What cooking techniques need more evidence?
There are many tips or techniques that are strongly recommended for cooking, but it's hard to know which are evidence based and which are just passed along because that's what people always do.
Which are the tips that need more evidence?
Here are two that I struggle with, about stainless steel pans:
- Water drop test / leidenfrost
People say that if you get your pan hot enough to get the leidenfrost effect and then add the oil you'll have less problems with sticking. My problem with this is that it means the pan gets very very hot - much hotter than it needs to be for most uses. My other problem is they all say "Look, I'll cook eggs and they won't stick" and those videos either have a ton of cuts, or the eggs stick and you can see the person pushing with a spatula to get rid of the stick, or their "scrambled eggs" is really a chopped omelette.
- Heat the pan before adding oil. I don't understand this. Again, people say it helps prevent sticking, but they use some argument about "pores" which just feels hokey. I add cold oil to a cold pan and bring it up to temperature before adding food so the pan and oil are both at the right temperature, and food sticks and then releases, because that's how stainless pans work.
I'm aware I could be completely wrong here and that there may be a good evidence base for these, but they don't seem to work based on how I cook.
Heating the pan first then adding oil seems to be a TV chef thing possibly?
Both America's Test Kitchen and Food Lab seem to recommend heating them together! (I don't have a membership to ATK so I can't confirm but from the bit I could see/read that seemed correct.)
https://www.seriouseats.com/ask-the-food-lab-do-i-need-to-preheat-my-oil
I preheat my pans and add oil just before cooking. Largely because I know if I forget about the pan I don’t have to worry about burning the oil, and if prep-work is taking longer than my estimate I can take the pan off the heat.
Oh yeah that makes total sense. I'm not saying I never heat my pan first, just that when I went looking for evidence it sort of makes sense that this would be really common among TV chefs who have their pan hot and then add the oil for the camera.
I'm very similar in getting easily distracted
Preheating the pan before adding oil is standard for stir-frying, as demonstrated by almost any video by Chinese cooking demystified (whom I schill at every possible opportunity). I seem to remember them making a video in the past talking about the merits of this method for stir frying specifically, but I don't remember the details and I'm too lazy to find it. The only dish I put oil in a cold wok for is popcorn.
Makes sense that a wok would be different!
Out of curiosity, how do you keep the wok covered while making popcorn? I'd never even considered using a wok. I like the idea of easily tossing popcorn, but I don't think I've ever seen a wok lid. Do you just use any random lid as a loose drop lid?
They make wok lids! I bought mine for pretty cheap on amazon (I'd gotten my wok itself from different retailers who does more imports).
I thought Alton Brown did it but his recipe is for a covered metal bowl you hold over the stove with metal tongs. He covers it with foil with slits cut in it. Iirc he prefers it because the popped kernels stay up away from the heat better and the unpopped ones sink down easier.
So you could do the same with a wok!
One I learned last night is a challenge to the common wisdom that "the only acceptable meat for hamburgers is 80/20".
Last night, I used 90/10 for burgers for my family and all of them came out literally leaking juice all over our plates. These were all double-patty onion pseudo-smashburgers btw (not crushed down as hard.)
Standards in hamburger meat are pretty variable with time. Around 2005 I worked at a butcher block for a stint and the "base" grade of beef was 70/30, which you can barely find anymore, while 80/20 was the lean grade and you couldn't even get 90/10 unless you asked for us to custom-grind it. Now 80/20 is the standard almost everywhere, and you can pretty regularly find 90/10 or even leaner. At the time, everyone swore that 70/30 made the best hamburgers and 80/20 was "too lean".
The trick to making a burger juicy rather than dry is dependent on several factors, not merely fat content of the meat. Fluid retention is also governed by salt content, so premixing with a healthy quantity of salt (akin to dry-brining poultry) will significantly aid in fluid retention during cooking and result in an overall juicier burger. Fat does help, but especially in ground meats you will end up losing most of it as it renders out unless you have your burgers sitting there cooking in the drippings.
