Pots To Kill For

CONFESSIONS OF A pot addict.

No, not that kind. I have had a life-long affection for pots and pans, sometimes bordering on emotional instability. Maybe it's not really an addiction. Perhaps affliction is a better word.

But, answering some questions commonly posed to suspected addicts:

Have you ever felt guilty buying a new pot?

Yes.

Have you ever missed work while rushing off to a housewares sale?

Yes.

Do you hide your new pot purchases?

Uh, sometimes.

Have you ever bought a whole new set of pots that duplicated your existing sets of pots and, three days later - overwhelmed with shame - returned them, claiming it was a wedding gift and the bride died?

Yes, but only twice.

At the same store?

Unfortunately.

And so it goes. I have thrown pans against the kitchen wall in disgust. I have gotten up in the middle of the night, lovingly cleaned and reseasoned an old, neglected pan and put it to sleep in a cozy, warm oven.

Once, but only once, I tried to kill a frying pan called the Perfect Omelet Pan for being imperfect. (More about that later.)

When I was a kid growing up (kinda) in Connecticut, I started cooking at about the age of 10. I didn't cook with much sophistication. But daily I made my own burgers, my own toasted-cheese sandwiches. My own scrambled eggs.

By age 12 I had discovered that melted cheese, beef fat and

meat juices from a frying cheeseburger could be amalgamated with a tablespoon of ketchup, a pat of butter and a dash of salt and pepper into a substance that could be poured back over said cheeseburger with highly beneficial results. The substance could be called a sauce.

The pan in which these transformations took place was a German-made enameled cast-iron fry pan. It was infallible.

I spent my last two years in college living in a succession of lakeside cottages near the University of Connecticut. They were summer-vacation homes rented out to students - usually graduate students or, like me, ex-GIs - during the rest of the year.

I started cooking on plain cast iron during those years. Black cast iron is the poor man's gleaming copper. To this day, I feel that no kitchen is complete without at least a couple of good cast-iron pots and pans. They heat slowly but evenly, retain heat well and, once seasoned with a coating of

fried-on fats and oils, are virtually nonstick.

Cast iron, an old favorite

Cast iron goes way back in American history. One of the first American domestic industries (to spite the British colonial prohibition on metal manufacturing) was the production of three-legged cast-iron pots by the Saugus Iron Works of Lynn, Mass. The year was 1642.

Why put legs on pots?

Because there were no stoves. Open-fire and hearth-side cooking and roasting were not replaced by stoves and ovens until the late 18th century. Three legs kept the pot stable in a bed of coals.

Cast iron still cooks superbly, legs or no, but unless carefully maintained will rust. It is heavy and cumbersome. And unless it is kept well-seasoned, it reacts with acidic foods, such as tomato sauces.

Nothing fries a steak better, especially a fry pan with griddle ridges on the bottom. I have four cast-iron pans and one old kettle I use for chili.

Coating cast iron with porcelain solves the problem of chemical reaction. But the process is expensive and unless excessive heat is kept from porcelain-lined pots, they eventually develop small cracks. Le Creuset makes beautiful, but costly, pots. And, of course, they are heavy. I use six of them, ranging in size from a small skillet to a massive paella pan.

Porcelainized cast iron is perfect for acid-based sauces, such as lemon, vinegar, wine and tomato. Porcelain-annealed pots date to 1788, when the Konigsbronn foundry in Wurttemburg, Germany, succeeded in producing iron pots with gleaming white interiors. It led to the waggish expression that in Germany the pot could no longer call the kettle black.

Copper, the conductor

The best conductors of heat are gold, silver and copper. Of the three, only copper pots are affordable. The problem with copper is that it imparts a taste to foods, and in significant amounts is poisonous. Hence it must be lined. Tin is the usual lining material, but if used extensively or carelessly, it wears away. Tin also has a low melting point (356 degrees Fahrenheit).

I have had several copper pots, purchased at E. Dehillerin in Paris (18 Rue Coquilliere, Paris 1). They have a catalog and will ship internationally, but you really ought to go there at least once. It is the most delightfully cluttered kitchen shop for food professionals in creation. Sur La Table in Seattle (which has a vast line of French copper pots by Guery) is a laudable but distant second.

When new - or newly lined - copper pots cook beautifully. But they require regular maintenance, and the few pieces I have left are kept for reasons of nostalgia and decoration.

