Personally, I just got afraid of ever buying takeout sushi, put a label on the black spatula and hope to use it for garage experiments but you do you...
it works, but it is covered to 90% with a "subscribe now" popup that i can't seem to close. perhaps for your browser size the popup covers the whole screen. reader mode makes it all go away and reveal the article text and pictures
That's not the kind of spatula they're talking about, I've rarely seen that kind be black. I'm pretty sure they mean the flat offset kind you'd use to flip eggs or pancakes.
in english in america, can't speak for other lanuguage/locales and too lazy to look, the word spatula is used for two different tools:
one tool is for scraping food (generally solid) inside a hot frying pan
the other tool is for scraping foods (generally liquidy generally cold) from the sides of a bowl or other container.
in the first case you want to flip your pancake and it's sticking to the pan
in the second case you want to get all of the pancake batter to pour into the frying pan.
The picture is the article is of a hot frying pan black plastic scraper.
GP's picture is a silicone cold bowl scraper.
is the disconnect
it is potentially true that you should eliminate all such spatulas made of "plastic" hot or cold, and it is potentially true that in all cases substitutions with silicone is the right move, but I'm not sure if that's what is being suggested
We have the same word for both in France, like you.
However we have an extra word for the silcon one to get all the pancake batter: marise. It is not used very much, though, outside of some cooking books or shows.
OXO makes a flat silicone spatula too (I think they call it a turner or something), I've got one and it's been a great upgrade from the black plastic kind.
Plus it won't scratch anything enameled or nonstick etc.
Just cook with stainless steel, it's not that hard. Add and warm fat before adding your other ingredients to prevent sticking or if you don't want additional fat, then add liquid to reduce at the end (the same way you do a wine reduction you can just use a bit of water) if your food sticks and you need to scrape it off the bottom.
If you have cast iron and you’re having a lot of food sticking issues then you may need to reseason it. As a person that uses mostly cast iron, I prefer it, but I think it does require a bit more care.
Oh! Very grateful for the correction. I do feel that’s a third-degree burn waiting to happen. Are you saying heat the pain to high, then put on the oil? Doesn’t that splash painfully?
I don't get why it seems like people are all of a sudden talking about "crusty" eggs. I've seen it so much online in videos in just the last year. It definitely feels like some kind of fad. Eggs that have browned to the degree to which I'm seeing on YouTube would have gotten me fired at Waffle House.
That said, at Waffle House, we used carbon steel pans for eggs. There was a point where every pan would start to stick, no matter how it was heated. Those pans, we would clean with oil and salt, which is very abrasive. I'm not sure exactly what the effect was: either cleaning off accumulated dirt or filing out scratches and dings that would develop. I'm not sure because the salt should have created more scratches, but there was definitely a "worst" pan that had a deep scratch in it that always had some sticking problems.
But I don't want a crust on my eggs. I want them pale and fluffy, especially my scrambled eggs. Any brown spots on my eggs and I consider them ruined. If you tell me I won't be able to make eggs the way I prefer them in a cast iron pan, then cast iron is not for me.
I am not used to be around the kitchen but I actually did an omelette two days ago with a cast iron. I was worried it would stick. I used a small amount of oil and pre heated the pan at high temperature. After putting the eggs I lowered the heat to medium low. The idea is to have a thermal shock on the outside of the egg so that it solidifies. And then cook it at lower temperature. It worked wonders.
I’ve made scrambled eggs in it before too but these were the things I did today and I’m not expert enough to minimize them without experimentation. I frequently eat eggs and don’t have much trouble.
Cast iron is the best. The hardest part of cast iron is all of the nonsense people believe about cast iron, leading them to think it's inconvenient and, worse, that gets them to actively make cast iron problematic.
I still have a cast iron skillet, but I mostly stopped using it once I got some carbon steel pans. In my experience they beat cast iron in nearly every way. I only use my cast iron now if I need a huge amount of thermal capacity (like pre-heating it to make pizza on or something) or for the presentation value.
It’s hard to talk to cast iron zealots. They’re usually people that never seriousky cooked before and went from cheap, thin steal pans to cast iron and assume all pans are like the thin pans they had before.
Cast iron is fine for certain applications but not many others. I’d fry and egg in one but you can’t make a great matter in one due to the thermal capacity properties they have.
Steel lined copper is the king. But yes they are cost prohibitive for some. Carbon steel is nice too.
"It’s hard to talk to cast iron zealots. They’re usually people that never seriousky cooked before and went from cheap, thin steal pans to cast iron and assume all pans are like the thin pans they had before."
Maybe they are the same people who praise Apple and Tesla products for the same reason?
Cast iron is so easy I honestly have no idea why people think it's hard. Even the people who claim you can damage the seasoning. They're not wrong. You actually can. You know whats great though? You just reseason it by cooking in it with a lot of oil.
The pans are magic. I even take my pans camping for cooking on a fire. Truly amazing things
Microplastic and heart disease are both potentially going to affect my health, but the direct impact of heart disease is a lot easier to prove and test for...
Although the fats in butter have good heat stability, and the proteins can be easily removed by melting the butter and letting them settle out to make clarified butter, butter also contains cholesterol, which is not so easily removed. Although dietary cholesterol is likely safe to eat in its raw form, it's easily oxidized by heating in air, and oxidized cholesterol is implicated in health risks, e.g.:
Eggs in hot oil in a clean, smooth preheated pan should not stick...
Consider trying carbon steel. It's lighter than cast iron and just as non-stick once it's well seasoned. It's ubiquitous in restaurant and hotel kitchens.
I cook eggs in a stainless steel frying pan several times a week, and I just use plenty of butter. The egg doesn't stick. Also, don't let the butter burn, and don't let the pan get too hot.
The easiest way to cook eggs is in a glass vessel in a microwave oven.
It is very fast and reproducible, regardless if you scramble them or leave them intact to look like fried eggs or if you separate the whites and the yolks and cook them separately (which I prefer), and regardless whether you prefer to add some oil or not.
Even without using any oil the glass vessel will be easy to clean. You must use reduced power at the oven, to avoid explosions (obviously you should never cook eggs in their shells and you should puncture the yolks before cooking and glass vessels with a glass lid are preferred).
This - its super easy. I use an IR temp gun and once the pan is 170, add 1 tbsp. of butter, and it never sticks. I've showed friends and they still insist on their nasty Teflon/non-stick crap.
170c right? I do the same but use 350f. I also heat the pan before adding oil. Works perfectly every time. Even more nonstick than any nonstick pan I’ve used.
You may have a stove that heats the stainless steel vessel non-uniformly, so you might need a heat spreader.
Stainless steel has relatively poor heat conductivity, so a direct flame would heat it very non-uniformly in comparison with an aluminum or even a cast iron vessel. Hot spots lead to sticking.
For this reason the better stainless steel cooking pots have a bottom that encloses a copper sheet, to spread the heat. In such pots or pans you will not normally have problems with sticking. With simpler pots or pans you must use an external heat spreader.
'Researchers from Harvard Chan School found that three types of flame retardants, called TDCIPP, TPHP, and mono-ITP, can have a major impact on pregnancies. The study followed 211 women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF), and found that 80% of them showed evidence of the chemicals in their urine. Women with the highest levels of exposure fared the worst, with a wide range of effects:10% lower chance of a successful fertilization31% lower chance of the embryo implanting in the uterus41% fewer clinical pregnancies (where fetal heartbeat is confirmed by ultrasound)38% fewer live births https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/subtopics/flame-retard...
There's a bottom of the barrel, dollar store brand under the Betty Crocker name brand in Canada - all black plastic cooking utensils, cheapest you can get in all varieties.
Every time I go over to mom's place it's so shocking to see these utensils being used for high heat applications they were never meant to be used for.
Flipping burgers in a pan, moving fries on a baking sheet - the ends of them are all warped and disfigured, bits carved out of them from scraping something and a piece of plastic chips off and ends up in the food.
Same with the pots and pans, she's been using the same teflon coated set for the better part of a decade and to her it doesn't matter that there's a spiral from the stovetop element burned into the inside of the pot where the teflon's overheated and chipped off.
I've tried buying her new pots and pans, utentils, etc. and educating her about how much plastic and teflon she has (and by extension I have) been eating over the years but it's in one ear and out the other.
We really need to stop making plastic cooking utentils. I've moved mostly to glass or metal bowls for storing, microwaving, baking foods - silicone for utensils (which I've heard is still somewhat risky even though it's inert?)
Microplastics are the leaded gasoline of my generation it seems like.
>Every time I go over to mom's place it's so shocking to see these utensils being used for high heat applications they were never meant to be used for.
>educating her about how much plastic and teflon she has (and by extension I have) been eating over the years but it's in one ear and out the other.
I have much the same problem, though luckily I haven't lived with her for ages. According to her, eating plastic and teflon isn't a problem because she's so old that it's not going to make a difference.
Anyone know if I should ditch this thing before thanksgiving? Oxo makes great stuff, this is food grade plastic but who knows what that’ll really mean in 50 years…
ALL my black plastic utensils are OXO and I'll be damned if I'm throwing them all out. They'll have to pry them from my room temperature dead carcinogenic fingers.
It will solve itself, nature adapts fast, if you have enough dice throws- and plastic is everywhere. A million evolutionary dices roll everywhere out there- and one day all the plastics get a mold and that building block of civilization just drips away.
Indeed. The first step is for the planet to get rid of the pesky pollutants, perhaps by way of launching several “natural disasters” such as mighty strong winds, excessive floods, and particularly pesky deathly organisms. Then it can deal with plastic at its leisure.
> The real solution is sunsetting single-use anything...but $$$
Those $$$ correspond to real-world costs.
For examplee, we also want to lower car usage. Do you imagine that people who commute by bicycle or train are going to carry around durable versions of every single-use item they currently encounter? Cups, straws, plates, utensils, napkins, takeout containers, grocery bags, produce bags, tissues? Carrying around dirty versions of all the above until they get home to clean them?
Even if they do, detergent is also single-use, and damaging to aquatic environments.
I'm not some kind of hyperlibertarian, but I think we need to properly tax externalities (such as poisoning customers and destroying the viability of the biosphere), use the proceeds of that for mitigation, and let the market take care of the rest.
Straws are useless. Plates and ustensiles can be provided by and cleaned at the place you eat. Takeout containers don’t take more space than the non reusable container you will have to carry back anyway. They can also be provided by your place of work if you generally go for take out for lunch. Reusable tissue bags take no space or paper bags can be used for a cost.
Napkins and tissues are not made of plastics.
So, yes I fully expect people to carry around reusable things even when they bike. It’s not that hard. You know how I know? Because I do it every day.
Honestly stopping using single use items must be the easiest thing to do to limit the amount of trash you generate. It has absolutely no impact on your daily life.
Would you be surprised to learn that napkins and tissues and paper towels have all sorts of plastic coatings on them? It’s an untold story and I’d love one of these pubs to do some research the way they did about pizza boxes back in the day
Your 100% cotton sweater has petroleum-derived coatings on it too, which give it a soft handfeel in the store and keep bugs from eating it on its way over from SE Asia :)
I just want to be able to buy ketchup or mayonnaise in glass at the grocery store. But apparently that's not enough, you want me to bring my own container and have the grocer fill it up from the 55 gallon condiment drum?
Don't turn the argument into a parody of itself because you don't like what it implies.
No one is asking you about buying using refilable containers you bring to the store. That's not what's talked about when people talk about single use items.