That's another one, actually. People seem convinced that mixing salt or other seasonings into the patty will ruin it. I don't know why these people hate properly seasoned beef.
Lol you can't get higher than 15% fat ground beef here in the Netherlands without going to a specialty butcher, so we've always made our burgers with 15% or less out of convenience. They're ridiculously juicy, like sure they could be even juicier, but I feel like at least 85% of a good juicy burger is technique over everything else.
There are a lot of cooking methods that are more tradition than useful. For instance, pretty much every method of determining doneness that does not involve a thermometer. One of the ones that bugs me the most is using a huge volume of water to cook pasta, which is wasteful and slows the process down. It also makes it hard to intuit how much salt to add.
Breadmaking has the worst of it because it seems that all of the popular videos are based on “artisan” or “traditional” styles which don’t keep in mind that the tools and techniques they are using were developed by professional bakers largely to make their bread look prettier. Most of those steps are completely unnecessary to achieve bread that will be dramatically better than any store-bought sliced bread. Nobody needs to know what a baker’s percentage is except for a baker.
Of all the techniques and styles related to baking bread, baker's percentage is one of the most useful things for me. Using baker's percentages, I can easily scale my recipes up or down, and it lets me easily track and compare different recipes.
If you're just making the same recipe week after week, then sure, it's not useful. But it's certainly useful when experimenting with different flours and volumes of water.
Right. Baker's percentages are isolation of variables type stuff and super duper useful. The core idea is basically that you scale your ingredients primarily with the amount of flour you're using, rather than the amount of dough you're making. If your recipe is 66% flour, 33% water, 1% salt, that's a pain to mess around with. I want the same amount, but mess with the water amount, how does that work? If the recipe is 100% flour, 2% salt, 50% water, then scaling water up and down is trivial, even if it slightly throws off how much dough you're making. Arguably, the amount of bread you receive is a function of flour use anyway.
But beyond that, a lot of the terminology and methodology around baking, bread baking in particular, is frustrating for evidence-based people. For example, the entire protein matrix, gluten development, stretching-folding-kneading part is super opaque and while there's some evidence out there, because of the complexity of the topic the readily available evidence doesn't nearly cover everything you might want to know. Similar things for anything microbe related. Yeast or sourdough development? Outcomes depend on a lot of factors and you're lucky if the evidence isolated even a handful of them at a time.
I'm glad that it works for you, but for most home cooks it doesn't make much sense. Baker's percentages are meant for high volume applications. How often do you need exactly 83% of a loaf? If you need to scale a recipe you can do it easily with multiplication or division just the same as you would do with any other recipe. You don't need percentages to experiment with different proportions of ingredients. Beyond that, most home cooks aren't actually baking enough bread to make baker's percentages worth learning.
Funny you ask, because I recently went from making loaves with 500g of flour to loaves with 400g of flour. So not quite 83%, but pretty close.
I don't know how often you think someone needs to bake to make something worth learning, but I bake it weekly, and I keep tuning my ratios to have enough bread for the week, and no more. 500g was too much, 400g seems fine for now. But beyond that, it also lets me easily incorporate other flours (rye, whole wheat, etc.) into the basic recipe and see how it turns out.
As a home baker, the scaling factor of baker's percentage is much more useful so that I can compare my once per week loaves with each other. If something doesn't work (for example, I added too much rye to a recent loaf and it was flatter and denser than I wanted), then I can look at how much I added (as a percentage) and scale it back from there, regardless of how big my loaf actually was.
And yes, it is just math. But it's math that simplifies a lot of conversions, and also makes it easier to remember recipes. I could start with a recipe with 483g flour, 338g water, and 10g of salt. Or I could make a recipe with any amount of flour, 70% water and 2% salt. It makes more sense to start with what you want and figure out the other numbers from there, rather than starting with a bunch of numbers and having to convert them all individually. It's also a lot easier. How do you scale that above recipe to use only 400g flour? You'll need 400g flour, 400/483x338g water, and 400/438x10g salt. Or... you could do 400g flour, 400x0.7g water, and 400x0.02g salt. I can do the latter in my head. I need a calculator to convert the former recipe.
