We all know what a frying pan looks like. It has a flat base, a shallow bowl, and a handle for easily grabbing it while making your meals. The iLean Pan takes the traditional pan and changes things up.
How so? Well, it’s a frying pan that doesn’t have a flat base. Instead, they call it a “sloped frying pan,” sporting a bowl that’s intentionally tilted, with a higher height out front. Why would you do that? According to the outfit, this means temperature is different across the different parts of the pan, allowing you to cook multiple items at different temperatures at the exact same time. Yeah, it’s pretty strange.
The iLean Pan looks like a standard frying pan, albeit with a base that’s taller out front and tapers down towards the rear. Because different parts of the pan have different proximities to the burner, each section will naturally have different temperatures. That means, it’s hottest at the rear towards the handle, coldest at the front at its most elevated, and somewhere in between right in the middle. The outfit is touting this as a way to let you cook three different food items at different temperatures. As in, you can fry something at the rear, move it out front to keep warm, and start frying something else.
The tilted design also lends itself well to easily draining oil from what you’re cooking. Just slide your sausages to the front, for instance, and let the oil drip to the back before taking the food out of the cooking surface. You can also easily drain the oil out, such as when you’re frying bacon and want to use the grease when making gravy at dinner later. According to the outfit, the pan should work on any standard stove top (even your survival stove), although the current version is not compatible with induction burners.
The iLean Pan may seem like such an odd cookware design and, truth be told, it is. According to its creator Ilene Marcus, she designed one not because she found anything wrong with traditional frying pans. Instead, she made it to be able to cook just a little easier on the tilted stove top of her home kitchen. Once she started using it, she realized the benefits and how some home cooks might find it useful as well, even if they had a less-crooked stovetop. Basically, they’re not positioning it as a replacement for the frying pan, but as an alternative for those times when a pan with uneven heating surfaces might prove useful to your cooking plans.
The outfit claims the pan holds a consistent temperature differential between the high and low end of 30 degrees, so the front section will always have lower heat than the rear. Construction, by the way, is recycled stainless steel, so we don’t know why it’s not supposed to be used with induction stoves, but we’re guessing it has more to do with the fact that induction burners might not heat it to the exact way they wanted.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the iLean Pan. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $109.