I am 100% in favour of putting in place a container-deposit scheme however because these glass containers are actually reusable most of the time and should be collected back. Plastic overpackaging should just be banned. The whole thing is just a waste of ressource only possible because externalties are not priced in.
> because these glass containers are actually reusable most of the time
As far as I am aware, those are mostly obsolete/moot/whatever. Still used for pickles, to the best of my understanding. Tomato sauces (spaghetti, etc) have started to switch over already several years ago. Glass is mostly for premium products, the $12/qt organic-grass-fed-shoulder-massaged milk.
Even if I'm generous and assume you're not talking about grocery stores... it's practically impossible to have a fast food industry without single-use packaging. Most of the McDonald's in my area are designed around drive-thru and delivery. The closest probably seats 30 inside, but has two drive-thru lanes and a large rack right next to the counter for the Uber Eats bags.
> They won’t be if you start pricing plastic packaging generated externalities in the products prices.
Sure. let's make food more expensive for poor people. That's always grand policy. It'd be one thing if it was limiting how many Chic-Fil-A sauce packets they got in their drive-thru paper bag, but this also (believe it or not) affects those trying to eat at home with minimally processed foods. At some point the 72-serving Gigantosaurus bulk Hot Pocket box in the freezer section looks better than some of the stuff that resembles food people should eat.
> It’s so impossible it’s actually done in France if
I have no clue why people can't just magically wish themselves French and have entire centuries of French culture and habits imprinted on them just because people who played too much SimCity 2000 as a kid think that other people's lives should be micromanaged for a higher score. God save us from the technocrats.
> Sure. let's make food more expensive for poor people.
I know I started this whole argument by speaking up in favor of efficiently throwing things away, but I do want to speak out in favor of making (harmful) things more expensive for poor people; and giving poor people enough money to make up for it.
This also applies to a lot of other things, like taxing semi trucks for the insane amounts of damage they do to the roads compared to other vehicles, and then paying poor people for the increased price of goods at Wal-Mart. It may sound like taking extra steps to have the same result; but because you're reducing externalized costs instead of subsidizing them, everybody ends up better off.
> Sure. let's make food more expensive for poor people.
The magic of deposit refund system is that you only pay more once. Plus really poor people can actually collect unreturned items to make some change. Have you ever considered how things worked before plastic?
> I have no clue
That much is pretty clear.
I’m very happy to see that you are able to claw at anything so that your initial impossible as actually been exposed as entirely possible. I think it’s nice that you are so afraid of change you can’t even fathom taking such large steps as using reusable containers to limit trash.
> The magic of deposit refund system is that you only pay more once.
Your insight into the economics of this is shallow. If plastic is cheaper than glass, a "deposit refund scheme" doesn't fix the fact that forcing everything to glass makes it more expensive. Glass jars aren't just washed and reused, they have to be melted down to be reused at all. There's a big fuel usage penalty there (not to mention this is fossil fuel, so all the climate change connotations). In some really pathological scenarios, the single-use plastics can actually be better for the environment, since once the plastic is landfilled the carbon stays out of the air.
> That much is pretty clear.
Cheap shot. About all you have, isn't it? Just big dumb ideas that make you feel good, that you've never much contemplated to any depth, that would make things worse for everyone.
> Glass jars aren't just washed and reused, they have to be melted down to be reused at all.
Glass, unlike plastic, is impermeable. In Germany, the pfand system incentivizes bottle return by around $.10 to $.50 per glass bottle; and they're washed & sterilized, then re-used.
This does work as a subsidy for poor people with time on their hands; pfand bottles are often left next to outdoor trash cans instead of in them, and they usually disappear very quickly.
> Glass, unlike plastic, is impermeable. In Germany, the pfand system incentivizes bottle return by around $.10 to $.50 per glass bottle; and they're washed & sterilized, then re-used.
Glass jars tend to have small fractures, especially around where the lid/cap are, making them unfit for reuse. Inspection is tedious and manpower-intensive. Melted down and put back into the blow molds, if reused at all. Industry works differently than the political perception of it. You might want them to be reused, but it's just not the way the world works.
Instead of jacking off over political videos, go watch some of the non-political ones of the "how it's made" variety once in awhile.
I live in Germany and I see glass bottles that have been obviously re-used--e.g., beer from one brewery in glass embossed with the slightly-raised lettering of another brewery.
I couldn't tell you whether it's economically efficient or energy-efficient to do things that way, when you consider all the direct and indirect inputs; any more than I could tell you how to make a pencil. But I can tell you that Germany does it.
At present, yes, I believe bicyclists are more likely to carry some reusable items with them.
Some of the reason being that they are planning their trips and know what they can carry, and know that they don't want to carry more. Reusable water bottles in a work backpack are an example.
The other aspect is you don't have to carry all of these things. If you eat in a restaurant or at a house you are more likely to have reusable options available (ie washable plates and dinnerware). In many ways, car culture is linked to takeaway culture, which causes single use culture.
Top of mind; it's easy to picture the American automobile with bags of fast food trash.
> Do you imagine that people who commute by bicycle or train are going to carry around durable versions of every single-use item they currently encounter? Cups, straws, plates, utensils, napkins, takeout containers, grocery bags, produce bags, tissues? Carrying around dirty versions of all the above until they get home to clean them?
Doesn't seem uncommon at all to me, that's what my colleagues and I do, same for my wife and her colleagues (and we work in very different environments and places, different countries even).
Some of my colleagues wash their dishes at work, I just bring them back and put them in my dishwasher a home. My wife has a dishwasher at work so they just put their stuff there. The products we use for washing at home or at work claim to be biodegradable and not harmful for the environment.
Properly taxing externalities is an obvious thing to do though of course.
If we as a society leave "safety" to the producers, yes it is.
It's bizarre to see how new chemicals are basically "allowed because they are new" (maybe except in food additives), and the producers are expected to do inhouse undisclosed self-testing without being held to any standard.
and it absolutely won’t be limited to coffee lids. when we don’t hold creators and sellers of products to any kind of real standard, they over and over and over will cut corners. we know this is a fact.
when we don’t hold them responsible for the harms they directly or externally cause, we have to waste our fucking time scrutinizing ridiculous items like coffee lids. soon it will be each of the hundreds of items we buy during our regular trips to target—from toothbrush to laundry soap to shampoo to batteries.
we have to get some actual enforceable testing, standards, and holding bad actors to account soon or it’s going to be a very very real mess.
when we can’t trust companies to sell us safe spatulas or the lids on our coffee cups, we know we’ve gone off the rails.
no one has time to “do their own research” on the hundreds or thousands of random products they come in contact with every single day, “the market” has never fixed this, this requires regulations with teeth.
While I get your point, unfortunately “civilised” means plastic cups. You don’t see people in poor countries with no industry going to coffee shops to drink expensive coffee from plastic, they drink from handmade reusable cups.
I wouldn't worry too hard about the coffee cup lid. It's almost certainly made of PLA (polylactic acid). Nobody's making flame-retardant consumer appliances out of PLA.
The article is nonsense. Only engineering plastics carry UL94 ratings (and if it's got flame retardants in it, it's got a UL94 rating... otherwise no one would go to the expense!) and there are just not a lot of engineering plastics in the waste stream compared to consumer single-use plastics.
The point is that these plastics with flame retardants would go to recycling, and would eventually find their way into cooking utensils made of recycled plastics. Nobody adds the flame retardant there intentionally, but nobody removes the flame retardants from the recycled mass either, at least not in places where plastic recycling is normally done (not the richest countries).
Frankly, the idea of using recycled plastic with no control for its origin for cooking utensils looks weird to me. OTOH it should look like a great opportunity to cut costs, and shoppers very often try to save that last cent as a matter of principle and sport, so...
Coffee machines from reputable makers should be safe, I think.
"To investigate the extent to which kitchen utensils are contaminated with BFRs and the potential for resultant human exposure, we collected 96 plastic kitchen utensils and screened for Br content using a hand-held X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer. Only 3 out of 27 utensils purchased after 2011 contained detectable concentrations of Br (≥ 3 μg/g). In contrast, Br was detected in 31 out of the 69 utensils purchased before 2011."
Let me emphasize: Only 3 out of 27 utensils purchased after 2011 contained detectable concentrations of Br.
Further vital information: "Simulated cooking experiments were conducted to investigate BFR transfer from selected utensils (n = 10) to hot cooking oil, with considerable transfer (20% on average) observed."
Fine, I don't cook with hot oil. I don't melt my utensils when cooking, I don't damage them at all. I see the reason for concern, but for my cooking styles this really doesn't affect me.
I am bit weirded by using recycled plastics for anything interact with regularly with my hands for example. Also stuff that get heated. Sure it has places like furniture, decking and so on where contamination doesn't really matter. But what about something like re-usable cup for hot beverages or disposable cutlery?
I love your website Kyle. Missing images, no mobile formatting, broken links. The best. I’m glad you know how to read and criticize others because websites are not your jam.
There is no way to tell, as stated in the article.
"Of the more than 200 black plastic products Liu bought at retail stores for her study, hardly any were labeled as being made from recycled materials, she said. Consumers have no way to tell which black plastics might be recycled e-waste and which aren’t. “It’s just a minefield, really,” Turner said."
I was under the impression that labelling something as "recycled" was a value add, and it would be done where possible. I suppose that is not actually the case.
It's admittedly been a while since I've looked but there don't seem to be any (automated) drip makers whose use doesn't result in plastic coming into contact with hot water.
I'm well aware of and own many of the more manual options that don't have this issue. However, the automatic feature is killer (heh) and this seems like an obvious miss by manufacturers.
We make coldbrew coffee in the fridge. No need to heat up the coffee until it is in your cup with some extra water and into the micro. And it taste a lot better than anything else I tried. And I didn't even drink coffee a year ago because it taste so bad. Now I can even drink it without milk! :-)
I think Coldbrew is even more dependent on what coffee beans and roast you use, we have tried a few and they are very different. But so far I liked them all. Maybe you preffer the bitter taste of cooked coffee? That is something that is missing from all our tries with coldbrew.
> Maybe you preffer the bitter taste of cooked coffee?
Definitely not.
But the thing about cold-brew is that it tastes mostly sour to me and nothing else (which is unsurprising given our taste-buds are most sensitive at higher temperatures, and proper extraction of coffee can't happen at those lower temperatures as some compounds just won't dissolve at the same rate, and sour compounds in coffee dissolve the fastest). With warm brewed (+ warm drank) coffee things are more balanced (not just straight sour) and you get the interesting flavour notes from the bag.
I don't think the quality of the coffee I am using is the problem. It might be the variant, but I enjoy natural light roasts (and light roast is already difficult to brew without it getting too sour).
Ours is not sour at all and I'm pretty sensitive to sour stuff.
700 ml water, 50-60 g beans, 24 hours in fridge. When drinking we mix with 3-4 parts water. I always drink cold, wife drinks it hot. Lots of flavour and fun to try the local roasterys seasonal tastes.
The article does speak of black specifically, not just any plastic. Even if there aren't any that don't put the hot liquid in contact with plastic, it might be worth looking at the color (is my understanding from the article)
Yeah, sorry, that was implied. I would assume that's what they all use. Based on my recent personal experience, even the higher end options like Moccamaster and OXO use black plastic.
