I Almost Didn't Buy This Pan.
Here's What Changed My Mind.

A retired nurse from Wollongong writes about a small Melbourne workshop, a stubborn couple from Fitzroy, and the pan that finally stopped her eggs from sticking.

I'm going to be honest with you. I almost scrolled past.

I'd seen the post in a Facebook group I'm in — Australian Kitchen Guide, one of those pages where Aussie women swap notes on cookware that's actually worth your money. A woman called Janet had written about a frying pan from a small workshop in Fitzroy, Melbourne. Ashcroft Titanium, it was called. A married couple in their sixties had run their own restaurant there for forty years, and were now selling off their warehouse stock — up to seventy per cent off — before relocating to a bigger one.

My first thought was the same one you're probably having now: here we go, another sale, another sob story, another Facebook ad pretending to be something it isn't.

I closed the tab.

That was on a Sunday. By Wednesday I'd opened it three more times.

→ See the pan I'm talking about

I think what kept pulling me back was the way Janet had described it. She hadn't written like someone selling something. She'd written about cracking two eggs into a dry pan — no oil, no butter, nothing — and watching them slide off the surface as if they'd been waxed. About the weight of it in her hand. About a hammered finish that caught the morning light in a way none of her other pans ever had. Who notices the way light catches a frying pan?

I'm sixty-two. I've been buying cookware for forty years. I've had the expensive ones — a Le Creuset my sister gave me for my fiftieth that I still pull out at Christmas. I've had the cheap ones from Big W that lasted a year before the coating started peeling into the kids' breakfast. And I've had everything in between.

What I have not had, in a very long time, is a pan I trusted to cook for my grandchildren without quietly wondering what was coming off it.

So on the Wednesday evening, with a cup of tea and absolutely no intention of spending money, I went and read the workshop's website properly.

The bit that got me

There's a page on the Ashcroft site where Walter and Margaret explain what their pans are actually made of. I'd never thought about it before. I'm not a metallurgist. I just buy pans.

But here's where I should tell you something. I worked as a registered nurse at Wollongong Hospital for thirty-four years before I retired. So when their page started talking about surgical-grade titanium — the same metal we put inside the human body for hip replacements, knee plates, and dental implants — I knew exactly what they meant. Titanium is the one metal the body never rejects. We've trusted it inside people for sixty years.

Most non-stick pans don't use titanium. They use a chemical coating — PTFE is the technical name, the brand name is usually Teflon — sprayed onto a layer of aluminium. It works beautifully for about eighteen months. Then the coating starts wearing through, and the moment you scrape a fork across it or push it past a certain temperature, you've got tiny flakes of it ending up in your dinner. PFOA was banned years ago. PFAS — the wider chemical family — is still in most of them.

Ashcroft's pan has none of that. There's no coating to wear off because there's no coating at all. It's just the titanium itself, hand-hammered into a surface that's naturally non-stick the way a properly seasoned cast iron pan is naturally non-stick — by texture and craft, not by chemistry.

That was the moment I stopped thinking of this as a sale and started thinking of it as a last chance at a specific price. Because here's the thing nobody had told me until I'd already ordered: when Walter and Margaret say they're moving, they actually mean they're moving. There's no closing down, no retirement, no sob story. They've simply outgrown their current warehouse in Fitzroy and are expanding to a bigger one. But once the current stock ships and they relocate, the prices reset. The pan I paid $109.95 for goes back to $366.95. I had to read that twice before it landed.

→ Read about the Hammered Pan

I ordered the Hammered Pan

It's twenty-eight centimetres across. Surgical-grade titanium, uncoated. The whole cooking surface has been hand-hammered, which gives it the dimpled finish you can see in the photos — but I didn't know until I held it that the dimples aren't just for looks. They're what stops food sitting flat against the metal. Each tiny hollow holds a pocket of heat and air, and that's what releases the egg, or the fish fillet, or the pancake, without any oil at all.

It cost me $109.95. The tag price was $366.95. I'll come back to the price in a minute.

It arrived on a Thursday morning in a brown paper-wrapped box with a handwritten card inside. Not a printed "thank you for your order." A handwritten one. In ink. Signed by Margaret. I haven't received a handwritten anything in the post in about a decade and I'd forgotten what it does to you.

I opened the box on the kitchen bench. The pan came out wrapped in a soft cotton cloth, with a small leaflet that had Walter's name signed at the bottom — explaining how to season it and how to cook on it for the first time. No glossy magazine print. No corporate language. Just clear, practical notes from someone who had clearly cooked for a living.

