The Simple Trick for Using a Stainless Steel Pan Like a Nonstick

For years, I’ve gravitated towards nonstick pans when I cook—particularly when it comes to eggs, meat, seafood, and dairy products. Even after culinary school and years of recipe development, testing, and food photography, I still found it difficult to cook with stainless steel as it would inevitably lead to a pan that had caked-on food residue. Wanting to avoid the hours of soaking, scrubbing, and elbow grease, I shied away from using my fancy and beautiful stainless steel cookware. That is, until recently.

I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a post from @snehasinghi1 about a technique for how to use a stainless steel pan like a nonstick one. The trick is to heat the pan up hot enough before you add any fat, and use the water test to ensure that it is ready.

How To Use Your Stainless Steel Pan Like a Nonstick

Place the stainless steel pan on your burner over medium-high heat. Put your hand over the pan—making sure not to touch the pan—to see if the heat radiates into your palm. Once the pan is hot, about a minute or so, it’s ready for the water test. 

Flick a little bit of water into the pan. If it evaporates immediately, the pan is not hot enough. Try the water test again every 30 seconds until the water forms into beads and looks like it’s floating, or dancing, around your pan. From here, reduce your heat to medium/medium-low and add your fat (e.g. butter, olive oil, etc.), then the food item you want to cook. 

It is important to reduce the heat to medium/medium-low after you have a successful water test, otherwise the pan will be too hot for the fat that you add in and could either smoke your kitchen out (this happened to me the first time) or catch fire due to your fat going beyond its smoke point. 

Why It Works

This trick is due to a physical phenomenon called the Leidenfrost effect. In layman’s terms, the difference in the pan’s temperature and the liquid’s boiling point creates a veritable buffer between the liquid and the surface. 

The water test allows us to determine if this point has been reached, which will then in turn let us know if our pan is hot enough for food to go in without adhering like a stage-5 clinger. (Nobody wants a stage-5 clinger.)

Why I’ll Be Using The Water Test From Here On Out

After testing this phenomenon, I can confidently say that this is how I’ll be using my stainless steel pots and pans from here on out. As someone who cooks multiple times a day and is hard on their cookware, this saves me from having to clean out the same one nonstick pan that I’ve used every morning since my brother gifted it to me for Christmas over two years ago.