The nice thing about copper is that it heats quickly and evenly, but cools quickly (a plus if you need to hold a sauce without overcooking it).

Copper can also be lined with stainless steel, which has its good and bad points. It eases the problem of caring for the pot (except for polishing the outside) but stainless steel tends to stick. That isn't a drawback for boiling and stewing, but it is for sauteeing and frying.

Stainless steel, day to day

Which leads us to stainless steel, the most commonly used cooking material in America. There is probably more Revere Ware and Farberware in household kitchens than all other brands combined.

Old Revere Ware pots were pretty good implements (about 30 years ago). They were heavy, had a bit of copperplating on the bottoms and lasted forever. They are now made of thinner steel and the copper on the bottoms was described by one salesman as ``a micro-thin little sheet of copper that is virtually useless.''

Nevertheless, I keep a couple of large ones, 6- and 18-quart size, for making stocks, crab and lobster boils, etc.

For day-to-day use, I use stainless pans a lot. But the only ones I ran across that I really liked I also found in Paris, five years ago, at the La Varenne cooking school, where they were in daily use by the chef-instructors.

They were very heavy, had a thick sheet of copper sandwiched between steel on the bottoms, and were relatively inexpensive at Dehillerin. The brand was called Chef Inox (Inox means rustless in French, inoxydable).

But, again, stainless steel is not porous enough to hold oils on its surface, and therefore proteins tend to stick. I have four of the Chef Inox line (three pots sized one through five liters, and a large braiser). But I do not fry in them. Look for Chef Inox - or its North American equivalent - in restaurant-supply stores.

Aluminum, a lightweight

Aluminum. The cook-scare of the 1980s. Some believe it causes cancer; others that it is linked to Alzheimer's disease.

I used to use it almost daily. It cooks well. It is light in weight, heats evenly and

quickly without the hot spots that plague stainless, especially if the pot is good and heavy. Thin aluminum pots are cheap - but not much good.

The brand of pots I used in the past was Cordon Bleu, quarter-inch thick and infinitely durable. But I was troubled by aluminum's highly reactive chemical properties. It darkened sauces and obviously leached into acidic foods.

No one has ever proved that aluminum (in trace amounts) is harmful to humans. But I began avoiding it unless it was lined or anodized, except for soups or boiling pasta.

Aluminum can be seasoned; its surface will absorb a trace of oil, and if unscratched can be close to nonstick. The present food-fashion favorite is Calphalon, an anodized aluminum product made by Commercial American Cookware of Toledo, Ohio.

Its plain aluminum, non-anodized products are widely sold in restaurant supply houses. Oddly enough, I have rarely seen Calphalon used professionally. The surface is supposed to be chemically neutral and unscratchable, but my experience has been otherwise.

One pot that was used often with a wire whip eventually wore down to bright metal (Kitchen & Company at Northgate replaced it instantly without question). And new Calphalon pans, when splashed with an acid - lemon juice, for example - have given off an odd aroma that suggests some kind of chemical reaction: a slight, unpleasant metallic taste. Older Calphalon pans, probably better-seasoned, seem more satisfactory. Calphalon is sold in most quality kitchen shops and department stores, as well as designer shops such as Keeg's.

Teflon, most improved

What about Teflon? Every year it seems to get better. I keep a stack of Teflonized aluminum fry pans on the stove top. They work well (for a couple of years) until they stop working well - and I throw them out.

Thin Teflon pans warp and their surfaces tend to deteriorate more quickly than their more hefty cousins. I am presently using quarter-inch-thick fry pans called Meyer Commercial Weight. They are satisfactory.

Teflon, by the way, has been around for quite a while. It was discovered by a Du Pont chemist, Dr. Roy Plunkett, in 1938. Plunkett, who was experimenting with coolant gases, left a container of tetrafluoroethylene out overnight. It congealed into a remarkably slippery plasticlike substance. Tetrofluoroethylene was too hard to pronounce. Hence, Teflon.

First use of it as a cooking surface was not American, however. A French firm began using the material on fry pans in the 1950s. They called it Tefal. Tefal pans came to New York during the Christmas sales of 1960, with the brand name T-Fal.

