But for now, baby the shit out of them. Buy one that gets legit amazon reviews for your next one. Hand wash it and mayyybe use a sponge when washing it. Only use wooden, plastic or silicone utensils in it.
If somebody cleans it with a scrubby pad or uses a metal spatula, they get shot/buy you your next pan. :)
I did 2 years on my most recent nonstick pan until my roommate cleaned it with a scrubby pad.
Seriously yes - after I figured out how to use and care for cast iron I wondered what the heck made me buy nonstick pans in the first place. The main downsides are the weight of cast iron, or if some clueless person in your house throws it in the sink for a few days.
Personal experience. A few years ago my prostate enlarged relatively suddenly, to the point of making urination difficult. My doctor had no idea why, but it eventually dawned on me that I had recently been eating a lot of scrambled eggs, scrambled in a Teflon-coated skillet. I replaced it with a ceramic nonstick skillet, and the problem went away.
If you want absolute proof an anecdote won't satisfy you, but it's plenty of evidence for me. Look at the cost/risk calculation. The cost of a ceramic pan is on the order of $35; the cost of getting cancer is potentially quite large. There doesn't have to be a very large probability that Teflon causes cancer before it's not worth taking the chance.
Look. It takes science a long time to settle all these questions with rigorous research. In the meantime we all have to make decisions in our lives with imperfect, incomplete information. Dismissing all reports of potential risks until there is incontrovertible proof of danger is foolish; doing so out of some misguided fealty to Science and Progress is arrogant.
Downvote all you want, but you're not going to get me to stop posting anecdotes when I think they're relevant. Yes, their probative value is limited; I even acknowledged this in the post! But it isn't zero, and in a world of limited and often conflicting information, sometimes it's the best we can get.
6 months? I think you're doing something wrong here. Keep teflon coated material to low temperatures, use plastic/wood/silicone utensils and avoid abrasive cleaning techniques.
"While PTFE is stable and nontoxic at lower temperatures, it begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260 °C (500 °F), and decomposes above 350 °C (662 °F).
…
Meat is usually fried between 204 and 232 °C (399 and 450 °F), and most oils start to smoke before a temperature of 260 °C (500 °F) is reached, but there are at least two cooking oils (refined safflower oil and avocado oil) that have a higher smoke point than 260 °C (500 °F). Empty cookware can also exceed this temperature when heated."
Did you have some implicit expectation that you could heat it for an arbitrary amount of time, at full power, and it would just be fine? Almost all of the spot checking I just did shows temperature warnings / upper limits of around 450 degrees F for non-stick pans, right on their packaging.
Also, equivalently-sized cast iron pans are almost always cheaper than their quality non-stick (i.e. Calphalon) counterparts, and you can restore them if you jack up the seasoning on them.
The comment you reply to doesn't complain about their use of teflon (a complaint you imply in your first paragraph) and they praise the cheapness of cast iron (which you repeat with an 'also' in your second paragraph, the 'also' makes it look like you are trying to correct their understanding of the relative situation).
When I went to college and moved in a dorm I got a really good teflon coated pan from my parents. It's still works fine and it's 6 years old now. I even lent it to other guys in the dorm and I wasn't extremely cautious with it. I dealt with shitty pans too though. I think the quality of Teflon coatings could be extremely varying .
I'd expect pans made with this new technique to be as delicate as Teflon, if not more so. Those laser-etched ridges are quite tiny, and if you scratched the pan with a piece of metal, you'd probably wear away the ridges very quickly, creating localized areas of non-hydrophobia.
Comments
This is awesome! I look forward to my teflon pans that I don't have to throw away after 6 months because they stop working.
Same!
But for now, baby the shit out of them. Buy one that gets legit amazon reviews for your next one. Hand wash it and mayyybe use a sponge when washing it. Only use wooden, plastic or silicone utensils in it.
If somebody cleans it with a scrubby pad or uses a metal spatula, they get shot/buy you your next pan. :)
I did 2 years on my most recent nonstick pan until my roommate cleaned it with a scrubby pad.
May I recommend iron or copper pans? No sticking, can be used for your whole life. This new structure still looks nice.
Seriously yes - after I figured out how to use and care for cast iron I wondered what the heck made me buy nonstick pans in the first place. The main downsides are the weight of cast iron, or if some clueless person in your house throws it in the sink for a few days.
