Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where Jon’s quest to give himself more time to plan and cook also luckily overlapped with him accidentally having 4 things scheduled for yesterday, so there was no way this post would have been done then. Which is GOOD, because a discussion yesterday actually inspired today’s post, which I did then have to spend a little bit debating whether to make a Culinary compendium on the topic, or a full quick tip. I decided the latter, because there’s a lot of stuff to lay down as preface/ground work before I really start snapping off definitions. So, today, we’re talking about Pans. And our title is a slightly edited Palindrome because that was the only way to appease the pun-hungry side of my brain from making an incredibly tasteless reference to a “Pan”demic. Look, we can all acknowledge the bad joke was obvious, and now that we’ve identified it, we can move on, quarantining it so that it can’t hurt us further.

Some More Panned Humor

So, Pans. What do we know about them?

Never grow up, fight pirates, hard to rig for flying effects in a theater?

Thank you, caption Jon, for that very unhelpful addition. For USEFUL commentary: a pan is a relatively flat and wide cooking implement, mostly often made of metal, typically with a single long straight handle on one side, maybe with another smaller loop handle on the other. They normally have relatively shallow walls around the cooking surface of anywhere from ½” to 3” (1 cm to 7.5 cm for our fancy metric friends).

This makes the SOMEWHAT distinct from Pots, which are cooking or storage vessels, often with a flat bottom, but with high sides, often in excess of 6”, and sometimes exceeding 18” (15 and 45 cm, by ‘basic’ multiplication of the earlier values). Cooking pots typically have 2 loop handles, or knob handles for transportation.

Those are the broad strokes, though there are some irritating points of confusion, which is kind of natural: the word “pot” is from a different etymology than “pan”: “Pan” comes from Old German and Dutch, distantly connected to the Latin patina, meaning Dish. While ‘pot’ comes from Old French and Old English, eventually deriving from Latin potus, or “drinking cup” (which means, humorously, that a lot of political discussion in America would be VERY confusing for an Ancient Roman. Beyond, you know, the shock of television, twitter, cars…LOOK, the WORD IS A FUNNY COINCIDENCE, LET’S NOT OVERTHINK THIS.)

I think I’ve used this joke twice, and I don’t even WATCH this show.

The thing is that, in many kitchens, a pot is technically a pan (in that “pan” can refer to any metal cooking vessel) but a pan is not a pot. So if you asked someone for a pan, they might hand you a pot, but if you ask them for a pot, they should never hand you a pan. Unless it’s a SAUCEPAN, which is a relatively small, high-walled metal cooking container…often with a single long handle, but despite being NAMED a pan, is technically considered by many a pot… making it the spork of cooking vessels with even more confusing bullshit involved.

All of that confusion isn’t actually why I wanted to talk about Pans, though. That’s just the SET-UP. No, I wanna take about what you’re made of. Sorry, THEY. What THEY’RE made of.

The Poor Tool Rule School

There’s this old saying, which I’ve always heard as “it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools”, but apparently has a couple variations in different regions. Which makes sense, It’s like, 800 years old at this point. And, as apparently a LOT of coders like to point out, it’s kind of a shit saying. See, the general understanding of the argument is something like Godwin’s Law: Once you blame your tools (or compare someone to Hitler) you’ve outed yourself as a bad craftsman (lost the internet argument). And that’s an overly reductive view of what both maxims are saying. Godwin’s Law didn’t say “once you mentioned Hitler, the argument is over”, he said “it’s basically inevitable in online political arguments that eventually, someone’s going to reference Hitler”. He wasn’t condemning the practice, he was instead noting A: the immense societal and cultural weight of Hitler and his policies in respect to various aspects of political life, and B: the distance the digital medium provides making his invocation more certain. Sure, a lot of bad faith critiques will be “Policy X is JUST LIKE NAZI GERMANY!”…but there will also BE policies that ARE like Nazi Germany, and you can’t invalidate a claim for noting that.

