re: What makes cast iron skillets so much better than your normal pan?

heat distribution

Cast Iron is good for certain things but not all. It holds heat well. The downside of that is, of course, that if the pan is too hot or not hot enough, it will take a long time to change temperature.

Cast Iron is one of the least conductive metals of which cookware is typically made. This makes it unevenly heating, despite all marketing and old wives tales to the contrary. Marketing doesn't change science.

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Responsiveness refers to a material’s ability to respond to changes in the heat source. I think we have all experienced the phenomenon of turning the heat off under a cast iron skillet only to have the meat continue to sizzle and cook as though nothing had happened. This is because cast iron does not have good thermal conductivity and a cast iron pan is not able to respond to the decrease in the heat source by cooling off quickly. When considering responsiveness, it is useful to imagine the cookware as a bucket of heat with faucets dumping heat into and draining heat out of the bucket.

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One last bit of science... There is a quality that nicely quantifies the relationship between a material’s thermal conductivity and its specific heat. This is called Thermal Diffusivity and it reflects what actually happens when heat is applied to a material To arrive at this number we divide thermal conductivity by density multiplied by specific heat.Looking at this illustration, it would seem that copper is the best material among those commonly used for cookware. And, indeed it is the case that copper is theoretically the best performer in most cooking applications. However, copper is expensive and heavy, and there are many cases where other materials may be just as good or even better. We’ll come back to this later.

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LINK

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So 5-ply and copper are best for even heat distribution?

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Copper is the best, assuming it's at least 2mm thick. 5-ply really doesn't mean anything. What is determinative is the amount of aluminum present in cladded pans. Stainless is a terrible conductor of heat.

For instance, All-Clad D5 actually performs worse than All-Clad Stainless (traditional S-A-S clad construction). The reason for this is that, instead of adding more aluminum, All-Clad came up with this line to decrease their warranty claims due to warping by adding an additional layer of stainless between two layers of aluminum. D5 is a S-A-S-A-S construction. It contains no more aluminum than the small amount already present in All-Clad pans - only 1.7mm of aluminum.

D5 is slower to heat and slower to cool than All-Clad Stainless, and heats slightly more unevenly. See: LINK

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On the contrary, Demeyere's 5-ply lines perform better than tri-ply All-Clad because of containing more aluminum, not because of a number of layers.

All-Clad's D7 line heats far more evenly than the D5 and tri-ply because it has far more aluminum. Unfortunately, they've stopped making it. There are deals to be had on eBay for D7 skillets.

Demeyere's proline is the gold standard of cladded skillets for even heating because it contains the most aluminum.

D7 Review:

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Durability: 5/5 Excellent. D7 is built like a tank; you get about 3.76 millimeter thick alternating layers of stainless steel and aluminum which is ~1.2 millimeters thicker than ordinary All-Clad Stainless. The rivets are capped off with 18/10 stainless steel.

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Even heating: 5/5 Excellent. This pan is a high performer in terms of spreading heat around, for both induction/electric stoves as well as gas. My micrometer readings of the sidewalls was ~3.76 mm with about 2.2 mm of that being unusually pure aluminum, which is a great heat conductor. (Compare that to the paltry ~1.6 mm of lower-purity aluminum in All-Clad Stainless and knockoffs thereof!) Furthermore, the d7 pan has a lot of thermal mass so it won’t suffer as much as thin pans when adding food. A thinner pan can crash in temperature when you throw in large amounts of food, which turns tasty frying (Maillard reactions) into bland steaming until the pan can get back up in temperature.

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All-Clad D7 Review

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– 4.8 mm thick clad design (stainless steel inside/outside, 3.7 mm aluminum alloy interior) for even heating and large heat reservoir so it won’t drop in temperature too much if you throw in a steak or large fish fillet, for example. That 3.7 mm thickness is roughly twice the thickness of the aluminum layer in All-Clad Stainless. And the total heat capacity of Proline is roughly 75% greater than All-Clad Stainless of the same size (taking into account heat capacity differences between stainless and aluminum). (Note that the smallest Proline, the 8-incher, is 3 mm thick instead of 4.8 mm thick. Presumably there is little point in making the pan thicker, because the burner will be as large or larger than the base of the pan so you will already have excellent heat spread.)

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In fact, a Proline pan holds roughly 90% as much heat as a 4 mm-thick cast iron skillet of equal size (and spreads heat much more evenly than cast iron). This is because aluminum isn’t dense, but it holds twice as much heat as cast iron, pound for pound.1 (Some people mistakenly believe that aluminum doesn’t hold heat well, but that’s probably due to bad experiences with thin aluminum. Sufficiently thick aluminum can hold and evenly distribute a very large amount of heat.)

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Demeyere Proline review

Cast iron is almost unbeatable when it comes to braises and slow oven cooking. Its high specific heat and relatively poor conduction of heat mean that it's perfect for applications where the heat attacks from all angles (oven), mitigating its tendency to develop hot spots due to its poorer conduction. The high specific heat mitigates temperature swings in the cookware and maintains a more even temperature as the heat source cycles on and off (oven, electric). I have an enameled cast iron pot that I'll fight you for and the only thing I use it for is stuff in the oven because I get the benefits of cast iron with the protection of enamel to let me use it for long cooks with acids.

At the same time, I have my grandmother's Magnalite roaster that's also designed for long cooks in the oven. I keep it in my kitchen for purely sentimental reasons but it has zero use in my kitchen because it's not really good at what it's designed to do. Aluminum doesn't have the high specific heat of iron, so it tends to fluctuate in temperature more as an oven (electric) cycles, and its high conductivity is of relatively little use when the heat source is even and from all directions, like in an oven.

Cookware is like anything else. You need to select the right tool for the job. Sometimes, that's cast iron. Sometimes it isn't.

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don't bother responding to him...it's a bot created to spam the boards

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I like mine because I can put them directly from stovetop to oven or vise versa without thinking about heat or handles or whatever.