No coating, no flaking: cooking without non-stick

Non-stick cookware solved a real domestic problem and it solved it well. The trouble starts when the same product is asked to do commercial duty.

What a coating is up against in a professional kitchen

A non-stick surface is a polymer layer bonded to metal. In a commercial setting it faces:

• Metal utensils. Steel turners and ladles, used at speed, all day.
• High heat. Coatings have a temperature ceiling; an empty pan on a commercial burner goes past it quickly.
• Abrasive cleaning. Scourers and caustic detergents in a busy pot wash.
• Thermal cycling. The coating and the metal beneath expand at different rates.

Under that combination, a coating measured in years of domestic use lasts months.

The failure is not graceful

A cracked pot is obviously finished. A degrading coating is not — it keeps working while getting steadily worse, and the pan stays in service well past the point it should have left it. Food begins sticking in patches, cleaning gets more aggressive, and the coating comes off faster.

Once it starts lifting there is no repair. The pan is scrap.

What steel offers instead

Bare stainless steel has no coating, so there is nothing to wear out. The surface you buy is the surface you are still cooking on years later. It also means:

• Any utensil is fine. Steel, wood, whatever the cook prefers.
• Any heat is fine. An empty pan on high heat is not damaging anything.
• Any cleaning is fine. Scrape it, soak it, scour it back to bare metal.
• It genuinely sanitises. A non-porous, uncoated metal surface can be cleaned to a standard a worn coating cannot.

"But food sticks to steel"

It sticks to cold steel and to dirty steel. Technique closes most of the gap:

1. Preheat before adding fat. Steel needs to be hot before the oil goes in, not the other way round.
2. Let the protein release. Food sticks when it goes in, then releases as the crust forms. If it will not lift, it is not ready.
3. Do not crowd. Overloading drops the temperature and causes steaming instead of searing.
4. Deglaze. The stuck-on fond is flavour. A splash of liquid lifts it into the gravy — which is precisely how a good bhuna is built.

For most of what an Indian commercial kitchen actually cooks — gravies, dals, rice, deep frying, griddle bread — sticking is barely a factor. These are wet or fatty preparations from the start.

The cost argument

A coated pan is cheaper on day one and is replaced repeatedly. A heavy steel vessel costs more once. Over five years the arithmetic is not close, and it does not account for the disruption of a pan failing mid-service.

There is more on this in our piece on total cost of ownership.