The 3 Stages Of Calphalon Destruction!

Posted under Thoughts by coryelvidge

So about 5 years ago I discovered cooking. I don’t know what happened. I went from being someone who got impatient at the time it took to microwave a bag of popcorn, to thinking that a great Friday night was one that was spent chopping, dicing, kneading, mixing, brining, basting, sauteing, baking, broiling, and grilling. I got to know the staff at Williams Sonoma by name and spent literally hours learning how to do things as simple as boiling water lol (I knew NOTHING about cooking so I was starting from scratch). Those of you who know me well, know that I don’t like doing things half way. When I want to learn about something, I dive into it headfirst. It consumed all my spare time. The more I learned, the more l LOVED it!!! After spending a couple years in culinary bliss, I concluded that every artist needs the right tools and I decided to buy my very first set of professional pots and pans. I researched and saved and the day I went in to make my purchase, I couldn’t stop smiling lol. When I got them home I carefully unwrapped each pan and gently placed them in their proper place in the cupboard. I went to bed that night feeling that all was right with the world My pans and I were going to have a long and delicious life together.

Well, over the next year, I learned something incredibly disheartening: Very few people, if any, will ever care for my carefully saved for pots and pans, as much as I do. As you may, or may not know, putting a professional grade pan in a dishwashing machine is the quickest way to send it to it’s death. I didn’t know how this caused damage, or why, but I blindly and wholeheartedly agreed to lovingly hand wash every single pan for the rest of my life. What I didn’t count on were the many wonderful people in my life whom after family meals would be kind enough to do my dishes for me and out of innocent ignorance, or in some cases, lazy defiance, would put my beautiful pans in their detergent filled coffin. The first time it happened, I almost had a heart attack as I opened up our dishwasher to put away the clean load and saw my gorgeous saucepan trapped inside. But I inspected it carefully and breathed a sigh of relief that it didn’t look wounded in anyway. In fact, after a couple of these indiscretions they still seemed just fine so I began to loosen the apron strings and accepted that no matter how many times I asked people to hand wash my pans, it just wasn’t going to happen all the time and I was going to relax about it. I became so relaxed about it that I even found myself putting them in the dishwasher from time to time. My pans slowly began to turn a lighter grey color but they still cooked fabulously so I just assumed that the “damage” from putting pots in the dishwasher was limited to defiling their aesthetic appearance but not effecting their fabulous cooking capability. They changed ever so slowly but one day I opened my dishwasher and realized that I had killed my soup pot. I now have first hand understanding of why you don’t put professional grade pans in the dishwasher. Wanna see?? Ok… here you go:

The first picture is of one of my pans, after 2 years of regular use, that has only been hand washed. It looks just as good as the day I bought it and cooks beautifully! The second and third pictures are of one of my pans that has been occasionally put in the dishwasher over the last couple years. You can see that the outside is starting to deteriorate faster than the inside but it still cooks wonderfully well. The fourth, fifth, and sixth pictures are of my poor soup pot that has been put in my dishwasher very regularly. Keep in mind that these are all from the same set. Purchased at the same time.

As you can see, the dishwashing detergent has literally started eating away at my infused-anodized aluminum. I can no longer use my soup pot. It feels so chalky that you can’t touch it without cringing and the inside bottom of the pan is starting to grit. It is starting to rub off on food making it unusable. So why should you not put your pots and pans in the dishwasher? Because it does actually ruin your pans. It isn’t just overprotective corporate officers encouraging consumers to hand wash just to see how far their power actually reaches. Dishwasher detergent actually destroys a steel hard enough to be placed under a 1500 degree broiler. Go figure. So take my advice: if you are going to spend decent money on cookware, be willing to care for them. If you know ahead of time that you just aren’t willing to take the time to do that, get your pans at Wally-World so you don’t feel sick when they fall apart.