There's quite a few, actually. They're all commercial units that are expected to make hundreds of pots a day and stay cleanable and serviceable. Bunn, for example, makes a bunch of machines for which everything in the 'wet' service is stainless. By default they use a black plastic grounds holder but you can pay extra for a stainless one.
They're substantially more expensive than consumer units.
Your coffee maker is exposed to at most 100 degrees C. Spatulas are exposed to temperatures over 200 C.
Instinctively, I'm much more worried about the latter, though I admittedly don't know anything about the science behind what temperatures flame retardants or other undesirable contaminants might leach out of the plastic.
The article also speaks of a black necklace for children that was found to be 3% flame retardant chemicals by weight, saying
> Those flame retardants migrate into toddlers’ saliva and into the dust in our homes
Perhaps it's fine if you don't lick your coffee machine, or perhaps not. I guess being less worried makes sense but I'm not sure that we need not be worried about boiling our drinks in fire retardants (assuming they're present in these materials)
Ugh you reminded me how much I hate flame retardants and the horrible laws we have in America that have us spray it everywhere.
I was just recently looking at bicycle seats for small kids and the one I found interesting happened to recently have a recall (Thule) as they grossly over applied the flame retardant to a point where it was immediately toxic. I am guessing it was in the foam pieces but such a depressing idea that we need to make outdoor bicycle seats flame retardant.
The necklace, that sounded like a byproduct of recycling plastic.
In general though, through the 50s-70s there were some tragic events where people died in fires. Part of this is federal legislation, part of this is California who required household furnishings to withstand an open flame. Most of the legislation still stands, some of it like CA's has been reduced to a smolder test but it still requires some retardants.
People don't pay attention to this one but its in everything, mattresses, couches, baby sleep wear. And for me, a bigger issue than PFAS.
The people of the 1970s clutched their pearls and wrung their hands about flammable sofas in the same way that we today clutch our pearls and wring our hands about leeching plastics. The breathless articles were mostly the same except they were in places like Readers Digest instead of The Atlantic.
As another commenter stated laws were passed but more so than that the companies who make things were concerned about lawsuits and reputation damage so treating consumer textiles for flame retardants just became standard industry practice.
As an aside, I know a historical reenacter who had a need to make some char-cloth. The only thing he could find that wasn't treated was cotton work gloves.
All of them, I don't believe they serve any to the net of society and probably harm more individuals than protect.. YMMV like everything, flame retardants are generally just like PFAS, they are forever chemicals. The mains ones used up until the 2000-2013s were PBDEs, these bio-accumulate just like PFAS. THe EU and US have switched to alternatives but I don't believe these to be any better, just newer.
Below 450F or so they don't react with anything. PTFE won't react with your egg you're frying, or the inside of your knee. (PTFE is used in surgical implants, among other things that can safely go inside your body)
When you scratch them, and bits PTFE come loose, and you eat those bits, will they simply bee excreted, or will your body absorb (some of) it and never excrete it?
The question is not the temperature if you forget the pan on the fire, the question is which is worse: High Temperature Teflon, or High Temperature Oil?
I thought people in many long-living cultures often cook with high temperature oil, and not just the street food wok cooking. There is bad chemistry that can happen with other food components at high temperatures but what is the problem with oil itself?
At too high a temperature oil will smoke and burn, leaving toxic components in both the oil and in the air.
My point is that the temperature necessary to cause this oil toxicity, is lower than what you need to make Teflon toxic. Teflon becomes toxic at temperature FAR above any cooking process (unless you eat charcoal).
i.e. if you cook normally and don't burn things Teflon is obviously fine, if you do burn things you have bigger things to worry about than the Teflon, since the other stuff will kill you first.
I get your point, but what I am saying is that if you are not careful, you can easily overheat empty teflon-coated pan on an induction stove and create toxic fumes, no oil required.
And you don't even have to forget about the pan. Just setting the stove to high temperature when the pan is cold can quickly create superheated spots due to the way induction works (the temperature sensor is hidden and so it "lags" a bit).
Obviously, if you're careful, always start with a low power, wait for the pan (and stove top) to heat up, then gradually increase power, you'll be fine.
With a stainless stell pan, the worse that could happen is the bottom of the pan might warp. But there is no toxic hazard.
It's completely unnecessary to heat as cautiously as you describe. Even the worst performing induction burner is not going to heat the pan hot enough unless you do it deliberately, or just completely forget it.
Also, maybe you do it differently, but I put the oil in before heating - so if I had stainless, with oil, heated in your "unsafe" manner I would have toxic smoke in the air long before I would have fumes from Teflon. Meaning avoiding Teflon isn't helping you in any way at all.
Of course in actuality there's simply no issue, induction does not perform as badly as you describe. Go ahead and heat at full power and simply cook, it will work fine and not overheat.
I think you vastly underestimate the power of induction burners. They quickly concentrate a lot of energy in a small space. Mine came with a warning to always start at 60% power at most, so that's why I am so adamant about it.
I fully understand that this may just be the manufacturer covering his, um, behind. But I am not going to risk it.
So that would mean you can't put in oil either before heating the pan and checking the temperature. Are you then advocating for people not to cook with oil?
The risks of both high temperature PTFE and high temperature cooking oils are poorly understood. I wouldn't say with confidence either is safer. I personally avoid both.
Most consumer PTFE coatings are declared to be safe up to 450°F. It is trivially easy to heat a pan beyond that temperature on modern gas, electric, and induction ranges in less than ten minutes. The margin of safety is demonstrably nonexistent and it’s wild to me that we just accept this risk constantly, everywhere, anytime we eat food (whether at home or from a restaurant).
It’s not super clear what you’re getting at here. The choice isn’t teflon or oil. Everyone uses fat to sear food in a pan, whether or not it’s a nonstick pan. Cooking with a high-smoke-point oil which is low in saturated fat, such as avocado oil, with stainless steel, is strictly better than cooking with teflon pans by every measurable health metric.
Searing food in a PTFE pan almost certainly involves overheating it. Depending on what you're cooking you don't necessarily need oil (e.g. you don't need it for cooking eggs), although you might want to use some at moderate temperature for flavor. And for some foods oil is necessary to avoid overheating the pan, because it improves heat transfer from the pan to the food. Check with an IR thermometer every time you cook something new.
It's easy to learn how your cooking setup responds using a cheap IR thermometer. You can check it's working correctly by boiling water in the pan and confirming the temperature is close enough to the expected boiling point for your local air pressure. The risk depends greatly on both the construction of the pan (poor heat conductivity means hot spots from uneven heating) and cooking technique. Using high heat, heating empty pans, and neglecting stirring are all dangerous. Leaving heated pans unattended is especially dangerous, and anecdotally appears to be responsible for most severe overheating events. With correct technique I believe the risk is negligible and well worth the greater convenience of non-stick pans. But I don't trust third parties to use correct technique.
I threw out all my pots and pans that have non stick surfaces and replaced them with stainless steel.
Same with most kitchen cooking implements.
Stainless steel pots and pans are much cheaper, last longer, you can scrub and scrape them and the big upside is you don’t have to consume DuPont non stick chemical coating nor feed it to your children.
Despite all the celebrity chefs in the world attempting to sell you their name brand chemical coated fry pans.
I have, very regretfully, stopped using cast iron. Being a man, in a country where I can't easily donate blood, iron load is something that I want to be careful of.
It is possible to cook with cast iron in a way that won't leech too much iron into food, just as it is possible to cook with nonstick in a way that won't leech Dupont chemicals. But I'd much rather just use foolproof stainless or ceramic cookware that doesn't have these issues.
Too much of anything is bad. A quart of table salt would kill you. A bucket of water force-fed into you could kill you.
Hemoglobin in blood contains a lot of iron; it's used to bind oxygen. Too much iron intake apparently can result in its overproduction, and too much is no good. Donating blood rids you of excess iron, while also benefiting other people.
I suppose you should first check if your levels of iron are indeed excessive.
Is this comment an implicit endorsement of giving blood as a health benefit because it allows to slough off heavy metals or something? what…? News to me.
My other half works for the NHS blood/transfusion department and was able to trace my blood (after I gave her the number on the blood pack) and confirm that I was negative for various diseases including syphilis.
Also, you get a free iron/anaemia test before donating.
I don't understand the issue with cast iron pots after reading that either.
My understanding is that to get iron overload, your body would need to absorb excess iron and store it. This happens with haemochromatosis over a long time (30+ years), but it can also happen if you consume way too much iron by, for example, taking too many iron supplements when you don't need them. In normal circumstances and with a standard diet, the body will regulate it's iron intake so that too much doesn't get stored and so there's no iron oberload.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this leaves me a little confused about what the commenter meant. If you have a normal diet and don't have haemochromatosis or some other confounding factor, I don't see how enough iron could be leached from a cast iron pot to cause iron overload.
If you cook acidic things like tomatoes, apparently it can leech a significant amount of iron - apparently in some cases exceeding what you'd get from food.
Yeah, the main problem for men isn't full blown iron overload but rather subclinical iron excess which mostly comes from dietary heme iron since it bypasses the body's iron intake regulator compared to non-heme iron.
It makes no sense to fixate on elemental iron residue from your cast iron pan, especially if you're still getting heme iron infusions from red meat.
Anyone who doesn't lose blood somehow - for modern humans that usually means either menstruation or blood donation - should be careful of sources of excess iron in their diet. It's one reason why multivitamin supplements are often labelled as "for men" or "for women". The women's one will have iron.
What? Unless you have haemochromatosis this is really tinfoilery over the iron levels acquired through natural ingestion, especially the thought of leach levels from a pan. You get more iron from meat or a bowl of cereal than you could ever get from a pan without it being flat out dissolved in the process over the course of a handful of cooks.
Is the iron that leaches from pan even bio-available? Aren't supplements very specific compounds? I can admit that it might be toxic, but that toxicity is not due to something like over production of haemoglobin...
A pan is about 1 kg (a good cast iron one could be much heavier). That's enough for 200,000 bowls of cereal.
Even if you reckon the pan is degraded enough to be obviously useless after losing 5% of its weight, that would require you to use it every day for 30 years, not "a handful of cooks".
Not op and not raising my own cattle. However IMO finding a farmer you trust and ordering directly once a month or so is easier and cheaper than buying meat in supermarkets.
( not the person that made the "outside food" comment )
"you have to grow your own" is hardly the way to think about it .. we source the vast bulk of our food locally from our state and various farm groups.
To address your questions; Yes, we (the household I live in) have our own poultry, yes we grow our own grain, yes we have our own sheep. Ditto potatoes, figs, oranges, lemons, manderins, blueberries, garlic, herbs, olives, olive oil, etc.
No to "milk cow" - this isn't prime dairy country; that's some 500 km south and that's where we get milk from .. still extended family though. Beef cattle and the best fish is some 1,000+ km north - still the same state and still from extended family.
Essentially what we eat comes from our land or that of people we know either directly or with a single intermediary.
It's pretty healthy that way, we have one of the highest life expectancy's on the planet and COVID was a non issue here, both of the two roads in|out of the state were "closed" (goods trucks loaded | unloaded with no driver social contact, just sleep over, move on) the ships and airports quarantined with a mandated seperation of people or a mandated one-two week isolation if coming in.
Offtopic, but wow, I looked at some photos of Wheatbelt, and, amazingly, Australia can be intensely emerald-green all over! Before that, basically every photo of Australia outside cities I've seen showed scant khaki-colored vegetation at best, and Mars-like red and orange soils.