This might be more of a case of where you are rather than what you are doing. If you are using the metric system where you are putting in hundreds of units then it makes a bit more sense, but here in the US people are baking with volumetric measures that are typically fractional, so it makes less sense to do the math that way here.
But it's also a matter of mindset. I am an intuitive cook. When I make my weekly loaf, it's by feel; I don't have a written recipe anywhere. I find baker's percentages to be alienating as a result. I know that my way of cooking is probably alienating to people who think like you do. Like I said, I'm glad that thinking this way works for you, but I don't consider it to be a necessity by any means.
Just to be extra pedantic, you don't need to know what a baker's percentage is for your example; that's just regular percentages. :P
Baking should always be by weight, not by volume. Things like flour, brown sugar, and salt vary dramatically in their densities depending on how you load your volumetric measuring device, and 1 cup of something isn't going to be the same every time.
If you're baking bread using volumetric measurements, you'll still end up with bread, and it probably won't be too different week to week, but it will occasionally be inconsistent and you might not know why. If you're baking something more temperamental, like cookies or pastry, then using volume for flour is going to make a much bigger difference batch to batch, and it will be difficult to achieve consistent results.
There are workarounds, like fluff, spoon, and level for flour, or packing as tight as you can for brown sugar, or having various conversion charts for different types of salt, but they're all subject to error, and more work than just weighing your ingredients. For the same price as a set of measuring cups/spoons, you can buy a scale, and have much more consistent and repeatable results.
My example is in baker's percentages, though I didn't write the 100% for flour. If you use regular percentages for my example, you end up with 28% flour (to 70% water), and I think that's just called soup.
I would agree with you about volumetric measurements, but there are two things to keep in mind. Number one is that I can't change the way people work, and people in this country use volumetric measurements. Number two is that volumetric is usually good enough that it doesn't really matter enough to get people to change things.
I personally prefer weight based measures. Especially when it comes to solids that melt at low temperatures like butter or shortening; measuring them by volume is a real pain.
I was born in the US, live in the US, and I cook by metric weights.
I know it's a small sample size, but once you teach someone to cook by (metric) weights they can quickly realize the utility.
For this, I recommend learning about gluten percentages as well! You can mix in vital wheat gluten (include it with the flour's weight when doing your calculations) to make any flour— rye, buckwheat, etc. — behave like bread flour in the oven.
Thanks! I started looking into this when I realized the dough wasn't right, but by that point it was too late to do anything for the loaf. It still tasted great, only the texture wasn't quite where I wanted it.
One interesting thing I noticed as I started investigating gluten percentages was that a lot of all purpose flour in Canada is about 13-14% protein. The only place I've found 10% AP flour is at Costco, though I'm sure it's available elsewhere. I hadn't thought about gluten content much before working with bread, but it definitely has an effect on cakes and cookies as well.
My biggest annoyance with flour labelling nowadays is when they give the nutrition facts per 30g instead of per 100g. 4g/30g protein could be anywhere between 11.6% and 15% protein, and that's a pretty big range when it comes to baking.
Could you walk through your argument like I was a simpleton because I don't really get it? If one likes bread making, it doesn't seem that far fetched to think they'll eventually start playing with different hydration levels. Besides, it's super simple to learn.
Obviously if you're just reading a recipe it's a different case.
Let's say you are working with a recipe that calls for two cups of water and two cups of flour. If you want to experiment with the hydration, you'd simply adjust the amount of water that goes into it. Say you do 1-1/4 cup of water instead. You just make a mental note, and if you decide you like how it turned out, you just take your recipe, strike out the old number and write the new one in. There is no math involved.
