de Buyer Mineral B

The nonstick coating on a supermarket pan begins flaking into the eggs somewhere around year four. Nothing underneath is worth keeping, so the whole pan goes in the bin.

The de Buyer Mineral B is one sheet of French carbon steel, spun and forged, with a riveted steel handle and a beeswax finish. There is no coating to fail. You season it with oil over the first weeks of cooking. The surface then builds its own dark, slick patina that deepens every time it meets heat. Professional kitchens have run on carbon steel for a century, because it takes a hard sear and shrugs off the metal spatula and the scrub that would strip a coated pan bare. De Buyer has forged cookware in the Vosges since 1830. The company backs the Mineral B with a lifetime guarantee on material and workmanship. Scorch it or forget it on the flame. You sand it back to bright steel, season it again and cook on. The pan you buy at thirty is the pan you hand on at sixty.

A budget nonstick pan costs somewhere between fifteen and thirty euros. It lasts three to five years before the coating gives out. Take four years as the average and cook on it four times a week. Across three decades you buy that pan seven or eight times over. Every dead one heads to landfill as coated aluminium that no recycler will take. The de Buyer costs 44,99 euro once at Coolblue. Cook on it the same four times a week for thirty years and the outlay works out under half a cent per meal. It finishes those years worth more to you than the day it arrived. The patina is the one part money cannot buy up front.

Verdict: buy the pan with nothing to wear off, season it once and cook on it for the rest of your life.