The wheatbelt is pretty seasonal, lush green in the winter months, dry yellow to brown following harvest - our neighbours here put up a lot videos on their channel year round, this is after harvest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE
The south west corner of the state is dairy country, forrests, caves, big surf, cool year round, the northern part of the state can get pretty hot - the Pilbarra is sparse dry desert country that explodes with colour when the rains pass through.
If you're buying and preparing whole foods, and not buying processed meals or eating out, you probably have a good enough handle on what you're eating. No need to become a certified organic smallholder.
This article relates to "hidden dangers of cookware." If he was talking about the vagaries of the solar cycle on Mars, I'd be on your side, as it is, this comes across as reflexive gatekeeping.
> Do people on this site now just read the headlines and then come to comment their stream of consciousness based on the title?
And.. what, precisely, do you think _you're_ doing in this comment? Is it not precisely what you complain about?
This is directly related to the topic. You cant have an indepth discussion about why we use these type of utensils without a discussion of non-stick as one of hte main reasons we use them is they don't scratch nonstick. Or you can collapse the thread and move on to the discussion you are interested in, or just downvote. But complaining that one of the current points of discussion doesnt do it for ya is a pretty lame method of trying to control a topic that you dont even have interest in.
Clean freaks might object to standing water in pans. But it really does work. First rinse & brush out what you can before soaking, so that it looks like water and not sludge.
The main problem here is that many people use non-stick cookware, and metal spatulas will scratch them up badly. Plastic or rubber spatulas don't do that.
Of course, you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware, but they are, so...
I have a Japanese electric fry pan, non-stick. I use a bamboo spatula for it. It was not originally intended for the purpose, but I took a rasp and file to it to give it a sharp edge. I usually don't need the spatula. I flip things with chopsticks. I mean that's why you use a non-stick pan! If you have to peel the food off it with a spatula, what good is the non-stick surface? I mostly use the bamboo spatula for lifting things that are delicate, like sunny side up eggs.
I honestly cannot understand the appeal of non stick. Cast iron is so much simpler and the food comes out better. And the pans are indestructible and cleaning is so much easier (just wipe usually). I have three cast iron pans with which I cook for large numbers of people regularly and I'm flabbergasted when I visit other people's homes and find endless stacks of speciality pans. What are people possibly using these for?
I love my cast iron, but usually choose a nonstick for eggs and crepes/pancakes in the morning.
- I tend to re-season my cast iron every time I use it and it’s a chore to do this for my early morning meals.
- Non-stick is just more non-stick, with cast iron I am constrained to using a certain heat and/or fat content to create the non-stick property which I might not want for a certain dish.
You really do not need to re-season them every time! Just using the pan with some oil is enough. If you clean it later with water, you can add a little oil afterwards and clean it with a paper towel, that's enough. Takes almost no time.
But I have to agree that non-stick pans are even more non-stick. That's why it took some convincing here to not buy new ones in my home.
That’s the kind of re-seasoning I mean: first I dry it (paper towel), then wipe with oil (more paper towel). It’s more work than cleaning a nonstick by hand and produces more waste.
Oh, okay! I see it as less work, since the whole part of using soap and rubbing the fat away properly doesn't happen. Plus it's just a drop of oil and two paper towels. You can use a cotton towel to dry it and move down to one paper towel.
But I just wanted to make sure you don't re-season it with the whole procedure, like oil, potato peels and salt fried for a long time. Because that would be definitely a lot of work each morning ;)
> You can use a cotton towel to dry it and move down to one paper towel.
You don't even need the entire paper towel. During the Hamas attacks last year I was unable to leave to the store for quite some time and began seriously reducing consumption in the house. Half or even a quarter paper towel is enough.
And even that doesn't need to be thrown away - the paper towel is still clean for purpose of reoiling the pan the next day if you absolutely need.
Nice. Also, adding oil each time after cleaning is also not necessary, especially after cooking with enough of it and if that went well (though I do it most of the time as well).
Cleaning cast iron is quick and (so to speak) dirty. Use a dish brush and running water to remove food waste, and scrape it with a metal spatula if there's sticky bits, then a quick wipe with paper towel to block rust. Hey, presto! Ready for the next round. No muss no fuss.
Yep, I ditched my "non stick" and all plastic utensils over a decade ago. It's just never seemed right to me to cook with plastic and I don't understand how other people can do it.
You can heat it with anything.
Remember. It is just steel!
Almost indestructible, can use anything to clean it, and if you mess up, you can heat it, wash it, and re oil again.
Erm, sure? Cast iron takes a little while longer to heat up because it's heavier, but it retains heat well once hot. It's even better on induction. I cook mostly in cast-iron and carbon steel and haven't ever had a gas stove. (Like a lot of kitchen wonks, I keep a cheap non-stick pan around for eggs and pancakes, and basically nothing else.)
Eggs and egg dishes (e.g. pancakes) mostly. No other pan works as well. Washing after cooking is also very quick and easy. Perhaps you've never used a non-stick pan that was maintained correctly, i.e. never overheated, stirred only with silicone utensils, and washed by hand using only non-scratching sponges. Most non-stick pans I've seen owned by other people have been in poor condition. If you think cast iron makes better food you probably use it for searing, which should never be done with non stick. And many people falsely believe wooden utensils are incapable of scratching non-stick pans.
That non-stick spray PAM is straight out, unless maybe you're huffing it. For eggs & pancakes I find that cast iron is responsive enough to temperature changes when used with induction, and that butter works to prevent sticking just fine.
You can make a case for eggs (although I don't like the way they come out this way) but this is a weird health argument for sweet pancakes which usually contain sugar and are drenched in syrup or chocolate spread. Also if you're making eggs and bacon, just use the bacon grease for the eggs?
I used to be like you until I lived with my mother then saw first-hand problems from her point of view.
Things like the weight of the cast iron means lifting it with wrist, cleaning it (in the sink). Other things like making it easy to cook proteins. Seasoning and maintenance.
I don't think I've ever even seen a wooden spatula, and I don't see how you could make one thin enough to flip pancakes (or worse eggs) and it stay durable.
It's a common thing in woodworking class at school. We have a spoon, butter knife and a cutting board made by our daughter. We also have a bunch of other wooden kitchen utencils since half the family works with wood on their free time... :-)
I use wooden spatulas, and gladly take the short-term biological risk over the long-term hormonal risk. In any case, in a modern kitchen where utensils are washed thoroughly and regularly I don't see an issue with wood.
You can use a well made, smoothly polished metal one with round edges. Your eggs are not sticking to your non-stick pan, right? So you will never use any of the kind of force that will gouge the surface.
Do you have any sources for wood cooking implements being unhygienic? I recall one a few years ago finding that wooden cutting boards are _more_ hygienic than plastic as they pull bacteria into their pores and trap and kill them: https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/09/cutting-boards-food-safety/
Wood is not good if you want to handle raw meat, since it's fibrous it makes it pretty easy to eventually cross contaminate something you eat. It's the same reason wooden cutting boards are usually avoided if you're working with raw meat. Every single time, the risk is small, but over time, the dice rolls add up.
I’m in my late 30’s and have basically forever used wooden chopping boards and wooden utensils. I’ve not gotten sick from home cooking once. I think you might be overstating the potential harm here.
How do you know by what mechanism you’ve become sick? Do you cook that sparsely that you can positively say you’ve never become sick a few days after eating something you’ve cooked?
I cook all the time and come from a family that actually cooks meals, so yeah, the hygiene aspect is a non-issue so long as you just wash stuff properly.
Really? It's one thing to understand that whatever pathogen you were infected with is (also) foodborne. But tracking the infection to something particular which you ate is generally quite hard, and it is even harder to track accidental contamination.
And many people do not understand where actual danger comes from. For example it is a really bad idea to rinse raw chicken meat. Yet this practice is still widespread.
If you've only been sick with respiratory illnesses that were "going around", you can be about, oh, 100% sure it wasn't from your wooden cutting board.
This is as useful of an insight as saying that I'm in my late 30s and never gotten Covid, I think you might be overstating the potential harm here. A sample size of one is not much use when we talk about statistical probabilities.
COVID-19 has only been around for about five years, as the name indicates, so "I'm in my late 30s" says nothing about how many opportunities you've had to get it, whereas being in one's late 30s does say something about how many opportunities they've had to get (or give someone else) food poisoning.
I'm in my mid-50s. I use wooden cooking implements a lot. I clean them pretty carefully. So far as I know, no one has ever got sick from eating food I've cooked.
The sample size is one person cooking but it isn't only one opportunity to get food poisoning. Let's say 20 years, 300 days per year, one meal per day; that's 6000 food-poisoning opportunities, none of which has obviously resulted in food poisoning for anyone involved. That is in fact quite good evidence that the risk of serious food poisoning on any single occasion, if you use wooden implements but are reasonably careful with them, isn't high enough to be noticeable above the baseline rate of people getting sick.
If someone doesn't take any particular precautions and never gets COVID-19, that is evidence that COVID-19 is less of a threat than it's sometimes felt to be. But not very much evidence, and it can readily be outweighed by all the other people who have got COVID-19, including some who did take reasonable precautions. Similarly, my and iamacyborg's anecdotal evidence could absolutely be outweighed by statistics correlating food poisoning with type of cooking implements. If anyone has those, I'd be very interested to see them.
Actually wooden cutting boards are safer than plastic ones because the plastic ones not only result in lots of plastic particles being dislodged while cutting but also the cuts into the board are harder to clean and result in a higher likelihood of contamination.
Wooden boards need to be maintained, however, which with frequent use means occasionally sanding them down a bit in addition to the usual cleaning and oiling. The problem with wooden boards is mostly that they're not dishwasher-safe and people are too lazy to clean them properly by hand. A plastic cutting board you regularly put in the dishwasher is probably safer than a wooden one you only half-heartedly rinse, at least in terms of contamination.
I have a composite (???) cutting board, the surface kinda feels like it's papery / fibrous something when it's wet and some of the bits flake off. But it's dishwasher safe.
When cooking meat, I use two pairs of chopsticks: the raw chopsticks and the cooked chopsticks. The raw chopsticks are used to loaded into the pan and to flip it once. Once that batch is flipped I use the cooked chopsticks.
> you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware
Using metal spatulas with non-stick is a big no due to the scratching. Ideally, you should throw away any non-stick cookware that gets a scratch on it.
I am still not convinced that scratched non-stick stuff is a real danger. As far as I know, the whole point of PTFE (what the coating normally is made of) is that it’s chemically mostly inert. I don’t know the mechanism by which eating PTFE flakes would be harmful. I’m not a chemist though so I would be grateful for corrections.
It's the perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) that's the issue. It's mainly been phased out of cookware now, so if it's less than 10 years old then you should be okay.
But wasn’t that only used in production? Some bouillon is also made by using hydrochloric acid, but it is neutralized and only NaCl remains. Isn’t it the same here? The PFOA is basically used as a precursor for PTFE and doesn’t remain in the product?
This particular article seems to be referring to brominated flame retardants (BFRs) -- there's a single reference to "PBDEs" in the text, and the original cited research paper [0] talks about various BFRs. The purported issue is with plastics recycling, where both new and old products may contain previously banned compounds.