→ See the Hammered Pan here

The morning the eggs didn't stick

I want to tell you about Sunday.

Geoff and I were having breakfast. The grandkids — Oliver and Ava — were coming over for lunch later, and I was using the morning to test the new pan properly. Two eggs, straight onto a dry surface, medium heat. No oil. No butter. Nothing. I stood there waiting for them to weld themselves to the bottom the way they always do.

They didn't.

After about ninety seconds I gave the pan a small shake and both eggs slid — actually slid — across the surface as if they were on a polished floor. I called Geoff over to look. He stared at it for a long moment and said, "Patty, what are you doing to those eggs." I said, "Nothing. That's the point."

I'm sixty-two years old and I should not be having feelings about a frying pan. But there's something about cooking with a thing you know was made slowly, on purpose, by two people who cared, that changes how breakfast feels. I can't explain it better than that.

What I noticed in the first month

The hammered finish — I want to come back to that. In the right light, the surface of this pan looks like beaten silver. The Wollongong morning sun comes through my kitchen window at about half past seven, and there's a moment every day where the pan, sitting on the drying rack, just glows. It's a pan. It shouldn't be beautiful. It is.

The weight is real. Not heavy — but it has substance. When you lift a thin chain-store pan you can feel that you're holding mostly air. The Ashcroft has a different kind of presence in your hand. It feels like an object that intends to last.

But the thing I keep coming back to isn't the weight or the look. It's the absence of worry. For years I cooked my grandkids' breakfast in a pan I was quietly anxious about. I knew the coating was wearing through. I knew roughly what was in it. I kept using it because I didn't have a better option I could afford. Cooking on something I don't have to think about — that's what I didn't realise I'd been paying for. The peace of mind alone is worth $109.95.

Now, about the price

$109.95 is, I'm aware, suspicious. My husband Geoff said exactly this when I told him. "Patty, real cookware doesn't cost a hundred bucks on sale. You're being had."

I had the same thought. So I went and looked.

A comparable premium frying pan from any reputable Australian cookware brand — and I checked Solidteknics, Scanpan, Le Creuset, and a few of the smaller craft makers — starts at around $280 and runs up past $600. Uncoated, surgical-grade titanium specifically? Even higher. The $109.95 price is not what this pan is usually sold for. It's what it costs because Walter and Margaret are moving warehouses and would rather see their stock in people's kitchens than haul it across town.

Margaret said this herself in a note on the site. "We're not slowing down. We're moving to somewhere bigger. But the old stock has to go before we go." That's the only reason the price is what it is.

And it's the reason I'm writing this — because once the stock ships and the move happens, that's it. The pan stays. The handwritten cards stay. But the $109.95 price doesn't. It goes back to $366.95, which, to be fair to Walter and Margaret, is what the pan is actually worth.

What I'd tell you if we were friends

If we were sitting at my kitchen table and you asked me whether you should buy one of Walter and Margaret's pans, here's what I'd say.

I'd say: don't buy it because it's cheap. $109.95 is cheap for what it is, but "cheap" is a bad reason to buy anything and you'll regret it.

Buy it because you're tired. Tired of pans that look beautiful in the shop and start peeling in eighteen months. Tired of replacing the same thing every two years. Tired of cooking for the people you love in a pan you don't fully trust.

And I'll tell you the thing that bothers me most. When I went back to the website yesterday to send the link to my daughter Rebecca, the twenty-eight centimetre size — the one I'd bought — was down to single-digit stock. Not "restocking soon." Just running out. That's when I realised Janet wasn't being dramatic in her post. The clock really is running down on this price.

Buy it because somewhere in a small warehouse in Fitzroy, there's a married couple who fed strangers for forty years and have built a single pan that lasts a lifetime. And this is the only window you'll get to own one before it goes back to what it should cost.

That's what I'd tell you.

I bought mine on a Wednesday evening with a cup of tea. It arrived the following Thursday. I've used it every day since. My daughter Rebecca saw it on the weekend and has ordered one for herself. Geoff — who told me I was being scammed — has stopped saying that and now refers to it as "your good pan," which from him is the highest possible compliment.

If you've read this far, you already know what you're going to do. I just thought someone should tell you the truth about it before you decided.

— Patricia

The Hammered Pan — $109.95 →