I like to cook eggs. In particular, eggs over medium, with the whites done and the yolks still runny.
There was a time when our nonstick fry pan allowed the eggs to slide gracefully onto a plate. In the last year or so, even with oil and butter in the pan, the eggs have required a gentle bit of prodding with a spatula to set them free.
Now, the effort required is greater, and sometimes the eggs are massacred in the process. Time to buy a new pan. But which one?
The choices are myriad. There are nonstick coatings galore. There are dozens of brands and styles. And for every positive review, there is a negative one.
The constant, however, seems to be that nonstick pans don’t last. Despite careful use and manufacturers’ claims, after a few years of daily frying, nonstick pans become sticky and must be replaced.
This means that every three years, another nonstick skillet will grace the landfill.
After much consideration, I’m thinking of going with plain stainless steel.
A stainless steel fry pan can be made nonstick by heating it to the proper temperature before adding the food. Professional cooks know this and have a simple test to determine if the pan is at the right temperature. A few drops of water are added to the pan. If it is not hot enough, the water quickly flattens out and boils away. Food put in the pan at this point will stick.
If the pan is hot enough, instead of boiling away, the drops will dance about the skillet, bump into each other, merge into one large drop, and continue to skip about the pan’s surface. The reason is, the bottom of the droplet flashes into steam and becomes a sort of hover board for the droplet to ride on. Food added at this point will not stick to the pan.
However, if a pan is too hot, the effect goes away. The water drops burst into dozens of tiny beads that soon disappear. Food added at this point will stick.
What I have just described is called the Leidenfrost Effect, which is named for its discoverer, Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost, of Germany, who lived in the 1700s.
One modern physicist told how his grandmother, when cooking pancakes, would flick water on her skillet. If the water boiled quickly away, she’d leave the skillet to heat further. When water beaded up and danced across the surface, taking a minute or more to disappear, she knew the skillet was hot enough for the batter to be poured.
How hot does a surface have to be for water to experience the Leidenfrost Effect?
We can’t say exactly because of a number of factors, such as the surface material of the pan, the altitude, impurities in the water, and so on. However, a rough estimate is around 379 degrees F.
Stainless steel, properly used, will be nonstick and will stay out of the landfill. Thanks, Herr Leidenfrost.
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