Why Use Saute Pans?

Every kitchen has saute pans.  Well, almost every kitchen does.  Diners have used griddles for cooking eggs, bacon and the like for at least my life time.  From griddles we can move to the high temperature plancha of current culinary stardom.  If you do not have a plancha what kind of cook are you?  We have a cast iron griddle which we procurred from a garage sale.  We use it for griddling english muffins for breakfast and hot dog rolls for lobster rolls.  Until recently we have not used it as a cooking surface for proteins and vegetables.  Why, our space is limited and it is not always functional to put into use.  And yet, I have felt we were missing out on something.  I hate spattering oil, so the use of a saute pan with oil or another fat in the bottom to cook ingredients has begun to leave a bad taste in my mouth.  Similarly, with the continued use of slow cooking and twice cooking the need for a saute pan and its traditional uses  seems less important.  Now, if I were to get more technical in terms of naming pans, a saute pan would not be used for cooking these ingredients, rather a sauteuse would be called into action.  In either instance, the pan limits how you cook in that there is no freedom of moving an ingredient.  As with a french flat top range, the griddle allows the free movement of ingredients over varied temperaures without the confines of a single heat element.  Again, as many know I thrive off of options, so the uses of the griddle, plancha and flat top resonate through my thoughts.  Today we cooked our sweetbreads on the griddle for a beautiful golden crust.  It was generated simply from the combination of heat and the fat that rendered from the sweetbreads and with limited sputtering and splattering.  And so we begin down another avenue with a new set of unlimited options.