I'm actually minorly peeved at all the baker's stuff because bread is perhaps the easiest thing you can cook. It's just flour, water, and some form of leven, usually left out for a little bit and then put in a hot oven. It's something that everyone should know how to make, and I find all of these extra steps without the context of "you don't actually have to do this" to be unnecessary barriers that prevent people from trying it. Baking percentages are easy to learn, yes, but they are unnecessary.
I guess we're just philosophically different kinds of bakers.
For me, learning about baker's percentage — and a few related concepts, like learning about gluten percentage — was a revelation for me. It freed me up from being a slave to the recipe and allowed me to improvise. Now I can makes loaves of bread out of any type of flour or combination of flours, I can add in whatever additional ingredients come to mind (fruit, seeds, etc.), I can make loaves of any size, and I can make them all to my preferring kneading method (I prefer to start with a small hand mixer and then switch to hand kneading, and virtually no existing recipes cater to this).
I generally find it very boring to follow recipes, so this turned bread making from a chore I procrastinated on (and ultimately did only on special occasions) into a fun activity I look forward to.
The brand of pasta we get suggests making a box (16oz of pasta I believe) with a gallon of water. Which just seems insane to me.
I get the feeling that most cookbook recipes are written with the assumption that someone else will be doing the prep work and dishes for you lol. This is especially true of chefs who work out of test or commercial kitchens (Bon Appetit people for example).
For them, they basically always have a giant stock-pot of water boiling. And they can use 40 small bowls for prep because they don’t have to wash them.
I get the same impression, except for the ones that explicitly try to factor in “less dishes” as a selling point. However my personal preference changed dramatically when I moved into a house that had a dishwasher, because it’s so easy to just pop all the little measuring bowls etc into the dishwasher when I’m done. Now I’m more aware of how much bench space I need than dishes I create, and it’s been interesting to see how quickly my own mindset changed in that regard!
You're not wrong. Whenever I do something new, I voraciously read about it first and when I first started cooking with cast iron and stainless steel, I've read all sorts of advice that proved to be false. This was especially true for cast iron, which I had been using exclusively until I got my stainless pan.
The leidenfrost effect is real but I just don't think it's worth it doing it. When I first got my stainless steel pan, I was scared of using it because of all the comments about how tricky it can be to not make food stick to its surface but I've literally never had this problem despite, as you mentioned, going against the common opinion of adding oil after heating the pan up. (I heat the pan with the oil.) It's all about experience and knowing how your tools (pan, stove, utensils etc.) behave.
As for the whole "pores" thing, that's just ludicrous, at least for stainless steel pans. You can make the argument for cast iron, especially if you've done a poor job of seasoning it, but if that's the case, you have a more fundamental issue than when to put oil onto your pan.
Most of these so called advice are outdated too, because kitchen tools evolve over time. Just to give you an example. There are plenty of discussions online about how you should never, ever clean your cast iron with dish soap but that's simply not true. Dish soap used to contain lye, which is hard and does chip away at a cast iron's seasoning, but almost none of them contain lye anymore. I've cleaned both my enameled and non-enameled (seasoned) cast iron using dish soap and have never had any issues in years. What used to be true isn't anymore due to how things evolve.
My best advice to anyone would be to just try things out and not be afraid. My brother worked at a couple of two-star Michelin restaurants, one as a chef de partie and the other as a sous chef and I know for a fact that they do none of this mumbo jumbo people online talk about to make themselves feel like a Chef. There are actual techniques, not tricks, that are essential in any kitchen, but these aren't it.
So.... what's the best way to cook things on a cast iron skillet without sticking ?
If you seasoned your pan properly, it's very hard to get your food stick to it. Know how to control the heat1, the type of oil you're using and how it reacts to heat and what you're cooking2, and never put things on your pan while it's still cold.
I also agree with much of what @aphoenix wrote. As trivial as they are, there are two points I'd disagree with him on though, based on personal preference and experience.
