I'm terrified of adding water to it while hot like I would with my cast iron, I don't want it to warp.
That's an often repeated misapprehension that began as sound advice and got entirely out of hand. The original, and proper (sort off), advice was not to immerse a very hot steel piece in water or rinse a very hot pot with a stream of cold water. The warning was necessary, because people might otherwise try to rapidly cool a hot pot by dunking it in cold water or might dunk a hot pan into cool wash water. But it is today much less of a hazard with "tri-ply" and other thick, encapsulated or bonded stainless steel cookware. Thinner steel, such as the classic Revereware, is more at risk.
It does not mean you have to fear something like pouring stock into a hot pan from a box that's been refrigerated. Or wine, or whatever. Those do not provide enough cold liquid to suddenly stress the steel. Neither of those are going to harm even single-thickness stainless steel. I used Revereware for forty years and abused it in just about every way possible, including straight immersion in cold water right from the stove. Even in the worst case, it's merely a warning of what
could happen. But how often do you want to be pouring cold liquid into something you're cooking, anyway?
(I
have warped large, flat thin steel baking sheets by dropping them hot into wash water. For that matter, I've warped them by sticking them suddenly under a broiling element.)
You are just not going to harm your SS cookware without deliberately setting out to harm it. You may buy yourself some extra work when you get the technique wrong and have to soak and scrub, but it will come out like new. (The rainbow kind of iridescence effect you may see after use is a reaction from some salts. It's harmless, and Barkeeper's Friend polishes it right out.)
Now, if you read enough about using SS cookware, you'll find someone touting the hot pan/cold oil notion and representing it as preventing sticking. Baloney. You want hot oil and the faith and patience to leave the food unmolested long enough. How hot? That depends on the food and its thickness. And you don't have the heat available on a home range top to properly do thin steaks in a pan without having them overdone before they brown. So you use thick steaks. The same idea transfers to fish and vegetables.
Since temperature matters, and there's no easy way to directly measure the temperature, it's good to know the smoke points of common cooking oils.
Smoke Points of Various Fats - Kitchen Notes - Cooking For Engineers
Note, for instance, the very different characters of olive oils. Extra virgin at 320, virgin at 420, and extra light at 468. Although extra light olive oil is good all around, and cooking with extra virgin is just a waste.