For what it's worth, the simulated cooking experiments involved cutting up the utensils into small pieces, grinding those into a powder, then vigorously combined with hexane (the terms "vortexing" and "ultrasonication" are used), then subsequently combined with sulfuric acid, and dried. Small samples were then immersed in olive oil maintained at 160 Celsius for 15 minutes. (I may have misinterpreted this section, but it described the first step as "pre-treatment of samples")
It's perhaps interesting to note that the only sample listed as "new" in Table 1 with substantial levels of bromine was a thermos cup lid (180 μg/g), and only a small number of other items had detectable levels in the 3-10 μg/g range. Meanwhile, many samples purchased to 2011 had levels well over 100μg/g. That said, I also don't know how representative this study is in the context of, say, a thermos lid if you're not storing any liquids substantially above 100 C.
The big "no" with non-stick is using steel wool scrubbers for cleaning. That and using sharp instruments like forks.
A nice, smoothly polished stainless steel spatula with round corners and a slightly convex edge shouldn't do anything to your non-stick pan.
You have to deliberately be trying to damage the non-stick surface with such a spatula to do any harm.
If the non-stick surface actually working, you shouldn't be using any force to scrape anything off. And there's margin for that.
I use one of those 5-in-1 painter's tools to remove grime from just about any surface without damaging it. I would cheerfully use it to take a dried paint splatter off a $100K Steinway. :)
This entire discussion points me towards a conclusion that metal-on-metal is the conservative way to go. So what is the problem with this as a solution ? Do we have to worry about microbits of metal disrupting physiology ?
I just started cooking in an iron pan, and I love it. It's actually not significantly more difficult to clean once you learn to leave the seasoning on and get over the cultural conditioning of what clean is essentially.
The cooking process it also far better, with the whole pan being uniformly hot and staying that way.
There are a lot of old misconceptions around about cast iron seasoning. It's a layer of bioplastic formed by the polymerization when heating a thin layer of oil on the pan to high temperature - It's not about leaving your pan dirty or 'flavored'. You can clean it with regular dish soap just fine, that isn't strong enough to take the layer off.
Yes, correct. I'll add, though, that this takes skill to develop. Even the soap just left on the sponge from washing other utensils is too much. So I'll often just foregoe the soap unless there is an egregious bit of food stuck on it - which is rare as the heat is so well distributed on cast iron that I don't burn food anymore using it.
No, that's not me. In any case, in our language we don't use the same word for the pan coating that we use for food flavouring. There is no smell on these pans! But yes, if people are treating their cookware as referenced in that page, then I understand why you are appalled.
The fear of using soap was real back 100 years ago when soap contained lye, which would destroy the seasoning on your pan. Today is this no longer true, so clean away!
You need to preheat the pan and not cook at a temperature where the oil polymerizes or the ingredients can burn. When you put something sticky in it, you need to wait a bit for the crust to form before moving it.
I thought we had found that all non stick pans were toxic? They said at first just to avoid teflon, but then the replacements were found bad too, or even worse. Are there actually safe ones now?
I am mostly worried about the stress of things sticking to that like glue. Stress has physiological consequences.
I see people worrying about this shit while walking on cliff edges, honking down cans of energy drinks and puffing away on vapes. There are probably larger health and risk considerations to make in your life.
Raw metal like cast iron is pretty terrible for red sauces due to tomato sauce acidity. You will get tremendous amount of iron oxide (rust) into the food to the point when you can taste it, with no idea if you don't cross safety thresholds.
Plus stickiness affects quite a few foods - eggs, pancakes, but also ie low burn simmer. There are cca inert linings like porcelain enamel on La creuset and similar, but in convenience its still subpar to non-stick and prices are high.
The whole point of why people go for non-stick is that you don't become a bit a slave to such an insignificant stuff like freakin' pans. Maintaining them, redoing the 'non-stick' surface... that's not direction we generally call quality of life, in fact it goes directly against it (have less things, free up yourself to have more time for yourself and our closest ones and not just continuously maintain gazillion stupid little or bigger things).
It is perfectly alright to cook tomato sauces in cast iron, especially a well-seasoned one which should defend against the acidity attacking the metal fairly well. Another way is to neutralise the acid with some sodium bicarbonate. Oh, and
> You will get tremendous amount of iron oxide (rust) into the food to the point when you can taste it
is generally not a problem. In fact, cereals are fortified directly by adding iron oxide—enough that if a magnet is run over it, it will pick up a substantial quantity of iron filings.
If you're especially concerned about your food tasting iron-y, a good substitute is stainless steel. Bring it up to 200°C, add in a small touch of high smoke point oil, add your proteins, and cook. No sticking.
All my cookware is metal including my spatulas, spoons, pots, and pans etc which are stainless steel, aluminium, or enamelled cast iron. Metal is infinitely more durable and flexible (in terms of where and how it can be used, not literal flexibility à la Young's modulus) than any silicone/plastic/non-stick cookware. You can pop a stainless steel pan directly from the stove into an industrial oven. You can put metal (even cast iron, really) in a dishwasher. You can violently scrub at any metal with steel wool and Cif/Gif to attack stubborn stains. The likelihood of something sticking to it is a small price to pay for the sheer peace of mind and flexibility.
Oh, final point. If scrubbing stuff off is such a pain, get a dishwasher.
I really disagree on the tomato sauce being okay in cast iron. Cooking high acidity food will absolutely strip all the seasoning off your pan if done for long enough. It has nothing to do with rust.
> Cooking high acidity food will absolutely strip all the seasoning off your pan if done for long enough
That statement doesn't seem compatible with the chemistry. The seasoning on a cast-iron is a (plastic) polymer that is fairly resistant to acid attack—especially the weak acids in food. It's why the strongest and most concentrated acids are stored in plastic and not glass beakers.
Try it. 60 minutes boiling tomatoes takes the seasoning right off. its recommended as a way to restart seasoning from nothing. vinegar is also an alternative.
You generally wouldn't fry burgers in the same cast iron container in which you make sauce, because of their different shape that determines their purpose. Only cast iron used for frying needs the varnish.
metal spatulas make scratches into the pan, which destroys any surface coating (so it goes into the food) or, if there is no coating, at least destroys the smooth surface which makes food stick even more.
maybe they have higher quality pans that are less easy to scratch, or they are learning how to use those tools without causing scratches, or they simply replace them more often.
in every pot or pan i have ever used, scratches were a problem. and only metal tools could have caused them.
Higher quality and generally made in free countries (https://www.restaurantsupply.com/saute-pans), versus the cheap stuff made in authoritarian countries with questionable coatings/materials that some consumers opt for. Vollrath stuff has always been good in my experience. Preventing sticking and scratching are mostly skill issues, but everybody burns something (during prep) every now and then. I never saw a new pan or a pan thrown away in any kitchen I worked in.
Wood is an option, but look for solid wood, I don't trust these bamboo ones that are made from laminated / glued slats. Bamboo "wood" will be the next major thing I'm sure, sold as co2-neutral and biodegradeable, but soaked in glues / resins to make it useful.
It is wild how well the old marketing worked, leaving consumers to think Teflon was something close to indestructible. In my industry, a lot of the machines I work on use Teflon bearings, and customers are almost always flabbergasted when I show them the bearing wore down considerably after 8 years of continuous use.
The correlation-causation in this article is really rather screwed up.
The way it really works for plastic is this: almost all bad plastic is black, but not all black plastic is bad. That's it.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with virgin black plastics. (Well, at least, nothing more than is wrong with plastics in general.) So there is no reason to fear black plastic from reputable sources.
The trouble comes in when plastics get recycled. There may be sourcing issues for black resins, but the root of the matter is this: black plastics are typically pigmented with carbon black. Carbon black as a pigment is cheap, safe, and very effective. That's good! But that also means that when you throw together a pile of recycled sludge mix and it comes out beige, greige, or worse, you can't sell that (who would buy greige resin?? wait, don't answer that)... so you color it, cheaply... which means carbon black. So almost all random crappy recycled plastic resin ends up black. That's the real problem with black plastic.
This is correct. Sadly, this is also unhelpful. As long as you can't guarantee that the cooking utensil is from newly-made and clean black plastic from a reputable source, there is still risk. Think about a random convenience store item. OTOH e.g. a green or red utensil is free from that particular risk (unless a new investigation finds something for these types).
That is, a reputable source, e.g. an established cookware company, may proclaim that their existing black plastics are fine, safe for cookware, and have been tested. But a smart move for them would be to stop using black plastics for cookware, because a customer will just remember one highly reductionist association: "cookware + black plastic = poison". It's not always true, but it may sometimes be true, and that's enough.
Even if the particular research will be found lacking by new investigations and reproduction attempts, a lot of people will still remember this association for years, due to its shock value, simplicity, and trust to The Atlantic (which is generally a really good resource).
> because a customer will just remember one highly reductionist association: "cookware + black plastic = poison". It's not always true, but it may sometimes be true, and that's enough.
This and the fact that it's a high risk / low reward scenario.
> That is, a reputable source, e.g. an established cookware company, may proclaim that their existing black plastics are fine, safe for cookware, and have been tested.
Frankly, nobody should be so credulous as to trust what a consumer goods company claims. You just have to look up how often well trusted consumer goods companies get caught "accidentally" using slave labor.
The need is for a regulatory body like the EPA or FDA to step up and check that the claims are more than just that.
The issue here is that these plastics are super cheap and testing is expensive enough. I have absolutely no faith that a consumer goods company will follow through or continue to follow through without a monetary penalty. This is something that's just to easy to cut once headlines die down.
Are you sure there's absolutely nothing wrong with virgin plastics? Maybe it'd be safer and simpler to just avoid plastic in e.g. cooking since the growing amount of research about effects of plastics doesn't seem very positive.
Maybe I'm having some kind of brain fart or mixed something up, but I thought "absolutely nothing" was a direct quote from them and no mention of plastics in general.
Is there a way to see if/how comment was edited?
I'll try to quote things more directly from now on...
> So there is no reason to fear black plastic from reputable sources.
But how do you even judge that? My coffee machine is all black plastic. It has dozens of parts. The hot water runs by/over black plastic.
It's an expensive and reputable brand of coffee machine, but I have absolutely no illusions that some/most of the black plastic parts it contains are straight from different factories in China.
And I would be surprised if anybody QAs the chemical makeup of raw plastic input. As long as the parts mold correctly and hold up structurally, nobody would notice when the Chinese injection molder changes suppliers mid-batch.
> some/most of the black plastic parts it contains are straight from different factories in China.
Yes, they are.
> I would be surprised if anybody QAs the chemical makeup of raw plastic input. As long as the parts mold correctly and hold up structurally, nobody would notice when the Chinese injection molder changes suppliers mid-batch.
And yes, they do care. Critical parts (and food contact parts are always critical) usually specify a specific resin from a specific manufacturer on the procurement documentation. The major brands absolutely 100% audit this when they check in on their suppliers. And the major brands absolutely do check on their suppliers. (Many of them are even supplying the resin themselves, so they really care if it's getting diverted.) The factories are not incentivized to mess this up, because they know it's game over for their business with that brand (or even OEM/CM) if they screw up, so they instead get it right and just charge more. This is what you pay for when you buy name brand products.
And it's what you give up when you "save money" buying on AliExpress!
I don't think it's worth nit-picking in this case.
Everyone wants to reduce their plastic intake, but nobody wants to throw 80% in their kitchenware in the trash.
There's no obvious steps you can get people to follow to check if their spatula is one of the "good" ones, so tossing black plastic is a good concrete step to advise people to take.
