Why You Should Never Use A Nonstick Pan To Brown Ground Beef — Grab This Instead

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A nonstick pan is a must for making perfect fried eggs like Gordon Ramsay, but it isn't exactly a jack-of-all-trades in the kitchen. Sure, if your sole concern is an easy cleanup, it offers that in spades. Yet, most people prioritize flavor and visual appeal with their cuisine; and there are some culinary tasks nonstick pans simply can't handle. According to Jennifer Borchardt, culinary director at Pre Brands, browning ground beef is one of them.

When asked if a nonstick pan would be a suitable piece of cookware to brown ground beef, Borchardt was skeptical. "In general, they are not able to handle the high heat you need for proper browning," she said. Even worse, heating the materials that make those pans so slick, to high temperatures, can be cause for concern. "Exposing most nonstick pans to high heat can ruin their coating and potentially release harmful chemicals into your meat."

The ideal kitchen accessory for browning ground beef must not only tolerate high heat, but also get hot enough to allow that tasty Maillard reaction occur. For that, Borchardt recommended using a perfectly seasoned cast-iron pan. "Cast-iron skillets are the preferred method for most ground beef recipes," she said. "They hold their heat extremely well and make for a nice, even cook throughout your beef." Contrary to what some people believe, you don't have to break the bank to get your hands on a quality pan, like the Utopia Kitchen Cast-Iron Skillet. However, there is also another type of pan that will sufficiently brown ground beef — and it's actually a better choice if your meat is seasoned with sugary components.

Using a hot pan and ground beef that contains the appropriate fat-to-meat ratio, browning the protein is a fairly straightforward process. Yet, Jennifer Borchardt noted that if you're adding sweet ingredients to enhance the flavor, you'll do yourself a favor by swapping a cast-iron pan for something that will be a bit easier to work with. "If your recipe contains any type of sugar (brown sugar, pineapple juice, etc.), I would switch to stainless steel," she said.

It's not that a cast-iron skillet is incapable of browning ground beef with sugary elements –- it can. Yet, if you value your time, a stainless steel pan is the way to go. "Sugar tends to caramelize and will make cleaning cast iron a real hassle," Borchardt said. "Stainless is much easier to clean off those stuck-on bits left behind in the pan." Just because you're not using easy-clean nonstick cookware to brown the beef doesn't mean you have to commit loads of time to scrubbing a pan after all is said and done. Besides that, using heavy-duty cleaning supplies on cast iron is a mistake that can damage your pan.