Whoops, that was me, logged in my friend by accident.
I’ve never had a problem cooking tomato sauce in a cast iron skillet for a long time but you certainly don’t want to store it in the pan once you’re done cooking it.
I use cast iron a lot, and I just try not to cook tomato sauces or exceptionally acidic foods in it. I have used it for foods with tomatoes or lemon juice and the like, and never noticed a problem. If it is well seasoned, theoretically there shouldn’t be a problem. If you get cast iron, I advise you to get a nice cast iron lid as well. A heavy tight fitting lid is a real help in cooking.
I don’t like the Le Creuset stuff too much. They come with the nice tight fittig lid as I mentioned, but you have to be very careful with them. One of the ones I had lost part of it’s enamel after washing one day. It was replaced free of charge, but still. Also, you can’t cook over high heat, it screws up the enamel, and it doesn’t form a non-stick surface, so you have to use a lot of oil. See a thread of mine on the issue:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=155540
Ordinary cast iron is much better, although, as mentioned before, a bit reactive.
One thing many people have mentioned is deglazing, which is important for making sauces. If you are, say, sauteeing chicken, the juices will drain from the chicken and hit the pan, causing a little glaze. The glaze continues to darken as you cook. Eventually it will burn. Before then, you then remove the glaze later and make it into a sauce with butter or wine, or whatever… Here’s what different pans have to do with deglazing:
Cast iron - You can deglaze, but you can’t see the juices, so it’s easier to burn the glaze
Stainless steel, aluminum, copper, etc - You can deglaze, and see the glaze But it’s not nonstick, so you may tend to get hunks of flesh with that glaze.
Le Creuset - Some people claim you can deglaze (see my thread above). I definitely cannot with mine. Surface is nice and white, so if you could deglaze, it would be good since the glaze s very visible.
Nonstick - You cannot deglaze, since the juices never sticks to your skillet and form a glaze. I don’t know why you can deglaze with seasoned cast iron, which is also nonstick , but you can for some reason.
Non-stick pans don’t(in my experience) last very long before the coating starts to degrade - a good stainless steel pan will last a lifetime, non-stick is OK for a frying pan but pretty pointless for anything other sort, plus you can’t get rough with it (for example, if you’re making a cheese sauce, it is good to be able to whisk it vigorously with a ballon whisk while heating it - do this in a non-stick pan and you’ll scratch it)
Heavier pans tend to be heavier for a reason (perhaps they have a copper bottom, which makes them conduct heat more readily), they also sit better, making better thermal contact with electric hobs.
Unless you have a gas range, in which case some of the heavier bottomed metal pans are little more use for cooking than a matched set of paperweights.
If you don’t have a lot of money you can try prowling the discount shops, flea markets, consignment shops and so on for cookware. I’ve managed to pick up some very nice pieces this way for half what they would cost in a kitchenware store/catalog. It takes longer than buying a whole set outright but it’s much cheaper and you get the thrill of the hunt into the bargain. I’ve gotten a couple of very nice lined, copper pieces, an All-Clad saucepan and a Le Creuset dutch oven. I also agree with the other posters that a good cast iron skillet, well-seasoned is invaluable in cooking. You can’t make good cornbread without it. 
I actually do have a gas hob; doesn’t cause me any problem at all with heavy-bottomed pans.
Squink, I don’t get it. What makes them useless when used with a gas range?
Couple of things I might add.
Here at Rick’s Cafe American we use Caphalon for most of our pans, some cast iron (Dutch oven, couple of fry pans, and a griddle), and a few odds and ends (Like a stainless steel and also aluminum stock pots) and few non stick pans.
I believe it is aluminum that you don’t want to cook acidic foods in not cast iron. according to this site
No warning are given for cast iron on that site.
In addition I prepared a brine last year that the recipe said NOT to prepare in an aluminum pot. Which is the reason I now own a SS stock pot as well as the aluminum one.
We do own a couple of non-stick pans (teflon) 1 small fry/omlette pan, and one large fry pan. Over the years, it seems that no matter what quality you buy in this type of pan, and how careful you are with it, the surface gets trashed over time. We therefore just buy the cheap-o non-stick pans, and save the $ for the other pans.
If you go to buy cast iron over the net, pay attention to shipping charges. This stuff is HEAVY. Look for a site that charges shipping based on price not weight. (yes there are some)
Rick, I don’t think that’s true of hard anodized, just regular aluminum or thin, cosmetic anodizing.
The only drawback I can think of is the extra mass of metal on the bottom of the pan causing a hysteresis effect (one of the major selling points of gas hobs is their responsiveness, heavy pans go some way toward defeating that)
Not all of the heavy ones are useless. I use cast iron on my gas range regularly. However, I’ve also had the misfortune of using someone elses pans, the kind with that ~3/8" metal disk on the bottom, which is supposed to give even heat distribution. On a gas burner, they took forever to heat up, and never really got hot enough. No doubt it depends on the brand of the cookware, so YMMV.
I agree with you, I was commenting on the don’t use cast iron for tomatos posts.
I cook pretty much everything in both my cast iron, and my Caphalon.
