I have a high tolerance to holding hot things; it really fucks with my wife and friends that will pick something up after I’ve handled it without flinching and they get burned.
Cooking breakfast? Probably not as hot as you’d think. I can fry up some eggs and a couple pieces of sausage and the handle doesn’t get hot enough to cause pain, much less injury. It’s hot, it isn’t comfortable, but it’s largely a matter of perception vs reality once you’re aware of what level of heat can cause burns.
Now, if I’m frying bacon in a big batch, I’m using something to protect my hand when I move the pan because it hurts, and prolonged contact can give a 1st degree burn in a few seconds, way less than the time it takes to drain grease or move the pan to the sink.
But truth? If your pan is hot enough to cause a 2nd degree burn, you’re either running too hot, or you aren’t using the range; you’re putting it in the oven. Anything over about 350 on a hob is too hot for practical use, and that includes searing meats. Yeah, you can go higher for something like a blue or rare steak, but you’d still be better off with a slightly lower temp and that with either a “reverse” sear, or finishing in the oven. You get more even cooking like that.
Meats where you need well done? You’ll end up with a tough exterior rather than that lovely Maillard browning and a tender interior. And anything other than meat will come out poorly over about 350 in a pan. Unless you like burnt exteriors and barely cooked interiors of things.
And at that temp range, you can easily pick up the handle for a second or two without insulation, as long as it hasn’t been in an oven so that the handle hasn’t had a chance to radiate any heat at all. You won’t want to stand there fucking around, it’ll be painful after a few seconds, but you won’t get injured, and it’s a level of pain that’s tolerable if necessary.
Which, it’s pretty obvious that this pan in the image wasn’t hot at all, but that’s a separate issue from the comment section debate about cast iron’s properties.
I take from the discussion that most of this community has never seen a well-designed frying pan.
The handle is not supposed to get hot. It doesn’t need silicon or whatever outside of it, just well designed metal is enough. Cast iron is perfectly fine, people do it with aluminum all the time, and cast iron is an order of magnitude (literally, a bit more than 10x) easier to keep cool.
You don’t need 23th century engineering to make it. In fact, people have been making it since the 19th century.
Cast iron’s heat transfer is quite poor. It’s about 1/5 of aluminum and 1/10 of copper. You can test this yourself if you have a laser thermometer. Heat the pan for a bit and then scan the pans surface with the thermometer. You’ll see a fair amount of variation.
I think people understand this property and rotate the pan to get an even hest distribution. Any case … Could be wrong, but I looked up the heat transfer coefficient and its a fraction of copper and aluminum. On the other hand, it’s really good at staying hot once it gets hot.
I’ve never seen a cast iron pan that the handle stayed cool. With aluminum the handle can be a thin hollow piece riveted on so very little heat is conducted to the handle and it stays cool (assuming you’re not cooking with gas). Cast iron is a big thick handle built right into the pan (because they’re heavy) an and tends to be shorter (because cast iron is brittle) so it’ll get hot as the heat conducts no problem. That’s why many cast iron pans come with a potholder for the handle (even the expensive ones) and other types of pans don’t.
Mine stay cool enough to handle on the stove top, except if simmering something for some time (which I don’t usually do with cast, because that often entails tomatoes).
I can make steaks or burgers in cast and pick it right up, whole cooking.
How do the handle connects with the pan at the frying pans you know? Through a solid slip like if the part of it you hold was just inserted into the main body metal?
Cast irons are …casted iron. They are a single piece of metal, which includes the handles. If anything,the average cast iron pan is thicker where the handle meets the pan due to cast iron being brittle and heavy.
This being an example of the most popular line of cast irons, due to its quality:cost ratio.
I’ve found a photo on Google of one with a much more reasonable handle. Notice it’s not plane, and it connects to the pan making a W, with walls thinner than the pan’s. You can get even better by making the connection with a long U shape.
Or like any good cook, you know when, where and how long you can hold on to a hot panhandle.
I worked in a kitchen for a while as a teen with my mom who taught me everything about cooking. One of those skills is a cook’s unnatural ability to withstand a lot of heat just before the point of getting burned.
My grandmother would take out loaves of bread (in a metal or glass bread pan) out of the oven with her bare hands. I don’t know how she did it, but she never got burned, and also made the best grandma bread ever.
Callouses and timing … it’s the same principal as those Polynesians who can walk over hot coals. They are able to withstand a bit of pain and they know how long to hold it.
If your grandma wanted she could have been able to do a hand stand walk over hot coals … while baking bread.
When the pan is cast iron like the one in the picture, the hot pan transmits heat directly into handle as they are all one piece. How fast the handle gets hot depends how long the pan has been heating and how hot you are cooking. If you’re just doing a quick fry or sear, you’ll be fine, if you’re simmering something for a while, you’ll need protection.
2. When you use a gas stove, a lot of heat is wasted* as hot air that flows up and around the pan. If the handle is metal and close to the pan or not designed with sufficient heat isolation and dissipation, it will get very hot.
*Some cookware, like woks, capture and use some of this heat, with their wide sloping sides, but most of it still escapes unutilized. In periods of cold weather, excess heat that is not vented helps to heat the space. Otherwise the heat needs to be vented, or offset by running air conditioning.
Never need anything with cast I use on the stove top. The handles just don’t get that hot for the cast-iron use-cases (which is generally some kind of frying, whether a steak, a burger, some chicken, etc).
And my stainless is even better. Those handles just don’t get hot on the stove top, ever.
I prefer to think by the 23rd century they’ve perfected material sciences so they can make a pan that doesn’t heat the handle when heating the rest of the pan.
And well-made stainless does too. We regularly comment how surprisingly cool the handles on our stainless cookware never gets hot, even when boiling water for 10 minutes.
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