Cooking is murder

The most exotic pan I ever used was

aluminum. It was terribly expensive (around $40 20 years ago) and gorgeous. It was named Gourmet Limited, I think, had a brilliantly polished finish, and a long, solid-teak handle. It was a work of art.

We bought it at Georg Jensen in New York City, wondering at our recklessness in making the purchase, brought it home with visions of a lifetime of perfect omelets and crepes.

The idea behind the pan was that the highly polished surface, once seasoned with oil, would be nonstick. I seasoned it scrupulously, made up a crepe batter, put the pan on the stove and slurped in the first crepe.

It stuck.

The first crepe always sticks, I reminded myself. I tried the second crepe.

It stuck and came out in shreds.

Almost sick, I reseasoned the pan and an hour later tried again.

The third crepe stuck. So did the fourth. So I stabbed it.

Not the crepe; the Gourmet Limited pan. I picked up my favorite chef's knife (at that time a 6-inch Sabatier) and like Macbeth dispatching Duncan struck with heartsick fury.

I stabbed it right smack in the middle. It would not die. Instead, there appeared a tiny indentation - almost imperceptible - and my favorite 6-inch chef's knife suddenly became a 5 1/2-inch chef's knife. The tip snapped off. My eyes popped. And then filled.

Oddly enough, the pan never stuck again (neither did the tip of the knife). I spent weeks repolishing the slight scratch in the pan, months reworking the knife. I reseasoned the pan carefully and returned it to the ex-spouse praying it would not stick.

The low-coast equivalent to that exotic appliance would be a plain, carbon-steel commercial fry pan - a Number 24 or 240 (try Bargreen & Ellingson, 1275 Mercer). Once seasoned (coat it with a light vegetable oil, wipe off the excess, put it in a slow oven overnight), it will do the job for decades - just don't ever scour it. If it needs cleaning, toss in some table salt with a bit of oil and rub it clean with a paper towel. Rinse briefly, dry, lightly oil and put it away.

Scanpan, near perfection

Is there a perfect all-around cooking material? A once-in-a-lifetime pot or pan? I don't think so.

But a couple of them come close. Recently, I began cooking with a Danish-made line of cookware, Scanpan. And an American-assembled but German-made line of heavily enameled pots, Chantal.

Chantal is beautiful stuff with shatterproof glass lids. The enameled surface is easy to clean, but except for use with liquids, food still tends to stick. It is probably the prettiest cookware available.

Scanpan is unusual in that it is ``squeeze-cast'' or pressure-forged (most aluminum pots are spun-lathed). This results, the manufacturer claims, in a denser metal pot. But it is the Scanpan surface that has ignited its sales. While still hot, the pans are subjected to a microscopic, space-age-ceramic bombardment that seals over the aluminum surface.

The surface is guaranteed for life (yours, presumably), is extremely slippery - far more so than Teflon - and can be used indefinitely with metal utensils. The base is a heavy, thick slab of forged aluminum that spreads heat perfectly.

Drawbacks? They are expensive ($60 for a 1-quart pan with lid) and almost never go on sale. A promotional item, its 8-inch skillet, is sold periodically for $24 (it's a good buy) to attract purchasers to the rest of the line.

I called a friend who bought a set four years ago. She loved it then; she loves it now. ``We bought one piece, just to try it,'' she said. ``Then went back and bought a set, which is probably the only affordable way to buy them.''

I expect to do the same.

Scanpan is available only in quality kitchenware shops and department stores. The distributors want to keep it away from discount stores.

The other day, as I was looking at the rafters full of pots and pans hanging over my kitchen, trying to pick out the evening's stewpot, my friend, P.J. Griffin, gazed upward at the 43 utensils and laughed.

``You better not be in the kitchen when `The Big One' hits,'' she said. ``You'll never get out alive.''

I haven't mentioned woks or rice cookers. We'll do that some other time.

Cook at home tonight. It's good for the soul. And the bank account (once you've got the pots paid for). And don't try to stab a Scanpan. It'll probably break your arm.

JOHN HINTERBERGER'S FOOD COLUMNS AND RESTAURANT REVIEWS APPEAR SUNDAYS IN PACIFIC AND FRIDAYS IN TEMPO. HE ALSO WRITES A WEDNESDAY COLUMN FOR THE SCENE SECTION OF THE TIMES. BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER IS A SEATTLE TIMES STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER.