How to stop food sticking to a bare-metal pan

Every bare-metal pan will stick if you use it wrong. Ours included. That's the honest starting point, and any brand telling you otherwise is describing a coating.

The good news is that sticking is a solved problem, and the solution is a sequence rather than a product. Here's what's happening at the surface, why the usual explanation is wrong, and the order of operations that works.

The explanation you've probably been given is wrong

Search this question and you'll be told, repeatedly, that metal has microscopic pores, that heating makes it expand, and that the expansion closes the pores so food can't get in.

A tidy story. Also backwards.

Solids expand more or less uniformly when heated — every dimension scales up together, like a photograph enlarged. A hole inside a heated solid expands with everything around it. It's a standard demonstration in introductory physics: heat a metal plate with a hole in it, and the hole gets bigger. Whatever preheating does for you, it isn't sealing pores shut.

The wrong mechanism leads to the wrong rule. People who believe preheating closes pores assume hotter is always better, and overheating is a reliable way to weld food to a pan.

What actually makes food stick

Sticking is chemistry, not geography: food doesn't fall into holes, it bonds to the metal.

The clearest evidence comes from an unglamorous corner of food engineering: fouling in dairy heat exchangers, where milk proteins build up on stainless steel and someone has to scrub it off. Beta-lactoglobulin, the main whey protein, holds its folded shape until heated past roughly 65 to 72°C. Above that it unfolds and exposes a free thiol group — a reactive sulphur site previously buried inside the molecule. Those sites then attach to the hot metal and to each other, forming the first fouling layer.

That is what happens when a chicken breast bonds itself to your pan. Egg white does it fastest, being almost pure protein that unfolds at low temperature. Fish does it worst, the flesh being delicate enough that the bond ends up stronger than the food.

So preventing sticking means keeping a barrier between protein and metal for the few seconds it takes a crust to form. That barrier is a film of hot oil, and everything below serves getting it in the right place at the right temperature.

The water test, and why most people misread it

The standard advice is to flick water in and wait until the droplets stop hissing and instead roll like beads of mercury. That rolling is the Leidenfrost effect: the underside of the droplet flashes to steam and the droplet rides on its own vapour cushion.

Here's the part usually left out. Researchers at Emory University measured the vapour layer directly on smooth metal and published the results in Physical Review Letters in 2021: on smooth surfaces the layer forms at around 240°C, then survives down to roughly 140°C before collapsing.

240°C is hot — past the point where most oils begin breaking down, and hotter than you want for eggs, fish, or anything you mean to cook through rather than sear. The mercury-bead test doesn't tell you the pan is ready. It tells you it's very hot: right for a steak, wrong for an omelette.

More useful: heat the empty pan until a drop of water sizzles briskly and evaporates in two or three seconds, without skittering.

The sequence that works

Four steps. The order is everything.

Preheat the pan empty, on medium. Not high. Rushing gives you a hot centre with cool edges. Two to three minutes on most hobs.

Add oil to the hot pan. Enough to move as a film rather than sit as a puddle. It should thin and shimmer within seconds — if it sits there thickly, the pan is under temperature.

Wait for the ripple, then drop the heat. When the oil moves in fine ripples, the film is hot and mobile. Turn down to medium-low. This is the step nearly everyone skips, and the one that separates a pan that releases from a pan that doesn't.

Put the food in dry. Pat it with paper towel. Surface water has to boil off before food can brown, and while it boils it cools the contact zone and dilutes the oil film. Fridge-cold food does the same, so let it sit out ten minutes.

Oil: smoke point is the wrong number

Smoke point gets treated as the deciding spec, and it's a weaker predictor than it looks. A 2018 study heated commercial oils to 240°C and held them at 180°C for six hours, testing oxidative stability, polar compounds and free fatty acids alongside smoke point. Smoke point tracked poorly with how the oils actually behaved; the better predictors were low polyunsaturated fat and minimal refining.

Practically: a decent olive oil, ghee or avocado oil will all do the job. What matters more is that the film is thin, hot and continuous before the food arrives.

