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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

I cook quite a bit and have a lot of friends who own commercial kitchens.

- Victorinox Fibrox knives are by far the best value you will get. They are inexpensive and are quite the workhorse.

- I agree for the most part about the pots and pans except cast iron should be #1 on the list. The one thing you will learn very quickly as a cook is that cast iron is your friend. It also lasts forever.

- Someone said something about ditching whisk. Are you freaking kidding me? A whisk costs under $5 and it is invaluable for lots of dishes.

- Desserts are generally hard and require specialized gear. I'd drop the whole damn category.

- I'd add a bamboo steamer to the list. You can pick one up at a asian grocery store. Put it over a large pan of water.

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One caveat that people rarely discuss about Victorinox Fibrox knives is that the don't hold an edge very long. They're a great starter knife and a great long-term knife if you don't mind sharpening it fairly frequently.

For example, at the rate I cook, I had to buy three separate fibrox chef's knives to go a solid month without needing to resharpen. And then I'd need to resharpen all three. I decided to upgrade to a slightly more pricey knife that was made of a harder metal. I can now go between 6 and 9 months between sharpening that knife.

So if you do go for the victorinox knives, they will arrive super sharp. But be prepared to resharpen them frequently depending on how much you use them.

Agree wholeheartedly on the Victorinox Fibrox not holding their edge, though I don't have any experience with their chef's knives, just the santoku.

I agree. That's why I threw the sharpener in there. It's really not that painful to do.

Do you steel every time you use the knife? That seems to be what pro's do. Obviously there's a difference between "dull" and "out of true", and if the only problem is "easy to get out of true", well, that's not a big deal.

Yeah, I use a smooth steel. These knives get truly dull. I sharpen them myself with wet stones and I've tried various angles on the blades. I have 5 victorinox chef's knives of various size. And two victorinox filet knives that I use for cutting fish and breaking down large cuts of meat. The filet knives last a long time because they very rarely touch the cutting board. But for the most part I use a MAC chef's knife.

In about 9 months time I will have dulled all 5 victorinox chef's knives and the one MAC knife I own. And the MAC gets more than half of the load during that time.

I feel that cast iron pans are overrated. Stainless steel is easier to clean, lets you build fond, lets you cook acidic pan sauces, and are lighter so you can be more aggressive about pan flipping. The only advantage cast iron has is heat retention and there are few cases where that's useful (like deep frying for example, or baking bread). Iron is actually a relatively poor conductor of heat also and a good tri-ply pan will heat up faster.

Cast iron dutch ovens are another story because you will frequently use them in ovens where the heat retention properties are useful.

I find my cast iron to be a pain, and after trying hard to use it well for years. Slow to heat, slow to recover, touchy to season, and heavy as all hell. I've gone back to either stainless or nonstick, depending.

It's kind of like driving an old F350 as a daily driver. Sometimes its just what you need, most of the time it's a heavy, ponderous maintenance nightmare.

The thing about cast iron pans is they're dirt cheap, so it's hard to overrate them.

I guess I agree with you: if you have a high-quality stainless skillet, you don't need the cast-iron pan. Things we do in cast-iron that we don't do in the All Clad pan: make cornbread, sear steaks, grill vegetables outdoors.

To all those pointing to cast iron, have you tried using carbon steel pans? I hear that they have many of the same properties as cast iron pans (they're seasoned the same way) but weigh less and heat up/down more quickly. I have been thinking of picking up a carbon steel skillet or wok as my next kitchen addition.

I think I picked one of these up at a garage sale and thought they were regular steel. Mine kept rusting and didn't think to season it. I threw it out, figuring the 3 bucks I spent on it was wasted on a bad product, but I guess I just wasted it in general, lol.

I like cast iron, and have a couple pieces. The problem is I feel like it's an addition since there are things you can't do in them and didn't fit with the minimum viable gourmet kitchen. Cooking with tomatoes would be probably the most frequent thing I need non-cast iron for.

And yeah, I laughed at the whisk thing too.

I do spaghetti sauce in a cast iron all the time. Am I doing something wrong?

Unless you're talking about enameled cast iron (Le Creuset, Staub), then acidic ingredients like tomatoes will remove the seasoning from your pan. It shouldn't hurt your sauce, but re-seasoning your gear is a pain in the ass.

Not really, in my experience. I had a rusted pan I pulled out of the basement, spent 20 minutes scrubbing and rinsing, a couple of rounds in and out of the oven with vegetable shortening, and was non-stick enough already to easily cook eggs. Am I missing a step I should be doing?

Wow, you +1 for teaching me something new. I've been using stupid vegetable oil on a cloth all these years to season my cast iron, and it's the biggest pain in the ass. I never even thought to use shortening.

I think I just read about it on a blog, and I'm pretty new to cast iron myself. But from what I understand, any fat should work.

You know, I've always read that cast iron (even properly seasoned) reacts with acid and as a result is bad for both your food and the iron, but to be honest I haven't tried it. Googling around some people say their food tastes metallic. Some say it's fine.

http://www.seriouseats.com/talk/2010/03/cast-iron-and-tomato...

I do it all the time. If your pan is seasoned properly, tomatoes aren't acidic enough to react.

In any case, the result isn't bad for you -- it just tastes bad.

In theory, the acidity of the tomatoes breaks down the seasoning of the cast iron.

Isn't it the opposite? Doesn't seasoning of cast iron allow you to cook acid foods? Washing your pan is what breaks down seasoning, but also, seasoning is easy to fetishize. Just wipe the pan down with canola and stick it in a fast oven. Seasoning cast iron is even easier than sharpening a knife.

Takes a lot longer though. I don't want to bake a pan for 2 hours every time I use it.

I find cast iron very easy to take care of -- much easier than non-stick (but perhaps we use our non-stick for only messy things). Dump out the food, wipe it out, put back on the still-warm burner, put in some oil.

If something particularly hard to clean was in there, I do what scouts do on a campout: put an inch of water (with a little oil) in and set it to boil, then go back to the "wipe it out" step above.

Correct. A properly seasoned pan creates a barrier between the food and the iron. How do you know if your pan is properly seasoned? If you can't soak it overnight in water and/or air dry it without seeing rust, it's not seasoned properly.

Thank you! Turns out my skillet has lost some of its seasoning. Whether this is because or in spite of how we use it for spaghetti sauce so much remains to be seen.

True, but cast iron should be seasoned. If one doesn't season the cast iron, they are screwed anyway.

Seconding the whisk. I have a very minimalist kitchen, and its one of the few things I feel I'm missing.

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