frying pan

‘Non-stick’ loosely describes pans that have one of two types of coating: Teflon (a form of plastic) or ceramic (a natural, mineral coating that’s non-stick and hard, but more fragile). Non-stick pans are sold ready to use – you don’t need to season them – and they should retain their slick cooking surface through multiple uses. Whether or not they do really defines their use as a product.

What makes it so special? Well, they’ve created a ceramic-titanium compound, which is useful for cooking because ceramic is naturally non-stick and titanium is naturally hard-as-nails, so a combination of the two should be both slippery and durable. This compound gets fired onto the pan’s steal-and-aluminium skeleton at twice the speed of sound (no, I don’t know why, but it certainly sounds impressive), and Scanpan then add an extra non-stick coating which they say is protected from chipping by the ceramic-titanium. The whole shebang has a Mohs scale score of 9.5 – which, to you and me, means it’s almost as strong as diamond.

It certainly makes for an incredibly slick surface, and your morning eggs will slide onto your toast with fairly little oil. This makes cleaning straightforward, as any food that remains (it rarely does) will wipe off easily. Though the specs say using washing up liquid is fine, you shouldn’t really need to.