Is a Cast Iron Pan Worth It?

You don't need a lot of equipment to cook well. A non-stick pan handles most meals – it's easy, quick and reliable. Adding a cast iron pan is a simple upgrade that improves certain dishes.

1. Your everyday pan

Non-stick is the one most people reach for, and it's the right choice for:

• Eggs and omelettes
• Pancakes
• Quick, low-effort meals
• Anything delicate

Stainless steel sits somewhere between the two. It's less forgiving than non-stick for eggs and delicate food, but it browns meat well and leaves browned bits on the base that you can loosen into a pan sauce with a splash of wine, stock or lemon. Nothing sticks to non-stick, so there's nothing to lift.

2. Cast iron is a different tool

Cast iron is unusually heavy, and the weight is the point: once it's properly heated, it doesn't cool much when cold food lands on it. A lighter pan drops in temperature the moment the food goes in, and food meeting a cooling pan steams instead of browning.

Cast iron isn't a better pan; it simply holds its heat unusually well. That makes browning easier, particularly in larger quantities.

3. Use cast iron for browning

It comes into its own for:

• Meat (chicken, steak, koftas)
• Vegetables (for colour, not just softening)
• Toasting bread or flatbreads

4. Add one, don't replace

This isn't about swapping everything over to cast iron. Your non-stick stays the everyday pan, and cast iron comes out for the jobs above – browning meat, colouring vegetables, toasting bread. For anything else it's just heavier, slower to heat up, and no better.

5. Keep it simple

Cast iron doesn't need much care:

• Wash with hot water
• Dry it straight away
• Oil it if the surface looks dry

6. Frying pan or griddle

A large frying pan is the more versatile buy. It browns, it goes in the oven, and it holds juices, sauce or a shallow bit of liquid, none of which a griddle will do.

If you mainly want it for batch cooking, consider a large griddle instead. Griddles come in all sizes and a small one is no more use than the frying pan you already own – the size is the whole feature. A large one fits a batch of flat food in one go rather than two or three: koftas, burgers, chicken, slices of bread.

Flat or ridged is worth a thought too. Ridges give you char lines but only touch part of the food; a flat surface makes full contact, which is what smash burgers need. Across our own recipes a griddle earns its place most clearly in the smash burgers, the lamb koftas and the Greek chicken, plus any bread or flatbreads you want to toast in batches.