I’m doing a whole mess of dishes while my kid is asleep and i just finished washing pots and pans. I scrub the heck out of them but there’s always some black and brown coloration on the bottom of it. am I using too much heat so there’s something happening to the metal? if it’s not happening to the metal itself what is it and why does it seem like it refuses every effort I make to clean it?
edit: since it seems i wasn’t clear enough initially, but bottom of the pan i did indeed mean the underside that is in contact with the burner, not the interior bottom of the pan!
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You’ve had some good answers already, but here’s something else interesting about the underside of pans:
If you have a ceramic cooktop, not induction, then it’s best to let the pans get blackened on the underside and keep them that way.
The reason for this is that ceramic cooktops heat the pans via infrared radiation, for the most part. Keeping the pans nice and shiny will reflect much of this heat back down into the cooktop, instead of heating the pan. Black pans absorb much more of the heat, and are therefore more efficient on this style of cooktop. I discovered this when we bought a new stainless steel frying pan, and it never seemed to get hot.
I use induction exclusively, and figured it was the spilled oil/ bits of food that burn and discolor the pan due to direct contact with the heat source and pan.
If it’s a gas stove it can be carbon soot deposits from the incomplete burning of methane. Over time with exposure to high heat it forms a graphene matrix that can bond to the surface and is as hard if not harder than the metal surface it bonded to. At which point it’s difficult to find anything in the kitchen that will actually remove it. (The stuff that will remove that will also eat or scrape through the pans, so it’s a lost cause at some point.)
Residue can get on the bottom of the pan or the burner, which then burns to the bottom of your pans.
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