As long as you actively cook with your properly seasoned cast iron, you don't need to re-season it. Cooking does not take away from your seasoning. If anything, it reinforces it. There are of course caveats to this. For example, if you're cooking food high in acidity with your cast iron and do so regularly (you shouldn't, I personally don't think it's the right tool for that), then re-seasoning is necessary as acids chip away at your seasoning. If they do break your seasoning, it may spoil the taste of your food as well, as iron could seep into the food. But if you cook things like eggs, meat, and do some frying cast irons are amazing for, then you shouldn't have to re-season at all. Keep in mind that when you're seasoning your pan, never leave any excess oil on it before you bake it. Coat your pan, take a paper towel and thoroughly dry it off, then put it in the oven. After you take it out of the oven, I wouldn't let it cool too much before you repeat the process. It should be warm, at least.
Medium heat is the highest I go for when I'm using cast iron. Cast irons are extremely durable and you can salvage them from almost any situation unless you crack or warp them. The latter of which happens when you expose your cast iron to fast changes in temperature. It's unlikely that you will warp your cast iron by just heating up on high, but I don't think it should be done. (If you heat it on high and do it unevenly, you will increase the risk of warping as cast iron expands more than you think when you heat it up.) If you want to make sure you eliminate the possibility of warping, do not heat it up on high and don't rinse it with cold water when you take it off the stove or oven. Either give it a few minutes to cool down a little, or rinse it with hot water instead.
1: Cast iron is known for high heat retention and it doesn't react to changes in heat immediately. That means even if you turn off the heat, your food will keep on cooking for awhile unless you take it off the pan all together. If you're cooking with a cocotte, they retain heat even more efficiently. This is something you will have to practice to get it right, but it's easy to get used to.
2: Different oils react to heat differently. Some, like olive oil and butter, have lower smoke points and these are not ideal to cook food that require high heat like red meat. They are great for things like eggs. If you want to cook something like red meat where high heat is essential for searing, you have to use natural oil, or as I prefer it, coconut oil. They have significantly higher smoke points.
Regarding your two disagreements, I agree with you. You don't actually need to reseason as long as you treat the pan right. I cook pasta sauce in one of mine, and arguably don't treat it as well as it deserves. As a result of my poor treatment, I do heat mine on high, because as you said the specific heat capacity makes it resistant to temperature change, and I'm usually strapped for time most days at dinner. You touched on something super important which is to not dump it in cold water when you are done, which I appreciate.
cc: @chocobean both of those caveats to what I said are important!
I'm glad we agree! Honestly though, there are no right answers. What you're doing is right for how you appear to be using your pan. I never cook sauces on mine but if I were, I'd be doing exactly what you wrote.
My impression was that the advice about not cooking on high too much was more to protect the seasoning from carbonizing than to protect the iron?
It depends on food. You have to use high(er) heat if you're searing but then you have to manage the heat to make sure you cook the other parts of the food as well. If you keep on cooking on high, you'd just burn it. To clarify my point about the heat -- the disagreement was about getting the cast iron to that high point quickly and unevenly. I think that's harmful, high heat/temperature alone is not. Lodge has a pretty good FAQ page on this.
I do not know if high heat damages the seasoning, but if I were to guess, I'd think it depends on what you're cooking and for how long. If the pan is completely empty while you're heating it up and forget about it on the stove and go about your day, I think it might damage it. But even if you do and it does damage it, that's an easy fix whereas warping means the pan goes to the trash can.
I figured since cast iron was the cookware of choice for wood stove and campfire cooking then they should have been pretty tolerant to very uneven heating. Though I guess you don’t typically put it directly on the coals.
You want to make sure you have properly seasoned your pan, and then make sure you reseason it with some regularity (I do so about every six months). That's the biggest thing - if you have a properly seasoned pan, it's not particularly sticky even without oil in it. Also, it's a good idea to know your temperature. I often heat the pan relatively high to get it hot quickly (with oil in) then reduce the heat to closer to what medium is on my range, which is still super hot, to maintain that heat through cooking. Cast Iron will stay at temperature for a long time, but can take a bit to get to temperature.
