New pan taste?

June 6, 2017 9:56 AM

I bought a new saute pan. Immediately washed it, cooked some kale in it, and all was well, but later I did some chicken breasts and went for a pan sauce and it tasted horrific, so metallic. Is it the pan or what?

This is the pan I acquired just yesterday.

The only other culprit I can think of is the chicken broth I used which is admittedly kind of horrible tasting on its own but I chucked the excess because the failed sauce was that upsetting so I don't have it around to test for metallic tasting.

After I washed up the pan I licked it and the pan itself does taste like well.. metal. I spent some time licking various metal objects in my kitchen to compare metallic flavors and my new saute and the saucier I bought last month are definitely the most metallic tasting objects to be found.. but I've cooked some beautiful acidic sauces in my saucier and that was fine.

Should I blame the chicken broth and try again? Is there some low effort, low cost test food that will help me figure out if my pan tastes like the devil or if something else was amiss?

posted by yonega to Food & Drink (14 answers total)

Was the chicken broth in a (metal) can?
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 10:03 AM on June 6, 2017

Response by poster: No, it was in a cardboard box. It was this one.

As you can see the label is encrusted with good buzz words and the ingredient list was totally reasonable. (I was cooking to share with someone else who has food sensitivities.)
posted by yonega at 10:09 AM on June 6, 2017

It just takes a while for stainless steel to - let's say - get used to food. Try again. It'll be fine at the end and it won't likely hurt you. Perhaps use the pan for a while to cook bulk stuff like collard greens with ham hocks or whatnot, before going on to the finer, subtler things.

Two things:
1) Don't use anything that tastes horrible, especially when you're also working your way through a series of scientific test cycles of tasting stuff for whether it tastes good.

2) I spent some time licking various metal objects in my kitchen to compare metallic flavors.
Seems like a fun project to me, but I get the sensation that you're not really happy having to do this type of work, so...mayybe...just don't?
posted by Namlit at 10:10 AM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

When you scratch it with your fingernail, does any grey or black residue come off? If so, you might have some industrial residue that isn't soluble in detergent. Alternatively, if you washed it in the dishwasher, it could be the aluminium base deteriorating with remarkable speed.

Either way, if you do have that grey residue, try using Bar Keeper's Friend or Cameo on it, or one of these methods (oil, or lemon juice/salt, or baking soda paste).
posted by flibbertigibbet at 10:11 AM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

I spent some time licking various metal objects in my kitchen to compare metallic flavors

This is such a wonderful mental image and I love that you did it.

Do you know exactly what the pan is made of? Aluminum or lower-quality stainless steel can react with acidic foods and generate a metallic flavor. I don't think broth should be all THAT acidic (it's hard to google for because I keep finding a bunch of BS detox sites) but if this particular broth was gross, maybe it was more acidic than average broth is?

Is there some low effort, low cost test food that will help me figure out if my pan tastes like the devil or if something else was amiss?

I might take your offending pan and a selection of other pans and simmer (separately) some apple juice and some milk in each one, let all your samples cool, and taste them. But then I am a huge nerd. If you do this, please make a blog post abut it someplace.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:18 AM on June 6, 2017 [12 favorites]

Seconding showbiz_liz's suggestion. If your pan sauce involved wine, especially if you added it before the broth, that's an even more likely source of acidity.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:55 AM on June 6, 2017

Response by poster:

Namlit:
It just takes a while for stainless steel to - let's say - get used to food. Try again. It'll be fine at the end and it won't likely hurt you. Perhaps use the pan for a while to cook bulk stuff like collard greens with ham hocks or whatnot, before going on to the finer, subtler things.

I was wondering if something like this might be the case. I've mainly been using second hand cookware up to now.

flibbertigibbet:
When you scratch it with your fingernail, does any grey or black residue come off? If so, you might have some industrial residue that isn't soluble in detergent. Alternatively, if you washed it in the dishwasher, it could be the aluminium base deteriorating with remarkable speed.

There's no noticeable residue.

showbiz_liz:
Do you know exactly what the pan is made of? Aluminum or lower-quality stainless steel can react with acidic foods and generate a metallic flavor. I don't think broth should be all THAT acidic (it's hard to google for because I keep finding a bunch of BS detox sites) but if this particular broth was gross, maybe it was more acidic than average broth is?

It's made out of stainless steel but I don't know what grade. The sauce wasn't particularly acidic, my trial run of kale that I made after the unboxing and the washing was much more acidic and tasted completely normal. The sauce had a few grape tomatoes in it but was pretty mild in terms of zing. However, I did reduce it a bit and I'm wondering if that concentrated the horror. I don't really cook with storebought chicken broth that often and I tend to think it generally tastes awful before you do anything to it but somehow it makes food taste better at the end anyway.. so I'm not really qualified to opine about the quality of the chicken broth. The sauce could have been good, all of the flavors I wanted were there, but it also tasted like licking a 9V battery. I can't imagine that anything that's the product of animal or vegetable could taste like that, which is why I suspected the pan itself is primarily at fault.

showbiz_liz:
I might take your offending pan and a selection of other pans and simmer (separately) some apple juice and some milk in each one, let all your samples cool, and taste them. But then I am a huge nerd. If you do this, please make a blog post abut it someplace.

