I don't believe it's dumb... in what way? The food all gets cooked right still and tastes great. And I'm a good cook - I don't really need non-stick anyway.

It might be a little overly paranoid, but whatever. I don't care. I don't use non-stick.

 

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lol ok

 

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We have non-sticks at our restaurant, although we only actually use them during brunch to do eggs. They aren't practical for everyday use at a restaurant (because they'll get damaged and become useless in less than a week.)

 

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Some restaurants I worked at just got a new set of Teflon pans out every Friday. No effort to make them last more than a few dozen hours on the fire.

At other places, each cook was issued his own pans. Maintaining (or replacing) them was up to him after the initial set. Same as taking care of your own knives.


The individual ones tended to last longer. But at under $10 each, no big deal if you ruin one occasionally.

 

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Why do they only last that long?

 

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I will give you that it does suck when friends come over who can't cook very well and use my cookware. I'll admit I've thought about getting a couple non-stick pans for those times.

 

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There's nothing wrong with using non-stick pans as they're supposed to be used - over medium or low heat. This makes them not such a great idea for most restaurant purposes outside of eggs though.

The reasons they sometimes don't last as long in restaurants is that line cooks aren't always the most fastidious when the kitchen gets weeded. Pans will be shifted to the back of the stove where they will be subject to hours of heat and have other hot pans stacked on top of and inside of them until the pile gets too high and they send them back to the dishwasher. Meanwhile the dishwasher may be a knucklehead and use steel wool on them or gouge them with other pots/spatulas/tongs in the pot scrubbing sink, this AFTER they've been sitting nested on a hot stove for a while and so on and so forth.

There's no inherent reason that they shouldn't last a good long while if reasonably taken care of. There's also no risk to using them as long as you don't use them over rocket heat.

 

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At Olive Garden, the house pans NEVER left the heat. It was that busy. 11am to 11pm, 7 days a week, then you throw them out. Some of the wear was not caring, but they got used a LOT. 75% of the hot food served there went thru those pans. Including things you'd never expect. No microwaves in the store, so if some mom wanted a bottle of expressed milk reheated, we just dumped it in a saute pan for a few seconds.

Wipe the pan out with a damp towel, and throw in the next order of overpriced mac'n'cheese.

 

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I cooked literally hundreds of thousands of eggs (hell maybe millions, we would go thru 500 dozen eggs in a weekend) professionally back in the day. Never used a non-stick skillet for any of them. Plain old thick gauge stainless pans with oil and/or butter added. Omelets, over easy, scrambled, whatever.

About 30 years ago I ran a brunch every Sunday and manned the omelet station. Six pans going at once making omelets to order, no way in hell you could use non-stick for that. The pans wouldn't last an hour and the heat was all the way up to extra high at all times. 400 old people waiting in line for their eggs means you can't be wasting time on low heat.

I can still flip a mean egg at times and my omelets are works of art.

Cool Ptilk!

Cooking is a great profession

 

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