I have used the water drop trick occasionally. Usually I cook an egg at higher temperature though. I wait until the oil smokes and fry it to get a golden brown crispy bottom. My favourite egg to throw on a noodle or rice bowl.

Both have their place. I think both stainless and carbon steel are extremely cheap in the long run compared to nonstick for the simple fact these pans don’t wear out. Both types of pans will last for generations and can take a real beating, even from metal utensils, though carbon steel does not give a damn about scratches whereas stainless can lose some aesthetic appeal (barkeepers friend can help polish it up though)!

Besides the chemical reactivity differences, stainless pans (especially clad pans with aluminum or copper cores) tend to be much faster to react to temperature changes than carbon steel. At the same time can’t hold as much thermal energy due to lower density, so carbon steel is better for searing a large piece of food without cooling down too much (which can start boiling the food instead of searing).

Yeah plus when cooking some foods in stainless (such as meat) you want some sticking so you can build a fond which you then deglaze to make a pan sauce. Carbon steel is less ideal for this because the seasoning will react with acids such as vinegars, wines, or citrus which are all common ingredients in pan sauces. While a well-seasoned carbon steel pan can survive a deglaze with vinegar the dissolved seasoning can ruin the flavour of your pan sauce.

I have that same wok. You need a lot more oil for a flat bottom wok than a round bottom because the flat bottom doesn’t let the oil pool to the middle.

You absolutely can get nonstick eggs with a stainless steel frying pan and a small amount of oil but you need to actually practice heat control and cooking technique. It’s actually much easier with butter because the water in it will begin to fizz and you just need to wait for the fizzing to stop and the pan will be just about hot enough.

You still need to use the right heat setting which is specific to your stove and pan, so practice is needed but you can get a good feel for it by how quickly the butter melts. If it melts rapidly and gives off a lot of steam and begins browning then the pan is too hot (unless you want to do a crispy egg, but that should be done with oil instead of butter which has milk solids that burn and turn bitter).

Carbon steel, glass, clay, ceramic, aluminum, and enameled cast iron are all great too!

Also stainless steel has the potential to leach chromium into foods. Research into this is still preliminary.

He’s a great character of a horrible person; an anti-hero like Walter White or Hannibal Lecter. People like these characters because they give us a safe outlet for violent fantasies. They’re not completely without risk, however, because some people struggle with the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

I don’t think he’s aspirational at all however. He’s lonely and obsessive. He has many of the same mental health issues that his villainous rivals struggle with. The only difference is that he acts out his violent fantasies against criminals instead of the general public.

The fix is to legalize the construction of more of these walkable neighbourhoods which are the most desirable places to live (so developers could make a lot of money with relatively small plots of land) yet are illegal to build because city governments have regulated them into oblivion.

Sure. I mean you can buy a solar panel and put it on your roof and then sell the electricity it produces back to the grid. That’s not work. Is it fair? I don’t know. There are definitely people who think subsidies for solar panels are unfair.

There’s also the question of whether or not you earned the money. I think if you take a risk with your money and you invest it wisely then you’ve earned the profits you made on (minus taxes of course).

Obviously if you inherit millions of dollars from your parents you didn’t earn that. We as a society begrudgingly put up with inheritance because we admit that as humans our urge to provide for our children is a powerful instinct.

There’s also a question of whether or not an investment benefits society. I think the pepper growing and solar panel examples show clear benefits to society. With larger companies the question is a lot more complicated.

For example, I used to think Apple benefited society with all the work they put into their computers and growing the personal computer market. Now I think they’ve moved away from that towards rent-seeking. So to me it wasn’t the money that made the difference, it was the behaviour.

I’m not a teacher but I do volunteer to tutor high school kids whose families are from Somalia. I used to be in the mathematics teaching program in university but I decided not to become a teacher. I love to teach but I’m not equipped to deal with all of the other stuff teachers have to put up with (angry parents, disinterested / defiant students, standardized testing, failing school systems).

Don’t let the people throwing around “bootlicker” bother you. These folks are totally lost in a pit of resentment. They’re basically left wing MAGA types. The two groups are going to tear apart western civilization if they have their way. I’m hoping sanity will one day prevail.

I think you mean private equity, which act as the scavengers of the economy, dismantling companies and selling them off piece by piece. Venture capital is about funding 20 startups and hoping one of them becomes the next Google.

