Stainless steel pans — How do you avoid sticking?

• Preheating fully
  • This is a list of "temperature proxies" that give you clues about how hot your pan is: the Leidenfrost effect, oil rippling, and butter bubbling.
  • This video has more visual details of the Leidenfrost effect.
• A low-preheat cooking method.
• How to season a stainless steel pan, and then cook at low heat:
  • Stainless steel pans can be seasoned just like cast iron or carbon steel, [1] [2] [3] with one caveat: the seasoning gets removed and needs to be re-applied whenever you clean the pan with soap. [4] †
  • You only need a thin coat of oil.
  • If you're going to cook something at lower heat right after seasoning it, you will have to wait for the pan to cool down first. [1]
• If your meat or eggs are sticking, then WAIT, and let it keep cooking! The food will naturally release once its surface has cooked more. [2]
• Avoid anything that will drop the temperature in the pan too much.
  • Don't put cold ingredients in the pan. Let them warm up for ~30 minutes between taking it out of the fridge and dropping it in the pan. Putting extremely cold food in the pan will drop the temperature too much. [1] [2] [3]
  • Don't add a lot of ingredients all at once to the pan, even if they are room-temperature.
  • Don't put very wet ingredients in the pan.
• For dairy, a thin layer of water prevents scalding.
• Avoid pitting the steel's surface. These extra pits (and dents, dings, and crevices) provide spots that are easier for food to stick to. [1]
  • Cleaning advice: [1] [2] [2b] [3] [4] [5]
  • You don't want to use abrasive methods of cleaning, since this adds crevices to the pan's surface. [2]
  • Never let concentrated salt rest on the surface of the pan. The best way to do this is make sure the water is boiling before adding salt. [2]
  • Although stainless pans can handle extremely high temperatures, it's best to keep them from getting excessively hot, as this encourages pitting.
  • Avoid cleaning in a dishwasher, since dishwasher detergent is too harsh.

† The Royal Society of Chemistry says this — "The oil, being liquid, fills in the valleys and caves of the pan surface and when it gets hot it reacts with the metal atoms of the pan and forms a coating called a patina. This leaves few free metal atoms to react with the food. This coating can easily be removed by detergents, however, so it has to be reapplied before each use of the pan."

Things I need to dig into and confirm:

• TODO — does adding wet food into the pan cause problems?
• TODO — does the "you don't have to preheat it to the Leidenfrost point" lower-temp method work? That is, does stainless steel really have "pores"??

Some deeper reading about the chemistry of how food sticks and doesn't stick:

• "Another method is to heat some oil in the pan before cooking. The oil, being liquid, fills in the valleys and caves of the pan surface and when it gets hot it reacts with the metal atoms of the pan and forms a coating called a patina. This leaves few free metal atoms to react with the food. This coating can easily be removed by detergents, however, so it has to be reapplied before each use of the pan." [2]
• (TODO: explore here some more)
• [2]