I miss the local community Reddit has/had - meaning vibrant town/city subreddits. The one for my town here on Lemmy is just one dude (@ickplant you’re doing your best) but it just doesn’t have the critical mass.

Sure are! They’re all steel.

Yep, that’s what I was driving at. If you’re a “medium” the cards are stacked against you and there are very few levers to pull (if any) to level the playing field at all. The only reason the mid-sized guy I know is able to survive is that he owns all his land outright and his family has been amassing acreage for three generations. Even still, he’s in a tough spot and the mega farms are buying up what is left of the family farms all around him and doing crazy shit like trucking manure across the state on a scale that he just can’t compete with.

Yes! That’s it - Matfer. I think America’s Test Kitchen recommend them and I’d follow ATK off a cliff on kitchen advice. So far, the pans have been fantastic, but I can’t imagine there’s a whole lot to go wrong with a carbon steel pan.

I think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.

I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.

Bonus points if you budget a little extra and make friends with a local upholster. They can work magic in turning that solid, but ugly, chair from something your grandma would have to something you might find in a design magazine.

Carbon steel pans. You season and treat them like cast iron, but they develop a beautiful, smooth, non stick surface. I just made two over easy eggs in mine. They’re basically all I use anymore - no PFOx, no muss.

I thought I bought two from a French company that started with an ‘M’ but I can’t figure out which brand 😂

I still say “Sorry, Babe” to my spouse and she responds with KEEVIIIEEEEEE

(post comment edit - if you put things inside < > as your entire post, Lemmy will eat it. Cool>

Yep - I bought sync way back in the day and paid less than $5 for it. Used it for years and years across multiple devices until I switched to iOS. I got my moneys worth for sure - $20 seems like a bargain.

No doubt, it’s a chicken or egg problem.

It’s French, I suspect based on the entity receiving the payment