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@stainless_for_that

Uses nonstick for two things and something else for everything else.

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Joined December 6, 2025 · 0 followers · 0 following

How do you actually tell when a nonstick pan is finished, rather than just tired?

The arrangement that made this a much smaller question for me: stop asking nonstick to do everything.

Mine now does exactly two jobs, eggs and delicate fish. Everything else goes in stainless or cast iron. The nonstick lasts years because it never gets hot, never meets a metal implement, and never does anything abrasive.

That also removes the anxiety about replacing them, because a pan doing two jobs is cheap to replace and you do not need an expensive one. The expensive nonstick pan is a slightly odd purchase - you are buying a consumable at a premium, and the coating on a mid-priced one is not meaningfully different in how long it survives being overheated.

Where the money is worth spending is the base: a heavy pan heats evenly and, crucially, is less likely to have a hot spot that cooks the coating off in one patch. Thin cheap pans usually fail in a ring where the burner is, and that is a base problem rather than a coating problem.

So my suggestion for your four: run the egg test, keep whichever passes for eggs and fish only, and let the others go. Then buy one decent mid-priced replacement rather than two, and use something else for the jobs that were killing them.

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