But it's 99% about properly seasoning the pan, which is relatively easy to do:
The more you season it, the nonstickier it gets. When I start with a cast iron, I usually do three-four cycles of the above; when I reseason I do one or two.
I've adopted the same practice. I had cast irons where I followed the general advice re: no soap, crape food off, etc. Frankly the fact that there was a weird ritual meant they were only washed by me because other family members didn't want to.
My current cast irons are washed like any other pan. Then I wipe it down with some oil and throw it in the oven for a bit to get rid of any water. It's held up great and doesn't have any sticking issues.
So, just scrap physical bits off and then rinse with hot water, no soap, because it's not sticking?
You can use modern soaps (more “detergents” than soap) and it will not hurt the seasoning of the pan.
Lye-based soaps, or old fashioned soaps, or modern boutique bar soaps may be lye-based and may damage the seasoning of a cast iron. But your standard run-of-the-mill dish soap is absolutely fine to use on a cast iron pan.
For ideal cleaning, wash it with as hot as water as you can stand, while the pan is still warm (but not hot) from cooking, and then dry it immediately. To finish drying it, you can toss it back on the stove with a splash of oil until it smokes to help maintain the seasoning.
In practice, this is what I do:
Looks like a lot, but it basically happens as I’m putting away dinner and dealing with the rest of the dishes anyway.
I don’t bother with the reheat & oil if it still looks black & shiny on the bottom after I rinse it out (typically if I did something like cook veggies in a splash of oil).
I do the same, I think that's great advice.
Today I learned how to properly season the pan. Thank you :)
You are very welcome!
Sorted Food just did a video on this very topic
In my experience about 50% of traditional cooking "rules" are nothing more than superstition. To be fair, it hasn't been that long that people have been doing actual science on cooking and there's centuries of old chef's tales to navigate.
One which particularly annoys me is the persistent myth that risotto needs constant stirring and stock adding gradually. Neither is true. Chuck in most of your stock just after the rice, stir occasionally, add more liquid as required. Which turns it from a fiddly, annoying dish to a quick and easy one. Risotto is delicious and I think lots of people don't make it because so many recipes make it sound like a lot of work.
Harold McGee's book, On Food and Cooking is excellent for this kind of investigating.
This is my favorite risotto recipe and it requires practically no stirring or faffing about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgYu2c_Az6w
That video has a pretty good discussion of what goes on when food sticks, then releases later. Essentially, the issue is that adding the food introduces a localized rapid cooling right under the food, which extends the period where the food is hot enough to stick to the pan but cold enough that those bonds can persevere. Release happens at the pan surface because it reheats to the appropriate temperature and destroys those bonds, letting the food break away from the metal.
I don't see how the order of operations prior to adding the food really helps, here. There is such a thing as porosity in cast iron pans, at least - I'm not sure if it's the actual metal or the polymerized oil coating that's retaining the oil, but when heating a cast iron pan you can witness the slight release of retained oil from the surface after a time. If this happens in stainless pans I've yet to see it, but I rarely cook on stainless so I'll withhold judgement. Regardless, it's in the same state when the pan is hot whether you add the oil first or last.
I imagine the advice has its roots in letting the pan come up to a proper temp without people getting nervous about oil smoke points. Letting the oil sit and heat is a bit nerve-wracking for some, especially if you're trying to fry something in olive oil because some misguided health blog refuses to use anything else despite its relative unsuitability for high temperatures. Leaving the oil out until the last minute prevents the risk of smoking but introduces pan cooling before you add the meat; I'd recommend just rubbing the meat with the oil if you're nervous. I do this with fish when I want to get a super deep sear, since it limits smoking generally even after the meat is on the pan.