The recycled plastic may, indeed, be worse than "virgin", but any plastic melting in your food seems ill advised. I'm not a zealot refusing to drink out of a plastic cup, but spatulas see a lot more heat than most cookware. My wife and I noticed our plastic spatulas (including one from a well known "reputable" brand) showing signs of melting years ago, and into the trash they went. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Does it count if the black plastic part is not in contact with the water/food? The inside of my kettle is stainless steel, but the lid is black plastic (not directly in contact with water)
In your case, the lid of the kettle is effectively in contact with the water. It sits exposed to hot steam, the steam condenses at the lid, and drops fall back into the water you're boiling.
Since the article repeatedly made a point to talk about cooking spatulas and hot oil, our only hope is that those flame retardants don't dissolve well in water - but dissolve very well in oil.
But if they do dissolve in water, it's safe to assume you're boiling them out of your kettle lid every time that thing runs.
If you're speaking of an electric water kettle, my advice is throw it out. At least where I live (Germany) you can buy good quality electric water kettles with seamless stainless steel container for well under €50,— (I bought mine a quarter of a century ago for €25,—), so there's very little incentive to save money. I once had an impossibly cheap water kettle with open heating coils. That thing not only smelled of plastics but the water was ruined, too. Add to that that open heating coils have a reputation of shedding nickel into the water. Just say no.
what bothers me is the black plastic handles on pots and pans when cooking with gas. they get way to hot and produce a strong odor that makes me worry about what kind of gasses are released there that i am breathing in.
Go throw it away if you smell any odor. I'm glad even my cheap IKEA pots come with stainless steel handles. My even cheaper cast iron pans have, well, cast iron handles.
My Aeropress filter cap is the only remaining black plastic in my kitchen. The Aeropress is pretty much the only plastic that remains in my kitchen. I'd pay good money for a replacement cap made out of white nylon, PMMA, PEEK, etc.
Toxicological evidence takes a long time to acquire. By it's very nature it's a lagging indicator. Remember when everybody freaked out about BPAs? That's because good studies showed the accumulation of those compounds in the body, and the potential health issues it could drive.
And what about now that we have all these BPA free plastics? Most of them have replaced the BPA with other compounds. They haven't been studied, so there isn't evidence against them. But the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Finally: what, in their long and storied history, has led you to believe that 3M, DuPont, or Eastman are acting in the best interest of your health? Because their incentive structure favors wealth creation, not population health.
I had no idea either. Thanks! When I first got my Aeropress, really hot water being forced through all dark-colored hard plastic had me concerned. Still does. But after getting the routine down it takes only three minutes and my daily coffee is so much better since I got it, I don't want coffee any other way anymore.
The glass one is most likely going on my Christmas list (even though that is sort of expensive for what it is)
The Aeropress is absolutely great, but I have the same reservations about putting 96c water through what's essentially a bunch of plastic. What I'm about to suggest is not a substitute, but there are solid glass/metal french press kits, and chemex/filtered glass/ceramic coffee setups which will make great drinks.
Once you have nailed the grinding process (with a single dose grinder for consistency, for example), the filtering parts of the procedure are 2 minutes.
Same. Cleaning up the hot water and coffee grounds slurry off the counter top or floor early in the morning is already a huge pain in my assholes, I don't want to add glass shards in the mix.
Or the thought of pressing too hard on a glass AeroPress, having it tip over and shatter, slicing through my arm. Would be the silliest way to go out.
Silicone rubber itself is much more inert than carbon-based polymers, but it could always contain undesirable additives. Hopefully such additives would not be used in food-contact products and silicone does not need at all some of the additives frequently used in plastic products, like flame retardants.
This said, the parent article recommends silicone utensils among the safer alternatives.
Ok, but why? It's a synthetic molded polymer, so I think it fits all the definitions that I can find.
Are we saying that plastics are bad and then redefining "plastic" as the subset of the previous classification which are bad? That's the kind of language trickery that duped us into making utensils out of an industrial waste product in the first place. If we're going to protect future generations from whatever harm comes after plastic we're going to need to stop being so vage.
What we commonly refer to as "plastics" are mainly chains of carbon atoms, whereas silicone is a chain of siloxanes instead.
Silicone is better for food preparation as it withstands heat better, has low toxicity (especially compared to additives used with plastic utensils), low reactivity, high resistance to oxygen, ozone and ultraviolet light, doesn't support microbes and repels water which is great for things like spatulas.
friend then later girlfriend got sick,bad. Before
that she was jammin along through life,A listed and having lunch with our now PM,dustin? bustin?
anyway she was sick and I put it upon myself to do what I could,she was in a bad way,couch bound,out of breath when walking,bad.So I started researching everything she was eating and drinking
and bieng medicated with, and researched all of the indivual ingrediants and "additives", hundreds
of substences, and of all of those additives and substances,not one was written up anywhere,ever as
HEY WOW THIS STUFFF is so great,the best thing for
humanity.....no it was all dry ,often void of any
actual descriptive reason for bieng in food.
So we got rid of all that,and started eating food
and her change in health for the better was dramatic.
Along side the additive free diet,a plastic ban was implimented,*nonplastic touches humans internaly or externaly,as long as a.viable alternative exists(feed packaging which is removed)
The reversal of symptoms was dramatic.This was an A list'r with very extensive medical access,and she was planning her own palitive care when I interviened with my simple method,of removing things where there can be no (health/physiological) down side.It was a huge effort to research the bad and inexplicable additives and find viable implimentable alternatives,ongoing.
But there is no write up/study anywhere that lauds
the benifits of plastic touching humans food or bodys.Its all bad, or they would brag.Simple as that.
This article is brief and uses big numbers to make a scary point but I'd be interested in if there is proof of causation of significant physiological effects at the exposure level from domestic cooking.
Often media will say "people exposed to Y have increased Z" but fail to mention that in studies those people worked in industrial settings with Y and the exposure level is hundreds or thousands of times higher than in a consumer setting.
The difficulty here is that the diseases happen years or decades after the exposer, sometimes.
The industrial setting offers the hints that there might be a problem but, as you rightly point out, also might just be a case of too much exposure.
An example of this is radiation exposure, it took an embarrassingly long time for society to link radiation to cancer, and that was a somewhat obvious link. Radioactive beverages were literally marketed as health beverages because of their radium content.
You can still find radioactive trinkets being sold for their alleged health effects. Thorium in pendants and that sort of shit. They don't disclose their radioactive nature but they market with some new age woo like "emits vitalizing energy waves using crystal technology."
Most of it comes from China, presumably from people who see waste byproducts of rare earth metal processing as a business opportunity.
In my country we have some ridiculous newspapers that will publish any story with "may cause cancer" in the headline. So for a lot of people these stories are a boy-who-cried-wolf situation.
Precautionary principle? I'm sorry to say stainless steel may leech heavy metals into food during cooking [1]
And also silicone may leech potentially harmful chemicals into food [2]
Nonstick coatings? Teflon flu "could be a real concern" [3]
Wooden spoons are porous and can crack, making them a breeding ground for germs, and they can splinter [4] - and good luck finding a wooden spatula that doesn't suck.
So personally I don't think it's churlish to take these warnings with a grain of salt. Especially for rarely-used pieces of cookware.
A well made point, but you won't get through. When you're in the fad, it's the center of the universe. Plus there will be an endless number of presently unknown medical worries and niggles. It all comes out in the wash, the best bet is diversification.
I can relate to your distrust of the various click-baity headlines of papers, but Teflon flu is a real thing. It's easily avoided by not over-heating pans - keep them under 260°C and don't heat them when empty as that can result in hot spots.
i only use wooden spoons and spatulas and i almost never had them crack or splinter. if an edge does break off i can use a knife or sandpaper to make it smooth. the only downside is that some spatulas are not thin enough on the front edge, making them more difficult to use for things like pancakes or omelettes. i always keep an eye out for good wooden spatulas. i had some quite nice ones over the years. and when i move i take them with me, just in case i can't get another good one in the next location.
The part that really drives me up the wall is that the demographics who decades ago decried plastics to be superior because they don't harbor bacteria like wood or break dangerously like glass are roughly the same ones who are now complaining about plastic.
I don't have a cultural analogy for this situation but whatever it is is worse than "boy who cried wolf".
Dismissing the papers as lies is very different from considering your usage of the studied tools/materials, and deciding you're not actually recreating the failure-modes studied in the papers enough to worry about your current tools.
Maybe a stupid question, but how can I tell the difference between plastic and silicone? We use a black spatula that's flexible (shapes a bit to the curvature of what you're wiping, super convenient) and doesn't scratch the pan while not being porous like wood (where I always wonder how many bacteria live in these crevasses). It seems perfect and is being sold specifically for cooking so I assumed this plastic, if that's what it is, is safe for that. Now, reading the article, it says it's not, but then in the comments I read it may be yet another material. How can one tell what's what?
Plastic isn't as heat tolerant, so you could subject the utensils to high heat (200°C should do it) and see if they start to melt. Whilst it's a destructive test, it's probably worth destroying and replacing plastic utensils as silicone ones are much better.
Edit: apparently you can tell the difference by squeezing them too - silicone will feel rubbery.
Side note: If you regularly and promptly clean your wooden utensils, bacteria and germs won't set in. Bacteria only becomes an issue when the wood splinters or is damaged in some way.
Also "capillary action" takes place in wood, meaning water and/or bacteria on the outside of the wooden surface essentially diffuses into the wood, "choking out" the surface bacteria and therefore not providing them with a good environment on which to grow. Additionally, wood has antimicrobial properties.
There's no single important thing— It's a combination of killing as many pathogens as you can with heat or chemicals, removing as much material as you can that bacteria feed on, and drying. Drying isn't going to do any good if your spoon is contaminated with hepatitis a, for example, and drying is much less important if you're really taking down the bacteria count by sanitizing it and don't have much for bacteria to eat in there. But if the spoon has been around the block and you're just throwing it in the dishwasher on a regular cycle, drying is a larger part of the risk reduction.
Honestly though, in home kitchens, you're waaaay more likely to get foodborne illnesses from accidental cross-contamination or time/temperature abuse of particularly risky ready-to-eat foods that people aren't as careful with as they are with meat— like cut melons and questionable been sprouts, cooked cut vegetables, cooked rice, and others. It's funny how careful people are with jarred mayonnaise, which is pretty indestructible. If that potato salad left out on the table at the picnic made you sick, it's the potatoes, not the mayonnaise.
As an aside: most people are completely wrong about what gave them food poisoning. To get a better idea, you need to look up specific symptoms and incubation periods... But contact tracing is the only way to be sure. And the most common— norovirus— could have been picked up anywhere. Even if you wash your hands right before eating, you could have gotten it from the seat you pulled out before sitting down, and alcohol isn't great at killing it. Working on restaurants, when someone said "you made me sick! I'm going to call the board of health!" I'd say "feel free. They're going to tell you to get tested to see what you have so they can compare it to other reports, and in the unlikely event that some of the other hundreds of other people who ate here when you did got the same illnesses, I'd want the board of health to know about that."
Well they've got a couple things going for them— they're sealed so there's very little chance of cross-contamination in transit or storage, and since it's a ready-to-eat food item rather than a raw ingredient, at least the more reputable companies probably need a pretty solid HACCP plan (short for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points— a formal for safety risk analysis and their mitigation procedures), which means at least someone is paying attention. But that's not a guarantee of course, as we've seen from McDonald's current sliced onion debacle, or Boar's
Head's recent listeria recall that lead them to discontinue liver wurst and shut down their huge plant in Virginia. Either way, it's probably safer than store-cut stuff, but there are a lot of factors.
