establishments will use them for omelettes and things of that nature, though I prefer a cast iron omelette pan.

Always remember, cooking is not just an art, but a science. At its essence it is simple chemistry… applying heat to alter the makeup of matter. Cooks learn how to do this in a practical way, and even if they don’t understand what’s actually happening (often the case), they know that it does happen, and through experience they can control those reactions.

Because of this, anything a professional cook can do in a professional kitchen can be replicated by an amateur in a home kitchen, so long as they understand the underlying principles of the science. Hell, it can even be done on a campfire.

Tools are important for sure, but as the adage goes, “it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools,” so the inverse is also true… it’s a poor craftsman who relies on his tools. Better to trust instinct and experience than a pan.