cleaningequipment
I’m the official pot-scrubber in our household. I have a question on how clean one should scrub the outside of stainless and copper pots and pans and whether this is merely an aesthetic choice.
I note that cast iron cookware shouldn’t be scrubbed at all.
Does keeping the outsides of stainless and copper pots and pans serve any purpose other than aesthetics? For example: might heat transfer be better if the bottoms were shiny instead of blackened?
I second Joe's advice.
Your pans may be too thin, that would make your dishes burn easily. You can test your pans with a simple experiment. Place a thin layer of water in your pan (an eighth of an inch, or just enough to cover the bottom). Turn on your burner to high. If you have an electric stovetop let the burner glow before placing the pan on the burner. Watch how the bubbles form in the pan. If they are uneven over the bottom, you have hot spots.
This photo is actually uneven heating from the burner, not from a bad pan, but it shows the idea:
you have hot spots.
If your pans have hot spots you need to stir more often and maybe lower the heat from what the recipe calls. Pans with thicker bottoms and made with good electric conductors (copper or aluminum) have fewer hot spots.
Then there is what I call the Remick Maxim. Three years ago when I decided I would learn to cook better, I went through many cookbooks and asked a lot of people for advice. A great friend (a French restaurant level cook) told me the best advice he ever got was from the actress Lee Remick, a good cook herself. She said: “the secret to great food is to cook it in low heat.” Best advice I got on cooking.
We love to using Baking Soda and water to gently clean cookware. A little bit of hot water seems to work best.
Best Answer
I think this is purely aesthetic. The outside of my stainless cookware looks terrible. The oils polymerize and are really difficult to clean after that point. I don't worry about it too much, though I have a friend who takes great care to keep his stainless shiny. I doubt the buildup is enough to impact heat transfer.