This product is cheap in more ways than one. Yes, the description cautions you to only hand-wash these rings and to dry them immediately when you’re done. But the fact is, even if you follow this advice to the letter, these things don’t last. The culprit seems to be the rivets. I used these rings a few times to make Japanese-style pancakes, and despite washing by hand and towel-drying, those rivets (and eventually the area around them) started showing those telltale signs of brown rust. In my opinion, cooking utensils aren’t worth buying, low-priced or not, when they’re guaranteed to be landfill fodder after just a few uses. You’re personally not saving any money that way, and on a larger scale, you’re ultimately only creating more real estate for garbage island. What’s worse, in case you actually forget to follow those stringent cleaning instructions and try to clean them by, say, letting them soak in soapy water with your forks and spoons—well, that’s when the bad things escalate to comedic proportions. It turns out that when they warn you not to feed the Gremlins after midnight and to never, ever get them wet, they’re not kidding, folks. (I’m including pictures.) I admit, this most recent time after using them, I forgot to follow “the rules” and I tossed them into some water with a squeeze of dish soap. All heck broke loose soon thereafter. Yes, this latest escalation was my fault for forgetting those breathless cleaning instructions. But keep in mind: (1) Up until this point, I'd been very careful to immediately hand-wash and dry them after using them, yet they still started to rust. This recent faux pas just seemed to accelerate the process. (2) Let’s face it. It’s kind of ridiculous that one needs to be this careful when cleaning what are some pretty basic kitchen utensils. A home cook should not have to remember to strictly adhere to the rules of some ancient gypsy curse, lest disaster strike. These are essentially just round cookie cutters, not Faberge eggs, for Pete’s sake. People shouldn’t be required to tiptoe on eggshells just to make some thicker-than-normal pancakes. OTHER PROBLEMS: In addition to the rusting, there are some other drawbacks to these rings (at least when using them for thick-style pancakes). a) Time Commitment: You have to clean/rinse them after every single use and before you add the next batch of batter. Here’s the procedure: You grease the interior before the first pancake. While that greasing helps to release that first pancake after it’s cooked, batter residue still remains on the inside of the ring. That means that after using a ring to make one measly pancake, one has to wait for the metal to cool down enough to handle. Only then can you wash the batter off and dry the interior. Then you grease it again so you can finally use the ring to make a second pancake. In other words, prepare to set aside a good chunk of your day. To be fair, maybe all similar types of ring molds require the same time commitment, regardless of the material they’re made from. But it just seemed ridiculous to me. (I do see another reviewer suggests people look for a brand of *nonstick* ring molds. That definitely seems worth a try.) b) Crap accumulation: These aren’t one solid piece of metal. Rather, these rings have a “seam” where batter tends to hide. (The seam is where those problematic, rusty rivets are.) This makes thorough cleaning more difficult. c) Not nonstick friendly: And because these aren’t one solid, smooth piece of metal, the rings tend to be kind of sharp, with an errant “corner” here and there, at the point where the ring is sealed. It’s not a good feeling watching these edges unavoidably scrape against the surface of your nonstick skillet as you try to flip over your Japanese-style pancake. As such, the last few times I used these (before they succumbed to rust) I felt compelled to use a cast iron skillet, even though my larger nonstick skillet probably would’ve made the whole process easier. But it didn’t seem worth the risk of damaging an entire skillet just to make some pancakes.