Avoid Teflon -- it leaches toxic PFOA into food. The ceramic nonstick pans work about as well, and are safe.
What is your source on that?
"Non-stick cookware is not a significant source of exposure." is what cancer.org [0] has to say about Telon and PFOA.
[0] http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/a...
Personal experience. A few years ago my prostate enlarged relatively suddenly, to the point of making urination difficult. My doctor had no idea why, but it eventually dawned on me that I had recently been eating a lot of scrambled eggs, scrambled in a Teflon-coated skillet. I replaced it with a ceramic nonstick skillet, and the problem went away.
If you want absolute proof an anecdote won't satisfy you, but it's plenty of evidence for me. Look at the cost/risk calculation. The cost of a ceramic pan is on the order of $35; the cost of getting cancer is potentially quite large. There doesn't have to be a very large probability that Teflon causes cancer before it's not worth taking the chance.
That doesn't even begin to prove anything about cancer specifically. If it went away just like that, it wasn't cancer.
What if ceramic pans cause cancer?
Look. It takes science a long time to settle all these questions with rigorous research. In the meantime we all have to make decisions in our lives with imperfect, incomplete information. Dismissing all reports of potential risks until there is incontrovertible proof of danger is foolish; doing so out of some misguided fealty to Science and Progress is arrogant.
Downvote all you want, but you're not going to get me to stop posting anecdotes when I think they're relevant. Yes, their probative value is limited; I even acknowledged this in the post! But it isn't zero, and in a world of limited and often conflicting information, sometimes it's the best we can get.
Ceramics don't break down at temperatures encountered in cooking. Teflon does. The only question is whether the breakdown products are bioactive.
Did you even read the second paragraph?
Skepticism is a valuable thing, but it is not an unerring guide to truth. You need to be less credulous of your skepticism.
6 months? I think you're doing something wrong here. Keep teflon coated material to low temperatures, use plastic/wood/silicone utensils and avoid abrasive cleaning techniques.
Never rapidly cool it off, e.g. by sticking it while still hot under the running cold water. This kills the coating just like that.
Huh. I do this all the time and it doesn't seem to affect it.
How exactly do you cook with it then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#Safety
"While PTFE is stable and nontoxic at lower temperatures, it begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260 °C (500 °F), and decomposes above 350 °C (662 °F).
…
Meat is usually fried between 204 and 232 °C (399 and 450 °F), and most oils start to smoke before a temperature of 260 °C (500 °F) is reached, but there are at least two cooking oils (refined safflower oil and avocado oil) that have a higher smoke point than 260 °C (500 °F). Empty cookware can also exceed this temperature when heated."
This is a pretty big design flaw for someone like me who loves putting a good sear on steak. Good thing cast iron is fairly cheap...
Did you have some implicit expectation that you could heat it for an arbitrary amount of time, at full power, and it would just be fine? Almost all of the spot checking I just did shows temperature warnings / upper limits of around 450 degrees F for non-stick pans, right on their packaging.
Also, equivalently-sized cast iron pans are almost always cheaper than their quality non-stick (i.e. Calphalon) counterparts, and you can restore them if you jack up the seasoning on them.
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
The comment you reply to doesn't complain about their use of teflon (a complaint you imply in your first paragraph) and they praise the cheapness of cast iron (which you repeat with an 'also' in your second paragraph, the 'also' makes it look like you are trying to correct their understanding of the relative situation).
You seem to be agreeing with my comment 100%, but taking a tone that implies some sort of correction.
You make it sound so unreasonable to put a chunk of metal on the hot thing and wait for it to fully heat.
Don't let the oil evaporate.
Instead you can worry about nanoscopic metal particles detatching from the pan surface and embedding in your food which you then ingest...
I wonder if it would be any worse than cooking on cast iron.
When I went to college and moved in a dorm I got a really good teflon coated pan from my parents. It's still works fine and it's 6 years old now. I even lent it to other guys in the dorm and I wasn't extremely cautious with it. I dealt with shitty pans too though. I think the quality of Teflon coatings could be extremely varying .
I'd expect pans made with this new technique to be as delicate as Teflon, if not more so. Those laser-etched ridges are quite tiny, and if you scratched the pan with a piece of metal, you'd probably wear away the ridges very quickly, creating localized areas of non-hydrophobia.