It’s the actual metal. As it heats up the steel expands and creates a smoother surface with fewer and shallower pores for the oil to seep into. If you put cold oil in a cold pan the oil remains viscous for longer and, due to surface tension, is likely to pool on top of those pores instead of seeping into them. When you add your food to it, it may get pushed into unlubricated parts of the metal which can get stuck in as the pan cools. This is why one of the most effective ways to clean stuck-on food in a steel pan is to get it really hot and add salty water to it, the salt crystals get small enough to get into the fissures and then you can more effectively abrade away the burnt food inside with your brush. I assume the stainless steel cleaners, like barkeeper’s friend, probably do something similar.
Adding oil to a hot pan means the oil flows better and coats everything more evenly. Also, generally, you want your cooking oil to spend less time being heated as the heat itself will degrade the oil. On a hot pan the oil gets up to temperature rapidly, it’s not spending extra time in a range of temperatures where all sorts of different reactions can be happening.
I don't believe that oil degradation is something that will come into play during the span of a typical cooking session. Higher temperatures hasten the rate of oxidization, but not to the extent that you'd notice any change over a few dozen minutes. Heating the oil past its smoke point is another thing entirely. Your point about oil spreading is valid, but I find it makes little difference whether the oil is heated slowly or quickly; a swish around the pan ensures even coating regardless of the circumstances.
I have never heard the technique of cleaning with salty water. Water, by itself, is a fantastic tool for cleaning pans when they're hot. Salt, by itself, can serve as a gentle abrasive for difficult patches of cooked-on food. I'm not sure that salty water offers any mechanism for enhanced cleaning over unsalted water or dry salt, as the salt shouldn't be crystallizing while the water is present to dissolve it; while it is crystallized, it is dry salt.
Bar Keeper's Friend is a combination of a feldspar-based abrasive, oxalic acid and a sulfonate detergent; it works as a combination cleanser. The feldspar works mechanically to abrade the surface, the acidic component helps to remove rust and other mineralized/oxidized deposits, and the detergent works on any oil-based soiling.
Three things first. One is that these are empirical observations that people try to map a reasonable explanation onto, two is that cooking advice is usually around building good habits that are generalizable to most of your cooking rather than needing to think about the particulars on a case by case basis, because nobody has time for that. Finally, it’s also generally meant for working under the assumption that you will get distracted or mess up sequencing things such that you’re ready to get to the next step by the time your pan is ready, because that’s real life. So if you don’t add your oil to the pan until you’re ready to do something with it, that’s much lower likelihood of smoking yourself out.
So with that said, oxidation isn’t the only thing that happens. You have dehydration as the water either evaporates or hydrolyses the fatty acids, you have polymerization reactions, and it’s been a while since college but I believe cyclization reactions happen at cooking temps as well. Much of this may not be an issue with something like vegetable oil as long as you’re making sure it’s coming up to temperature, but it will definitely be an issue with something like lard or butter where there’s more going on beyond just the fat. It also probably matters less if you have moist or fattier foods, like bacon or steak, compared to fairly dry ones like eggs.
It probably won’t be enough to affect taste unless you’re repeatedly frying in the same oil for a long time, but it can plausibly affect stickiness since if you’re just coating a pan you’re not using very much oil at all. Both because aromatics and other stuff in your oils are breaking down, and also because the oil itself may be polymerizing and not flowing as well at the microscopic scales where the fissures in the metal are.
Not on a microscopic scale The advantages of heating before adding oil is an observation made by cooks and chefs who then look for plausible explanations for why. So it’s empirically the case that it does make a difference, whatever the overarching theory is. It’s also advice geared towards busy kitchens (i.e. restaurants) where the conditions they’re operating under are different from that of someone just making eggs at home. If you have any residual water in the pan when you start heating, for example, you’ll get a lot of sputtering in a crowded kitchen
You put the salty water on and heat the pan to evaporate all the water away so you’re left with a very fine coating of salt on the surface. Then you scrub with soap and a moistened and brush and then brush again with soap and water, which ends up working better than just brushing with soap and water alone. So the salt basically works as a very fine abrasive which gets into the pores of the steel since you soaked it before evaporating, then the dish soap has its own acids and surfactants to do that part of the work.