If your friends suggest kidnapping the Pope to install themselves as the God of Germany, then yeah, that’s legit Nazi talk.

The similarly hidden meaning to the craftsman phrase is a broader point that a “good craftsman” is capable of picking the right tool for a given task, and has the potential to do more with inferior tools than a fool with good ones. Thus, it’s noting that “picking one’s tools” is PART of the definition of a good craftsman.

And that sounds pretty reasonable, but…it’s also kind of a bad argument. Like, it assumes a good craftsman has unlimited access to all tools, and a ‘bad craftsman” has equal access to them. That’s what the coder’s argument is about: there are seven HUNDRED coding languages, and most coders only know a handful of them at a time. And those languages have restrictions and issues. There are things that C++ CAN’T do, because the language wasn’t built that way. It’s perfectly reasonable for a coder in C++ to occasionally have to say “we can’t do that, because of the language we’re using.” Sure, you could argue “couldn’t he just know more coding languages”, to which I would respond “Can you code C functions on a site built in C++?” Because here’s the thing, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE ANSWER TO THAT IS, because I don’t code beyond very basic DOS/HTML stuff. I don’t even know if you “build sites in C++”. That sentence might be gibberish! Similarly, as a lighting technician, I have had to tell directors that there is no way, in the space the show is taking place, with the equipment and personnel we have, to achieve the effect they are asking for. It would require me, at a minimum, to buy a $700 piece of equipment, steal $5,000 worth of software, and then learn how to use it so I can train someone ELSE to run it, all inside of 2 weeks. . And the same is true in many other fields. Broadly.

“I just want to know if it can be done”
”That depends, has my budget recently gained an extra two zeros?”
”No.”
”Then no.”

I bring this up, because someone I talked to on Thursday happened to briefly complain that they had attempted to make a recipe they saw from a chef they watched on a food show and they encountered a problem where the recipe just didn’t work for them. And, interestingly, it was actually a recipe not unlike one I’ve already shown you all, and have, myself, experienced some difficulties with: The Egg Fold/Egg Wrap. If you don’t remember, the “Egg fold” is basically a cheater’s version of a jianbing made by making a thin layer of omelette, putting tortilla on top, filling, and folding. The Egg Wrap is the same kind of idea, except you roll the whole thing up instead of folding it.

On the one hand, I’m irritated how much better these look than my picture.
On the other, this is a professionally made show by the BBC. There are probably 8 people paid to make this look this good.

Now, it’s entirely possible that the issue the person ran into is that they just didn’t use enough oil in the pan, or they made some other mistake; I myself, due to rushing one morning, both used too little oil, AND pushed down too hard on the tortilla, adhering my eggs to the bottom of the pan. But, the person FELT that it was possibly because the TV chef had a better pan than they did. And that’s a legitimate thing to consider: the KIND of pan you use will have effects on what you can and can’t do with the dishes you’re making. And while I gave some basic pointers about how certain pans work, it also felt like a great topic to discuss further, because maybe the person DIDN’T have the pan they needed to get the job done.

So I wanted to “quickly” run down the pros and cons of various MATERIALS for pans, and what they can mean for your home cooking, going in what I understand to be roughly chronological order of creation. And “quickly” is in quotes there because by the time I had all this set up, I got TWO entries into my list, and was sitting at 2,100 words. So THIS actually IS just a pre-face. Sorry! I assure you, the next post we do for this will be information DENSE, but we just don’t have the space to fit everything in today. So For now, you get to learn the difference between a pot and a pan, the intricacies of coding and theatre lighting, and that if you liked the egg fold recipe, but didn’t like the shape, you can try rolling it. That’s not a TOTAL waste of time! 

MONDAY: MEAT’S BACK ON THE MENU, AS WE CRUNCH INTO SOME FRIED CHICKEN…BALLS. FRIED BALLS WITH CHICKEN, TECHNICALLY. LOOK, WE’RE DOING CROQUETTES.

THURSDAY? FRIDAY?: WE COME BACK AND BANG OUT THESE PANS.