The big problems I've seen with greens all came from field contamination that couldn't be washed off, but that could also be because other types of contamination don't have a single source point and therefore don't trigger a recall/definable outbreak/news coverage.
And when it comes down to it, these are natural organisms that don't come from industrial food production, and will always be somewhat of a risk as long as we eat natural foods. Botulism spores naturally occur more frequently in parts of the western US in places that grow a lot of garlic and onions, which is why we need to refrigerate garlic oil and such— industrial food production is excellent at killing botulism and cases of poisoning come from improperly prepared home canned goods, because doing it 80% right kills everything else, and you could go 3 generations using that recipe before getting over contaminated with botulism, and then everyone at dinner that night dies. Eating industrial canned food exclusively could eliminate most risk of pathogens altogether, but then there's other risks like chemical leeching in many products, nutritional considerations, other contamination (normally a negligible risk, but would it be if you only ate industrial food?) and who really wants to do that, anyway.
But in the US, no for we sell is as risky as raw chicken. Not by a long shot. It's really bizarre that the FDA is so upright that they won't allow soft raw milk cheeses to be sold, but the USDA still, I believe, doesn't legally classify the deadly Salmonella Heidelberg to be an adulterant, as they do e. Coli OH157. Not sure if it's outdated, but when I was in culinary school some time ago, 1 in 4 chickens had enough Salmonella or campylobacter to make a healthy adult sick.
The most impactful things it seems to me home cooks can do to reduce their risks are a) don't to anything else while cutting raw meat, and immediately wash everything that touches it as soon as you're done, b) invest in an instant read thermometer if you cook meat that has a lot of surface area exposure to equipment (e.g. ground meat, sausage, cube steak), c) don't keep cut melons or bean sprouts for more than a few days, d) keep all uncooked meat in the bottom of your fridge below everything else.
There are other things that are risky that people don't realize— cooked room temperature rice, raw flour, room temperature brewed tea, etc etc etc— but they're less frequently problematic. It's a risk/reward just like anything else. A tea shop in Boston made a ton of people sick not refrigerating it's iced tea some years ago, but it didn't kill anyone, and lots of people have made sun tea without getting sick. People WAY overestimate the risk of eating raw eggs, but something like 1 in 10k eggs could do it.
> It's really bizarre that the FDA is so upright that they won't allow soft raw milk cheeses to be sold
I'm in the UK and didn't realise that. We easily buy raw milk cheeses here, but they do carry a warning about people with compromised immune systems and pregnant women.
> There are other things that are risky that people don't realize— cooked room temperature rice, raw flour, room temperature brewed tea
I was aware of the issues with pre-cooked rice and how reheating it is unlikely to make it safe. Raw flour is a new one for me - I would assume that it being dried would kill off most nasties.
However, room temperature brewed tea is incredibly dangerous here in the UK as you're likely to get lynched if you serve that to someone as a nice cuppa. Otherwise, I'd guess that it's the sugar content that gives the bacteria something to munch - it's why kombucha can be dangerous if not brewed carefully though that's more a case of getting the desirable bacteria to out-compete the nasty ones.
The danger in the US involves general poor tea handling with iced tea. Sun Tea involves leaving water and tea bags in the sun for a long while to do kind of a cold brew. Many places (shitty donut shops, greasy spoon diners, etc) make iced tea by stuffing the filter basket on their coffee pots with tea bags, often not getting the tea up to a safe temperature to kill pathogens. It's often then let at room temperature until it's served. It doesn't need sugar in it to be a problem— heck, legionnaires disease grows in closed water circulation systems. It's not common, but in the past decade-and-a-half, there have been a few outbreaks in the US. Also, studies have shown that the containers for sliced lemons in restaurant service stations are frequently teeming with fecal coliform bacteria. If they toss lemons in there to cover up the disgusting residual old coffee flavor, even better.
Heathens over here.
So properly made kombucha wouldn't be risky, but as you noted, it isn't always properly made. You can do most culinary things wrong enough to get you sick if you really put your heart into it.
I recall reading many years ago when I was making some kombucha that one of the problems was using a ceramic container that could leach lead into the brew - presumably related to the acidity of it.
Nowadays, I like to make kefir as that seems like the easiest fermentation - milk and kefir grains in a covered glass jar (not airtight) and leave for a day. Temperature isn't critical and there's no sterilisation needed.
Yeah I avoid porous things in general for that sort of work, but I remember hearing that the lower-end of Mexican ceramic crocks are particularly bad. I see a lot of lead recalls for Chinese products but it could just be because there are so many products coming out of China. When I'm doing any yoghurt type thing, I use my instant pot. Works like a charm.
I make spoons and spatulas from various hardwood, one of me favorites being Mexican cocobolo. They hold up exceedingly welland despite reports of it containing irritants, neither myself or those I've made them for have any problems - I believe it's pretty much only the dust that tranfers the irritant.
Most of my utensils do not float. I finish them with a homemade or food grade beeswax. The act of cooking alters the new look, but they acquire their own, slightly less perfect, but reasonable finish.
I'll be making some katalox spoon/spats soon... another glorious wood, but not quite as remarkable as a good piece of cocobolo, which can be really special.
Anyway, my work with these utensils started for the precise purpose of avoiding plastic.
Nope. In fact, the higher density silicone with better heat resistance will turn white on bending far more readily than the low grade stuff designed for hair dryer pockets and such.
The black part in plastics is due to the addition of cheap carbon black to recycled plastic which is usually pale and unappealing grey, it is a form of 'soot produced by the incomplete combustion of coal, petroleum or vegetable matter. It is added to plastics as a reinforcing substance, the same reason for which it finds widespread use in tires' .https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-did-you-know/d...
Buy something that is silicone and use it as a reference. Silicone is distinct, but a lot of the words that one would use to describe it can also apply to plastic, strictly because language is vague. But once you have a reference it becomes pretty clear what is and isn't silicone.
Being deliberate about the materials you choose for your cookware is not the same as stressing out over every little risk in your life. For some people these are the materials that they use to prepare their food literally every day and one purchase will last years.
Indeed. Although now I’m pretty annoyed about the 6 or so black plastic cooking utensils I received as a wedding gift nearly twenty years ago lasted this long, so I’ve been using them this whole time. Oh well, at least I don’t cook much :/
Sure, but this is pretty low hanging fruit. Moving to only metal and wood spatulas, cooking spoons, etc. has been a pretty cheap and easy switch. I would love to ALSO see regulation, but in the meantime I can at least improve things for myself.
Those are either going to (metal) scratch my non-stick pans, which I’m also told (on scant evidence I believe) causes cancer, or they’re (wood) going to be inflexible and hard to wash (can’t dishwasher them), which is inconvenient.
Putting wooden spatulas in the dishwasher shortens their life, but it doesn't destroy them straight away. I don't feel bad at all about putting cheap wooden cookware in the dishwasher. And, of course, if you're using non-stick pans, worrying about black plastic is a mote/beam kind of situation.
I'm not even sure it does that. My cheapo wood spoons/turners/spatulas get dishwashed ~every time they're used, and they're 10? years old at this point. One finally cracked a few years ago but the rest are going strong.
Indeed, panicking about everything little thing like this is a psychological nightmare— it leads to the same mental fatigue as the infinite list of item known to the State of California to cause cancer.
And yet the State of California helps drive regulation forward; e.g. the case of Red 3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq9dhQIoDw8). CA may err too much on the cry wolf end of the scale, but it's serving a vital function.
Why, exactly, would those California notifications cause even mild anxiety (let alone "a psychological nightmare") if you know as you claim that they are merely "panicking about everything little thing"?
If you're certain they're trivial concerns, then they should be easy to dismiss.
If the problem is that you're not sure if they're trivial -- or which are and which aren't -- then what we've uncovered is the shortcomings of a policy oriented primarily around notifications. You'd want judgments made by people with toxicology qualifications whose job it is to focus on questions like this. Which was the point of the comment you're responding to.
I don't really understand that POV. It is easier to never have to worry about it if you simply decline to use plastic cooking utensils. You never have to revisit the topic, never had to read any Atlantic articles at all coming out with "new risks" because you just decided to use wood long ago.
Except, I don't think wood would be any better as you still have to worry about how it was sourced and made to make sure nothing was added to it, right? I see a lot of people using bamboo for example. The only really safe alternative is stainless if you want to avoid thinking about it again.
Wood utensils are often coated to improve their stability (just like the inside of cans is coated in plastic, so joke’s on you if you choose cans for that reason).
Have you considered the safety profile of the ink used for any markings, the stain on the wood, and any oil or wax coatings?
I use Tried and True linseed oil or linseed oil + beeswax for my coatings. Occasionally I'll use pure walnut oil.
I understand that not everyone likes to make such things! But I don't suspect its hard to find pure wood ones. Lots of people make them. Even just searching "unfinished wooden kitchen utensils" yields a lot of results.
I'm not trolling, the commenter asked me if I had considered something, and it happens I have actually made them myself. Not because I think its necessary, it certainly isn't, I simply like to make things by hand and use things that I've made.
It is inexpensive to buy unfinished wood utensils, anyone can search for them. And in the context of the problem, silicone is just as well if wood seems too difficult to find.
Sure and that protects you in your own kitchen, but not if you're eating anywhere else. Also what about all the other harmful chemicals with easy alternatives that you don't know about yet?
Only a regulating agency can truly protect you from exposure to harmful chemicals, because they can spend the time cataloguing all these chemicals and remove them not just from your home but everywhere else as well.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try and reduce your own exposure, it seems like a good idea. But ultimately it may just be a token effort because of all the other ways that you're exposed to those chemicals.
Wood is not dishwasher safe, metal will damage the cookware's non-stick coating, which may be worse than the plastic I'm trying to avoid. I guess that leaves silicone.
Wood is technically not dishwasher safe, but I have wooden spoons that I’ve inherited from my grandma and they still hold up despite being in the dishwasher regularly.
The problem temperature is 260°C which can easily be avoided by not heating an empty pan (oil/liquids will distribute the heat more evenly) and you'd be unlikely to want to cook at that kind of temperature.
Teflon is not very thermally conductive, so the bottom contacting the metal substrate may be at a significantly higher temperature than the top. Chemistry reactions have activation energies, and you can generally always trade temperature for time. If it happens in a minute at 260 C, it will still happen at 200 C, just slower.
> If it happens in a minute at 260 C, it will still happen at 200 C, just slower.
I don't think that's particularly accurate unless you're considering the action of individual atoms. e.g. Water is considered to boil at 100°C but there will be some water evaporating at lower temperatures but this is a different process that only occurs at the surface. I don't think it's accurate to say that water is "slowly boiling" at low temperatures unless you're reducing atmospheric pressure.
The result is the same though. The water leaves the container and enters the atmosphere as vapor. You can call the former "decomposition", and the latter "leaching", but you are eating the degradation products either way.
Because of the way toxicity works happening slower is quite relevant. Similarly if you drink a bottle of vodka slowly enough you will have no significant health effects but if you drink it in 2 minutes then it’s not going to be great.
Different poisons have different accumulation characteristics. The relevant part here is that perfluorocarbons are fairly persistent in your body. Your body needs a few hours or a day to process the vodka, but the PFAS in your blood takes months/years to leave your body.
My carbon steel pans are essentially non-stick and a fraction of the weight of my cast iron ones. They're cheaper than their stainless All-Clad counterparts. They're a pleasure to cook with.