Rick, I don’t think the problem with tomatoes in cast iron is a health issue (a la the aluminum you mention above), rather the acidity of the tomatoes - or any other significantly acidic ingredient - is absolute murder on the seasoning. I made the mistake of doing pasta in tomato sauce in mine once and had to reseason the thing because the tomato ripped the season right off as sure as if I had deliberately stripped it.
You have some very good advice and thoughts here. You want to get something that conducts heat well and evenly, is heavy enough for some level of abuse but light enough for your hands, and of course, fits within your budget.
Shop around at discount outfits for All Clad ware. It’s the best on the market in (my personal experience) but also confirmed by the folks over at Cook’s Illustrated. While you may be tempted to get the cheapest stuff on the market (and some of that can be serviceable) I think if you get good quality kitchenware, you’ll want to use it more. It will also last a loooooong time.
Have a birthday coming up? Ask for cookware!
For the best of both worlds look into Sitram. This is a french company producing excellent quality stainless steel cookware. The have a line called Cybernox which has a nearly indestructible nonstick quality to it.
They claim that it is not a coating but is the way the metal is produced. I have a few frying pans and I can tell you they are in fact non-stick and you can use metal untensils with them without harming them.
I have a couple of enameled pans and I have alot of trouble with pasta and rice sticking badly to the bottom. They are a cheaper brand, though, so that might be why I have trouble with them. They’re great for soup, though.
Has anyone used the induction cookware? At least, I think that’s what it’s called–the stuff that completes an electrical circuit to heat the pans. If so, is there any advantage to it?
I would assume that the induction cookware might have a tuned length loop that intercepts a localized broadcast field at the burner’s location. The pan’s metal will heat up as the inductor’s field tunes to the drive frequency.
A fresh cast iron pan will impart strong metallic flavors to tomato and lemon juice based sauces. Older and better seasoned pans will do this less. New bare aluminum pans are the very worst for this. Even hard anodized aluminum pans are susceptible to scratching. The anodization is only a few thousandths of an inch deep. It is almost the same hardness as diamond, but not quite. Once you scratch through the anodization, there is an attack path to the bare aluminum which promotes continuing failure of the coating. Newer techniques deal with “densifying” the aluminum’s surface but enameled glass is still the best.
Enamelware is cast iron coated with a ceramic type of glass. Dry pans exposed to high heats will chip and flake, ruining the pan. Enamelware outperforms cast iron in heating time. Enamelware’s cast iron form is much thinner than regular cast iron pans. For this reason it can crack or break when dropped. One learns to treat enamelware carefully so that it can be handed down in the family.
The two most prevalent enamelware brands are French Le Creuset and Dutch Descoware. Another contender is Danish Copcoware. All perform well and are ruggedly constructed. I have bought all of my uranium orange Le Creuset and Descoware in thrift shops for pennies on the dollar. They are increasingly hard to find because long ago, all the yuppies bought Caphalon pans and tossed out their parents’ Le Creuset.
Some Le Creuset frying pans are unenameled. They have an excellent pre-seasoned cast iron surface that imparts no flavor to acidic sauces. Look on eBay to examine styles, colors and cost. You’ll find that for only another 25-33% cost per pan you can upgrade to enamelware. I recommend buying one Le Creuset frying pan and one large enamel saucepan to judge its performance. Even though I bought a beautiful 13" diameter cast iron skillet for all of $3.[sup]00[/sup] at the thrift shop, I’ll only use it for mass burger preparation or fried chicken.
There are two specific applications where cast iron outperforms enamelware. One is for ‘blackening’ food, as in ‘blackened’ redfish. Only cast iron can withstand the near-glowing temperatures required to sear food in that fashion. Another more arcane virtue of cast iron is that it can withstand “kashering.” This is the annual Jewish tradition of heating every pan in the house to smoking temperatures so as to purify it for the new year.
Seasoning a pan:
Wash the pan with one drop of liquid soap and the hottest water you can get out of the tap. Dry the pan completely. Fill the pan to 1/4" deep with a new oil or fat (your choice). Lard will cure a pan faster because of it’s higher smoking point, but let your preferences guide you. Heat the pan until it begins to smoke, reduce heat just enough to avoid more smoking after one minute. Let pan remain at temperature for ten or twenty minutes and turn off the heat. Allow pan to cool slowly. Pour out oil and wipe with a damp cloth or paper towel. When washing a well seasoned pan, use little or better yet, no soap! Really hot water will wash your pan the best. Detergent has the ability to penetrate the metal (or other type surface) of your pan just like the oil does. Use soap very sparingly if at all. For this same reason, do not soak your pan overnight to clean it, this too will cut the seasoning. Remove stuck on food by boiling some water in the pan to loosen it.
Induction cookware is not, to my knowledge, a type of cookware so much as cookware that is suitable (or optimized) for use on an Induction stovetop. Induction stovetops use electromagnets to produce heat in magnetic materials placed over them. Therefore, your pans need to be magnetic in order to get hot. Cast iron and some stanless steel pans will work, aluminum, copper, glass will not. Not all staineless is magnetic, check out the pan at the bottom of this page, it is optimized for induction and contains a special layer of “magnetic stainless steel”.
I can’t quite tell what kind of induction these cooktops use, according to this site there are 3 kinds, only 1 of which requires magnetic materials to work. However, all that one does is line up the magnetic particles to the source, can that heat up a pan?