Let me quote GP because it seems like you’ve already forgotten what they said:

you’re just skimming off other people’s work

Now how do you reconcile that with this:

Nobody said it wasn’t fair

Either you’re just flat out lying when you say this, or you think “skimming off other people’s work” is fair. Which is it?

If you don’t think it’s fair then don’t borrow my $10 for pepper seeds! Find something else to do to earn your own money. I’ll buy the pepper seeds myself and keep the profits.

By the way, I’ve grown peppers myself. It’s very easy. The sun and the plants do 99% of the work. Claiming that “you did all the work” by germinating and transplanting a few seeds is quite silly.

Investing your money is not “making money for free” it’s providing your money to someone else so they can use it to make money. Then you make money when they make money. It’s capitalization. You risk losing all of that money if the investment fails. If you work a job you put your time and effort in and get paid for that but if the company fails you lose your job, they don’t take away your house.

It’s no different from a loan. Suppose you lend your friend $10 to buy some pepper seeds and they grow a bunch of peppers, sell some of them for $20, keep the other peppers, and collect seeds from the peppers so that they have even more seeds next year. Is it really fair if they just pay you back $10 next year? No!

They used your $10 to buy the seeds they needed to start with, they earned themselves $20 from pepper sales, plus they got to eat some peppers and even ended up with more seeds than they originally bought. They should pay you back more than $10 for the simple reason that you did not have use of your $10 for an entire year, so you did not have the ability to buy those pepper seeds and make the profit yourself.

That’s the time value of money. It’s why we pay interest on loans. Because to not do so is to saddle the lender with unfair opportunity costs, in addition to the risk of losing their money (maybe the peppers all die and your friend tells you they can’t pay you back the $10 anymore).

The Maillard reaction cannot be achieved through simmering alone. The temperature is too low. Simmering meat over a long period of time is useful for breaking down collagen and making a rich broth but you will not have the same deep, browned flavour as a broth made from roasted meat.

“For some reason”

You seem like a curious person. You should do some more research into cooking and why the Maillard and caramelization reactions produce such delicious food. It isn’t the carcinogenic byproducts that taste good (those tend to be quite bitter), it’s all the other complicated compounds produced from those reactions of proteins and sugars. By the way, these reactions can be achieved without burning the food at all, just not with most traditional cooking techniques.

Even still, you can get cancer from cooking without burning food at all. Heat up a bunch of oil to its smoke point and throw some water in there. In addition to creating a huge oily mess, you’ll fill the air with countless tiny droplets of oil and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are a known carcinogen. However, you can reduce the risks by not reheating used cooking oil, instead using only fresh oil every time.

You can also greatly reduce the risks by not heating the oil to its smoke point. It’s actually not necessary to heat oils to their smoke point in order to achieve the desirable browning flavour reactions.

As for life time of only eating bland boiled food: I would trade away a couple extra years of lifespan for avoiding that. Keep in mind that many of the most delicious soups and stews feature lots of seared, roasted, or fried ingredients anyway. Plus as I said, you can still get cancer even if you never eat or drink anything unhealthy. The air, the soil, and the water are all polluted with carcinogens. Even switching to electric cars will not help: the road, brake, and tire damage creates loads of PM2.5 particles which will destroy your lungs. This damage increases with the 4th power of vehicle mass, which means electric vehicles (that are far heavier) are actually far worse at producing this pollution!

You’re throwing out entire continents worth of cuisine. You’re essentially saying “do not sauté or stir fry anything.”

But here’s the sad reality: you could live your whole life eating nothing but bland, boiled food and still get lung cancer from VOCs and PM2.5 particles in the air due to the pollution of city life.

Not true. No matter what stove you cook with, cooking can produce large amounts of oil fumes (vaporized oil particles), smoke, and other VOCs from your food. All of this stuff is bad for your lungs.

Unless all you cook is boiled pasta, rice, veggies, gently simmered sauces, and sous vide (but not seared) proteins, you’re going to need a good quality range hood that (ideally) vents cooking emissions outside.

I’m reminded by the story I once read about Eritrea, a country with wealthy enclaves for the royal family plus foreign petro-engineers. The enclaves have these walls along the road with vast ghettos on the other side.

It’s a miserable place. The engineers tend not to stay long. Just make a lot of money in a short time period and then leave.

Yes. Capital flight is one of the last resort moves, as I said. Take your money with you and leave the hostile country.