This is a really good idea. I might try this later. I drank some cold tap water out of the pan just now and it definitely tastes metallic. I don't know enough chemistry but I wonder if Something need to happen to the surface before it will stop throwing so many ions or whatever all over the place. I also wonder what I could do to accelerate the process.

nebulawindphone:
Seconding showbiz_liz's suggestion. If your pan sauce involved wine, especially if you added it before the broth, that's an even more likely source of acidity.

No wine, just broth, shallots, grape tomatoes, I did add some balsamic at the very end but not a ton and it didn't taste particularly acid just.. like metal.
posted by yonega at 10:57 AM on June 6, 2017

This is wild speculation (but I'm home with the flu, and bored, so...), but maybe your pan needs to be passivated? The magic of stainless steel comes from its chromium content, which ideally forms an inert film on the surface of the metal. Normally this happens just fine but if the metal wasn't treated properly at the factory you might have gotten a non-stainless stainless pan which leaches iron, especially in the presence of things that normally corrode steel.

Anyway, the link says that the favored treatment for passivation is citric acid. They're in the business of selling high-tech treatments to metal fabricators, but it seems to me that you could rub a cut lemon over your pan, let it stand for a while, rinse thoroughly and repeat. (Don't use vinegar or any ol' acid - it has to be citric acid.) Do this a few times and see if your pan tastes less metallic - if so, you're on the right track.

And I'd complain to Cuisinart about it - stainless steel isn't exactly rocket science. Good luck!
posted by Quietgal at 12:15 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

SS pans don't need seasoning like cast iron, but they do need to be oiled:

Heat the pan like this and then add a small amount of oil.

You can then let the pan cool and it will retain a nice non stick surface for whatever you decide to cook next.
posted by Lanark at 12:29 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm guessing some kind of coating that was purposely applied. Call customer service and ask them about it.
posted by jbenben at 12:29 PM on June 6, 2017

I have that set of Cuisinart pots and pans; they're about ten years old and I've never had a problem with a metallic taste after using them. I've cooked all manner of foods, soups, and sauces with them.

I did have a metallic taste problem with a crock pot I bought several years ago though. Even after thorough cleanings, it still smelled slightly metallic even when not in use (so much so that I kept it in out of the house) and it ruined two perfectly good stews I made at two different times. I returned it and bought a high quality dutch oven instead and never looked back.

You have to be really careful with the kitchen products you buy nowadays because the quality control of many companies isn't very reliable anymore due to cost cutting measures and the over-reliance on imported materials and products, which may not have adequate safety or inspection standards. My philosophy is if something I bought that's meant to come in contact with food smells or tastes funny, I just return it and buy something else. I don't waste time second guessing myself. Properly seasoning pans, pots, and woks excepted, I should not have to take special cleaning measures or jump through hoops to use a product in a manner for which it is intended just because the manufacturer cut corners. I vote with my wallet and buy something else.

P.S. I've also used that brand of chicken broth before and while it's not one of my favorites, it has never tasted metallic to me.
posted by LuckySeven~ at 12:48 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Tomatoes are one of the worst things for newish pans in terms of leaching out weird flavors, though I'd expect a stainless steel pan to do OK if it was scrubbed thoroughly to make sure all the manufacturing grease and other schmoo was removed.
posted by wierdo at 3:11 PM on June 6, 2017

Chiming in to agree with LuckySeven. We have that exact pan and have been cooking in it multiple times a week for a bit over 15 years now, and I do not recall any metallic taste being an issue. Of course, manufacturing may have changed in that time, but just as an additional data point. I have sometimes noticed a metallic taste in some kinds of broth, one brand in particular that we do not buy anymore, so you might give a different one a try to see if that makes a difference.
posted by goggie at 3:24 PM on June 6, 2017

I wouldn't be surprised if I'm just missing it, but I can't tell whether you washed the pan between cooking the kale and making your sauce, or not; but even if you did, I think the answer could be a combination of what Quietgal said about passivation and the kale.

Because kale contains quite a bit of oxalate, and oxalate has a tremendous affinity for divalent metals:

Oxalate, the conjugate base of oxalic acid, is an excellent ligand for metal ions. It usually binds as a bidentate ligand forming a 5-membered MO2C2 ring. An illustrative complex is potassium ferrioxalate, K3[Fe(C2O4)3]. ... One of the main applications of oxalic acid is a rust-removal, which arises because oxalate forms water-soluble derivatives with the ferric ion.

I'm not sure why you didn't taste the metal in the kale unless it was all bound up in the oxalate and something in the chicken broth degraded the oxalate and released it.
posted by jamjam at 12:10 AM on June 7, 2017