I always heat the pan after adding oil and never had any issues with sticking or anything else
Searing a roast before you put it in the crockpot for hours. I've found this makes zero difference and is just an added step. You can't possibly taste the sear when the intent of the crockpot is to make the meat incredibly tender, right?
I believe the logic behind this is that the maillard reaction creates flavor in the sear that then diffuses into the meat and braising liquid over the duration of the cooking time. Personally, I find that the taste is less noticeable unless you're searing cut meat (like individual cubes of beef for stew) and have a much larger surface area to work with. With a roast, the surface-area-to-volume ratio means the effect is much less pronounced.
One other potential benefit is that if you have fatty portions on your roast it can crisp them up, which improves their eventual texture during subsequent wet cooking. However, most people prefer to trim a roast before slow cooking to avoid excess oil in the broth, so ymmv.
In India and SE Asia, where the meats are traditionally stewed or poached rather than roasted, we very seldom care about searing the meat. If it is seared it’s because it’s being grilled over an open flame or super-hot tandoor. Otherwise those umami flavors tend to come from either pungent seasonings, slow cooking onions or garlic, or fermented sauces like fish or soy sauce.
I can see how European culinary traditions, where they didn’t have as easy access to a few of those might put more emphasis on the sear since they won’t have much besides onions and mushrooms to add umami to the food.
Yes, but the important thing is that you have to sear it until it goes black. The charred bits dissolve into the braise and give it smoky flavors.
But I don't think it's worth it most of the time. It's messy and the smoke is probably not great for your lungs, and with most recipes it's simply not going to make enough of a difference in the flavor to warrant it. I'd even go so far to say as there are a good number of recipes where the smokey flavor just kinda muddles the taste. I'll agree with @NaraVara with their Asian cuisine standards; flavoring with herbs and spices works much nicer and is much more controllable.
Heating the pan and then adding the oil has probably something to do with the oil polymerizing (?) when it reaches a high enough temperature, creating a non-stick-ish surface. Don't know if there's any truth in that, I just heat the pan with the oil and anyway I've swayed away from the ridiculously high heats as it just creates a mess and smokes and whatnot. Not a good time in my opinion.
Not exactly cooking, but related.
I've read and had people tell me I shouldn't keep bread in the fridge because it makes it go stale. They say staleness comes from crystalization and the colder bread is the faster it crystallizes.
Something about this always makes me feel skeptical. It seems too simplified and just sciencey sounding enough to make people want to repeat it and sound smart. I'd love to see an actual study or experiment on the subject.
Freezing most types of bread doesn't harm it.
However, fridge is another matter, as you'll have starches retrograde—basically order themselves—which indeed could lead to full crystallization. I'd say "bread crystallizing" would be a fitting expression for it in a pinch. Either way, this does in fact accelerate going stale. Ordered starches mean firmer bread and loss of moisture. You'd have to reintroduce moisture and heat it to revert the process a bit.
Expanding on your points:
A refrigerator is going to be the driest part of many homes and unless the bread is stored well sealed will reduce moisture in the bread. If it is well sealed you may still find moisture escaping via condensation into the bag/bin but that will depend on how the bread is removed and used each time.
On frozen bread a single freeze/thaw cycle makes little difference to me but wetter, denser breads or repeated freeze/thaw cycles are noticeable to me when the bread is used at room temperature. If toasting or using in something else (soup, French toast, etc) I can't tell.
I freeze sliced, then just remove slices for consumption, so it only ever suffers one cycle. The kind I get handles it no problem, it's great.
While this phenomenon is well described and understood by food science (see /u/minty's comment), you probably won't notice it with store bought bread. The food industry is counteracting retrogradation with several measures, including adding what is essentially a heat resistant digestive enzyme (amylase) from mould species to the bread.