To me, someone who celebrates a bit more of the spectrum than most: Metal hot. Make food hot.
Non-stick means easier cleanup, but my wife seems to think cast-iron is necessary for certain things (searing a prime rib roast, for example.).
After I figure those out, then I gotta figure out gas vs. electric vs. induction vs infrared…
Yes. Our house only has cast iron and stainless.
There’s a small learning curve with cast iron, but the less you worry and over think it, the easier it gets. I fry eggs every other day in mine, and it’s about as non-stick as anything else. Preheat the pan or griddle, that’s all. Cleanup is a wipe with a paper towel or a rinse and quick scrub.
Cast iron works 95% of the time, but acid can strip the seasoning. So anything simmered an hour or more in tomato or win,e or sauted with lemon juice, get stainless. Don’t put it in the dish washer. Not a lot of rules, really. My pan is 15 years old. My Mom uses ones that might be older than her.
When I travel and have to use someone else’s non-stick pans, I hate the delicate little snowflake pieces of shit. Flimsy, toxic, someone else showed it a fork once so now it has damage and sticks anyway in a line across the middle, can’t go on the oven, can’t sear, handles all wobbly. Generally just disposable trash. Why would you love trash?
I have a non-stick, and I use it rather infrequently. I have read about the effects of damaged coating, and GOD I would throw it away immediately as soon as I see ONE flake in it. Maybe I’m just overreacting it, but I treat it like it was a delicately covered layer of asbestos.
It’s great and smooth NOW, but I’m only using it until I see a noticeably hard scratch. Until then, I get rid of the oil and juices with a paper towel immediately after cooking (and I’m already slightly worried that the dry paper could be too abrasive on the dry bits of the pan), and I leave it to cool down before I wash it to prevent it from heat stress.
I might be overthinking it. But I’m playing with the thought of getting a cast iron or carbon steel already.
Please consider how many decades it took for lead in the atmosphere from leaded gasoline to be considered bad enough that we got rid of it. PFAS and other toxic chemicals that are ubiquitous are known to be toxic in lab conditions, so just imagine how bad that shit is in the wild.
I agree don’t waste money, but might as well get the cast iron now, keep it in training mode for 2-3 months, and just wait for the cast iron to get bumped up to the big show.
Totally agreed, that’s the p(l)an.
Everyone else in the comments are saying Teflon is harmless to consume. Who do I believe?
Scientists are your best bet, I guess. I wish I could cite you studies, but I would have to search, as well. I might soon.
UPDATE: This far all I got was ‘best to be careful’ or ‘staying away never hurts’:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304389425031759
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28913736/
Thanks. So it sounds like it probably has the same effect as other microplastics? Chemically inert, but can physically cause damage.
I believe the harms that are well known are the environmental impacts and that on people involved in its production. Weighing all of that together, I’ll maintain my policy that I’d never buy a non-stick, but if I happen to have one, I’m not going to toss it and create more waste than is necessary. I mainly keep mine around because other people (e.g. parents) like to use them sometimes when they visit.
We could choose to believe that same folks who previously told us that cocaine, asbestos, lead, and tobacco smoke were
healthy/perfectly safe/ not really harmful.So throw all caution out the window in the absence of evidence? What kind of logic is that?
Haha. I didn’t say we should. I’m just pointing out that it’s an option, again.
Nonstick pans are amaaaaazing the first few months. After that, they get non-non-stick in places.
because you’re buying cheap non stick stuff.