I have a metal spatula I use with the enameled depending on what else is going on. Typically the stuff I cook in it gets moved around with a sillycone spatula. I scrub it with a blue/delicate sponge and its generally enough to get anything off, esp after a 2-3 minute soak in hot water.
Heavy, scratchy bottomed, and not always flat. If it works for you, it works. But some people wind up with scratched glass.
If I had cast iron and a glass top stove I’d sand the outside bottom of the pan smooth, something I don’t have to worry about at all with a gas stove.
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Is it electric or induction?
Dunno, ClutchLinkey didn’t say.
Plenty of people tend to end up with shattered range tops too, setting a heavy pan down too hard can smash it. Seems to be a particularly big issue among the elderly and anyone with grip problems.
I usually point people at carbon steel in that case. Bottoms are smooth and they weigh far less but perform pretty much the same. They have less mass, but being thinner overall they heat up faster and it ends up being a wash. In the offing they’re much easier to handle, more responsive, and a lot slicker. Trade off is they’re harder to season and maintain, and harder to come by in the US. With many major retail brands being pricey in the extreme until pretty recently.
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There is that kickstarter that was doing thin wrought iron pans - interesting idea, but I wasn’t especially wowed by the simplistic, cheapest possible stamped construction, but without the corresponding cheap as possible price.
Gotta say, though, I’m not looking forward to getting stuck with a glass top stove in some future apartment as they become more ubiquitous.
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They truly are hot garbage. Their main selling point is that they’re easy to clean and that they do not look like a stove.
The other end of that is that they need to be cleaned constantly because every god damn finger print can be seen from the street. And they aren’t any better as stoves than the cheapest coil stoves.
They are stoves for people who do not cook.
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Induction is glass-topped, and for some things is much better than coil. I spent much of last year with induction, and miss it now that I’m back home, especially when I’m boiling water for pasta.
I didn’t have cast iron cookware where I was, but I think you can protect the glass with a sheet of baking paper if you are worried about scratching.
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My stovetop is just glass topped electrical coils. First time I’ve had one like this. I use mainly cast iron, and regular sauce pans and stock pots for the most part. An enameled cast iron Dutch oven.
Our glass top cracked recently, so I was wondering if it might have something to do with the cast iron, specifically. But I think mr linkey sometimes has a heavy hand in the kitchen and maybe that is what happened and would’ve happened regardless of cookware. Not sure. 
Induction is a completely different method of operation though. One that is better than cheap coil stoves. By a lot.
I’m also pretty sure there’s nothing requiring they be glass topped, save that a ferrous metal top would heat up and defeat part of the point. It just seems to be be what we’re mostly doing at the moment, and it’s the one thing that gives me serious pause about them.
Everyone I know with glass top, regular electrics ends up replacing them far more often than is usual for stoves. Because of that glass top. If they don’t break they seem to wear and get unsightly weirdly fast.
A lot of commercial induction units use significantly more durable, matt finish ceramics.
Heat diffusers are also a good option. And very useful on regular glass top electrics for better spreading the heat evenly under the pan.
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My sister broke one after 10+ years and was able to replace it with something that looks near identical, but it was a total replacement kinda thing of the range.
I cook with gas.
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I wish we had piped gas here! but nope. I’m jealous.
We replaced the top this weekend. It was surprisingly easy, and though not cheap, less expensive than replacing the whole range. Maybe 1/5th the price.
Any metal, ferrous or otherwise, will completely block the current action. That’s why, for example, you can’t put a ferrous steel plate inside an aluminum pot and use it on an induction burner. (You can put such a plate under an aluminum pot – I’ve done this – but then you lose much of the efficiency of the induction.)
A lot of commercial induction units use significantly more durable, matt finish ceramics.
Most of the smooth cooktops, home or commercial, coil, halogen, or induction, are made some glass-ceramic hybrid, like Schott’s Ceran. I suppose you could make the top just from ceramic, but the glass component is how you get the transparency, which people seem to think is important.
I think that has as much to do with distance/thickness of the material. There is induction ready “copper” cookware for example. Though they seem to be thinly clad with copper on the outside, followed immediately by a layer of stainless for induction purposes.
Point being. It doesn’t need to be the same, ultimately fragile enough glass as the familiar glass top electric stove.
That seems to be aesthetic choice driven by familiarity. Frankly from my time in restaurant kitchens. The residential stoves I’m familiar with wouldn’t survive long in anything but the quietest, most controlled places.
Either way commercial units are largely limited to counter top and “drop in” units over full ranges and stoves. Everything I’ve seen has an opaque top, and in a lot of cases whatever that cover plate is. It’s not the entire top of the unit, but an inset around the burner. Meaning it’s smaller and more durable.
So again no reason the format has to match the big glass top of the classic glass top cooker. Manufacturers seem to just be going with what’s familiar as the “fancy electric” and that barrels right into the biggest shortcoming of these things. Giant, glossy, breakable, scratchable top.
Ironically, my idol Lemmy of Motorhead drank the stuff straight from the bottle constantly.
I worship Lemmy, but not his taste in whiskey. I still do jack & coke occasionally though.
Jack has it’s uses. Like I said, I don’t find it horrible, I just don’t drink the stuff straight. Too sweet & weak for my taste. I know that sounds snobby, but I just prefer 100 proof stuff and up.
Give Old Tub a try sometime if you can find it
The only time XKCD has confused me.
I know some people consider it blasphemy, but I stand by it. The seasoning really is a polymer when finished- soap should not affect a polymerized oil, because it’s no longer a compound surfactants affect once polymerized.
I started with a preseasoned Lodge pan brand new (they come preseasoned- you should not need to season a new Lodge pan- read the instructions or the website) and food cooks and tastes the same after washing with soap and rinsing thoroughly, I swear.
Chainmail scrubbers are great on cast iron btw.
Can you link to an example of this? I can’t find any with a copper layer on the outside. It runs counter to my understanding of the physics involved. (I can imagine a pot which is clad in copper but also has some extra non-copper cladding on the bottom, like some ferrous strips or rings. I’ve seen videos of craftsmen in Turkey adding some iron cladding to the outside of hand-hammered copper pots to make them work this way, though they completely covered the bottom.)
I agree that most residential-style smooth cooktops would be too fragile for most commercial settings. Even Ceran breaks.
I admit to being a bit perplexed by people’s reticence to clean seasoned cast iron. “Seasoning” is that exact same polymerized brown stuff that is so hard to scrub off my aluminum jelly roll pans. Detergent does not magically dissolve it and it only comes off with a lot of scrubbing, or with a scouring pad or powder. Yet people seem to think seasoning will just wash off of a cast iron pan.
That being said, I also don’t see the point of chain maile scrubbers, as I would think they are exactly the kind of thing that can remove seasoning, unlike detergent.
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Nope! It’s a good thing to do after washing and drying.
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