Heated with oxygen present, unsaturated oils cross-link into a polymer film — the process behind cast iron seasoning. On smooth bare metal it stays thin and transient, so titanium and stainless never build seasoning. A sticky brown varnish means oil polymerised too cool or left too long; a hot-water soak and a soft pad takes it off.

Let the food release itself

The most useful habit: stop moving it.

Protein bonds to the metal on contact, then releases as browning proceeds. The Maillard reaction — amino groups reacting with reducing sugars — gets going meaningfully from around 140°C and builds the crust that lifts food off the surface. Given thirty to ninety seconds undisturbed, most proteins let go by themselves.

If you try to move a piece of fish and it resists, it isn't stuck. It isn't finished.

What titanium changes, and what it doesn't

Two points, because this is where a brand would normally overclaim.

What it doesn't change: proteins adsorb to titanium much as they do to other metals — the surgical-implant literature is largely concerned with how readily they attach to the titanium-dioxide passive layer, a virtue in an implant and neutral in a pan. Titanium is naturally low-stick with proper technique, not slick out of the box. Skip the preheat and it will stick like any bare metal.

What it does change: there's no coating to degrade, so the surface behaves the same in year ten as in week one. A coated pan's release declines as the film wears; a bare-metal pan's release depends on technique, which improves. The passive oxide layer also regenerates if scratched, so marks and patina change how the pan looks rather than how it performs. Our construction — Grade 1 commercially pure titanium clad over an aluminium core with a stainless base, so it works on every cooktop — is set out with citations on the Evidence page. That core matters: titanium alone conducts heat poorly, and hot spots scorch food on while the rest of the pan sits under temperature.

If it still sticks

Pan too cool when food went in, by a distance the most common cause. Food wet or fridge-cold. Too much in at once, steaming rather than searing. Oil film too thin. Or you moved it too early. Residue from a previous cook does it too, which is why the Care Guide asks for a proper clean rather than a quick wipe. The FAQ covers the rest.

Starting with one piece? The 28cm Signature Hammered Frying Pan is where we'd point you — the hammered surface is a texture, not a release mechanism, and the technique above does the work. The Complete Kitchen is the full set, and the Titanium Cutting Board takes the same non-porous surface into prep.

The short version

Preheating doesn't close pores — pores expand when heated, like everything else. Food sticks because heated proteins unfold, expose reactive sites and bond to the metal. A hot, thin, continuous oil film prevents that bond long enough for a crust to form.

Preheat empty on medium. Add oil. Wait for the ripple. Drop the heat. Add dry food. Leave it alone until it releases. No coating required, and about two weeks before you stop thinking about it.

This article is material-science and cooking information, not medical advice. If you have a metal sensitivity or allergy, please speak to a qualified healthcare professional.

Sources

Khaldi M, et al. Denaturation Kinetics of Whey Protein Isolate Solutions and Fouling Mass Distribution in a Plate Heat Exchanger. International Journal of Chemical Engineering, 2015.

Harvey D, Harper JM, Burton JC. Minimum Leidenfrost Temperature on Smooth Surfaces. Physical Review Letters 127, 104501, 2021.

Collection of Experiments, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. Heating of Aluminium Plate with Hole.

El Hosry L, Elias V, Chamoun V, Halawi M, Cayot P, Nehme A, Bou-Maroun E. Maillard Reaction: Mechanism, Influencing Parameters, Advantages, Disadvantages, and Food Industrial Applications: A Review. Foods, 2025.

Guillaume C, De Alzaa F, Ravetti L. Evaluation of Chemical and Physical Changes in Different Commercial Oils during Heating. Acta Scientific Nutritional Health, 2018.

Comprehensive Characterization of Drying Oil Oxidation and Polymerization Using Time-Resolved Infrared Spectroscopy. Macromolecules, 2024.

Barberi J, Spriano S. Titanium and Protein Adsorption: An Overview of Mechanisms and Effects of Surface Features. Materials, 2021.

Hanawa T. Biocompatibility of titanium from the viewpoint of its surface. Science and Technology of Advanced Materials, 2022.