Sure, you can get a cheap non-stick pan that may or may not give you cancer, but why? I'm in my 40s and since I can remember thought it made no sense to cook with plastic anything. My parents still cook with the same wooden spoons my dad brought back from Algeria before I was born. The pans will last multiple lifetimes. The same can't be said for their plastic and non-stick counterparts.
I spent some time fiddling with seasoning, etc. but at this point I just cook like normal, use a bit more oil with eggs (still not much), and keep steel wool handy. Some people decry steel wool but for me it works great and the pan is a delight.
Sincere question - my mom always told me to never put wooden utensils in the dishwasher, but I never got a great answer as to why. I put my wooden spatulas in there. My question is, is it just because it's destructive to the wood? Or is there something else that I should be concerned about?
Just to echo this comment. I don't put my wood cutting boards in the dishwasher because they dry out and crack. Wood utensils have been fine in the dishwasher. They seem much less prone to cracking than cutting boards and, when they do crack, I just throw them out and replace them with cheap new ones. I see wood utensils as a wear-item.
It really depends on the wood used. Some should absolutely, under no circumstance, be expose to a hot + wet environment. Some, you can put in the dishwasher and they are fine. I do use a lot of wooden cooking utensil and most of them go in the dishwasher. But I do have some nicer wooden spoon that are made from a more precious wood that I would always wash by hand.
Another thing is that a loot of wooden utensil are made in several piece stick together with glue. A lot of cutting board are made that way for example (especially the cheap ones). Most glue are not very dishwasher safe. It might be fine for a few wash, and then you end up with pieces of a cutting board.
What is your opinion on food-grade mineral oil for helping with wood that is starting to get dry (and dramatically extending the useful lifespan)? I've been told that it's fine, but who knows these days.
No clue honestly. I usually use something like sunflower oil to maintain wooden utensil. This is what Opinel recommend for their knife, although it is more for the metal locking mechanism.
Within the last 20+ years one of about 5 wooden spoons in our household has cracked even though they're always cleaned in the dishwasher. I don't see the problem.
isn't it more that silicone absorbs lipids and soaps? so you are tasting the dishwasher or last meal. I bake silicone cookware in the oven on broil, as it removes absorbed food. Fair warning, this is a terrible idea if the cookware isn't 100% silicone.
Use a carbon steel or cast iron pan and learn how to season properly. They are very nonstick if you cook correctly in them, and their surface is incredibly durable (I use metal spatulas and I primarily cook on carbon steel and a cast iron griddle.) you can also incorporate stainless steel pots, although stainless pans are not nonstick and very hard to use for beginners.
a cast iron or "stainless" steel pan will get some gruff from cooking since its nonstick. It regularly goes to the dishwasher, some stuff won't get cleaned. Mostly oil burn stains it seems ("stainless" hardly!) .
Is that completely safe/expected ?
We obviously diddn't get that with the nonstick pans. We got rid of that stuff for a reason, now i'm not sure what is worse: nonstick pan surface OR hard-stuck burnt oil on a stainless steel pan. Thoughts?
Not the person you're replying to, but here's my $0.02. We have a couple stainless frying pans that we've had for a long time, and I've never been much a fan of them. I find they stick pretty bad no matter what procedures you use. Our main pan is a 12" cast iron that I smoothed out the bottom cool surface with a flapper wheel on an angle grinder. It's been used thousands of times over at least a decade and never gives me any trouble. I usually clean it with a stainless steel scrubber and hot water, and then either wipe it clean with a paper towel, or just put it on a burner on low to dry out. I'm not afraid to use soap if needed, but I find it rarely is. We also cook anything in it, including tomato sauce or whatever, and have never had a problem related to that. I find that most of the conventional wisdom around cast iron is just a bunch of voodoo. Just use it and don't worry about it. Beyond the cast iron, we have some ceramic coated cast iron dutch ovens/pots (including a real Le Crueset and a couple knock offs) and stainless steel pots. I'm real happy with our setup. No teflon, no grief, lots of thermal mass for even cooking. I don't feel like we've had to make a tradeoff. With the right equipment, it's really all upside from my point of view.
And Barkeeper's Friend makes it easy to polish up stainless if you like it to look fresh. I find it's mostly cosmetic, but I still do it a few times a year.
Stainless, when used properly, won't have hard-stuck burnt oil on it. They clean up nicely by just boiling some water in it and then a light scrub-- no need for dishwasher.
Worst case-- you've gone too high in temperature for too long and you need some bon-ami.
Not a cooking enthusiast but you should not put cast iron in the dishwasher. Heat some water in the pan, add a tiny drop of soap and use a spatula to scrape off any residue. Once dry add some oil (otherwise it will rust)
I have never been able to figure out stainless steel on the other hand. Apparently the trick is getting to the right temperature but I have never gotten it to work.
On the health side, Teflon pans used to be considered totally safe until they were not. Now they are considered safe again as they no longer use PFOA. Burnt oil and iron oxide might not be ideal either but at least it isn't novel to humans as it has been used for thousands of years. Unfortunately, difficult to get hard science on such subjects as it would have extremely large studies conducted over large periods of time to overcome the noise. In any case there are probably far more impactful decisions in life than which kind of pan to use.
A weak acid (tomato paste, dilute vinegar, ...) will help with burned-on stuff, but the real trick is just good, hard scrubbing with an abrasive (steel wool or similar).
A properly seasoned cast iron pan can be non-stick but the temperature has to be right, you need shortening, and you can't just put any amount of food in it at any temperature.
Stainless is can do the job too, but temperature and shortening is even more important. There's a much tighter window of temperature that it works at. You do the "water drop test" to determine that it's ready. See youtube for an infinity of videos on how to check the stainless is at right temperature!
I've given up on non-stick pans. They're semi-disposable because the don't last very long and you don't want to use them at high temperatures. All it takes is a little bit of skill to never have to use non-stick teflon pans.
I use cast iron for everything I possibly can, but there is one use case I still need non-stick pans for: frying eggs. The only way to get them to not stick in even the best seasoned cast iron pan is copious amounts of oil, which seems like it's probably worse than a few molecules of PTFE derivates.
I've been frying eggs in my cast iron every morning for years, works like a charm! I use a small slice of butter and it's nonstick. The eggs don't freely slide around like they would in a non-stick pan, but after frying on one side for a moment I can easily move them with a metal spatula.
My trick though is that I have a cast iron only for eggs... if I cook other stuff in it the smooth buttery coating gets lost and the eggs start sticking again. After a few days of eggs-only it becomes nonstick again.
I did actually polish this one, and to be fair it works mostly OK in that I'm not scraping the eggs off with a metal spatula, but it still sticks enough to be annoying, and for a teflon pot to be a measurably superior solution.
I haven't played much with preheating though, I'll have to try that - thanks for the suggestion :-)
I think you will be surprised how well stainless works when it has thin layer of fresh oil and preheated to the right temperature such that it passes the "dancing drop" test.
Really? I fry eggs in a cast iron pan almost every day, with just a little cooking spray or wipe of oil (like, put a little oil in, wipe it out with a paper towel, painting the whole surface with oil in the process). I mean, it's not no oil, but it's far from copious amounts.
Just gonna throw this out that as a long time seasoned cookware junkie:
There isn't really any clear data on what exactly the seasoning on our pans is, and what by-products are also formed. It seems somehow no one has done an academic deep dive on cast iron. Heating oils to the point of polymerization is very likely to have byproducts.
Now for the conspiratorial part, it seems likely that large manufacturers (Lodge) have done the research internally, but they haven't released anything along the lines of "We have research backing the safety of our pans!".
In some ways I really would not be surprised if it comes out that the seasoning process creates all manner of nasty byproducts.
I could be wrong but I thought it was well known and studied that the seasoned part of oil in cast iron were types of trans fats. Not great for you in any amount but also probably very tiny amounts are actually consumed.
Personally I make a lot of pressure cooker stews and things with more liquid which is less hassle and less chance of burning. If it needs to be seared in the outside then that can be done quickly without needing to cook the whole thing (pan or oven)
I'm with Kenji Lopez-Alt on this one. No matter how nonstick your cast iron or carbon steel pan is, it's not as nonstick as Teflon, which is so nonstick that we had to come up with new methods to get it to bond to surfaces. Carbon steel pans are great, but they simply are not a replacement for nonstick.
Maybe, but they're so easy to clean without a dishwasher. And even easier to clean later if you rinse them off immediately after cooking so stuff doesn't stick.
After you have finished cooking and have transferred the food to the plates or serving dishes or wherever (and your cookware is still hot!), add some cooking wine or tomato juice (anything that is a bit acidic) and deglaze the cookware. You can use the result or discard it, but the end result is cookware that is far, far easier to clean.
Some other options include getting a spouse that will do it for you, or to use the dishwasher and just accept that you will have to replace things more frequently.
> Some other options include getting a spouse that will do it for you
Listen to yourself man. Get a spouse because you can't personally wash cookware by hand? If you make decisions in your own life how you're suggesting I should then I shudder to think what a horror show it must be.
A lot of wood is dishwasher safe. But you should ask / check before hand. If it is made a several pieces glued together, it will probably not be.
For cookware with PTFE non-stick coating, it is basically the only solution, with silicone, but I personally don't like silicone utensil.
In any case, I also started to avoid PTFE coated cookware, because no matter how well you treat them, the coating will eventually get damaged (and PTFE is supposedly not very good for you). Now I just use stainless steel for anything that is not too sticky, and carbon steel for everything that need a bit of a non-stick surface to be cooked properly.
They are not too hard to maintain and they don't get damaged like PTFE non-stick pan.
The only unsafe thing I've ever experienced with wood in the dishwasher is a fire risk from a spoon getting blown off the top rack onto the heating element at the bottom.
"Should I risk this?" is the wrong question in life. The burden of proof, as it were, is on those who are alleging a risk. I'm not gonna go through life worrying about every little thing just because it might be a problem. That goes double because people are constantly finding new things to worry about, most of which amount to nothing in the end.
Obesity 5% to 42%, Alzheimer’s 0% to 33% in the last century.
I think there’s a balance between being neurotic and being blissfully ignorant, but given the high level health data in the west it’s probably time to be more neurotic.
Holding its probability constant, if the cost of avoiding a risk is sufficiently low and the potential harm sufficiently high, avoiding it is more rational than both looking further into it or taking it.
That would make sense in a just society. Here in the USA, I would factor evidence in such as, do corporations have a habit of using chemicals that are later shown to be toxic? Do corporations prefer to let people die rather than recall, say an exploding car? Do corporation put out armies of lawyers and doctors to convince everyone that their product does not cause lung cancer? Do corporations now use automation to brigade and create the appearance of a majority?
It's a tricky subject to get solid numbers on as most studies focus on just a limited number of the thousands of PFAs now in our environment. There's also the issue of identifying the source of the PFAs as they're in our water etc. Also, due to their very slow breakdown, PFAs are likely to accumulate in our bodies over time.
It is about the money:" The “black” in plastics is due to the addition of carbon black, which is basically a form of soot produced by the incomplete combustion of coal, petroleum or vegetable matter. It is added to plastics as a reinforcing substance, the same reason for which it finds widespread use in tires. Another benefit is that carbon black absorbs ultraviolet radiation that can cause plastics to degrade. Now for the problems. Carbon black contains numerous compounds, some of which, like the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), have carcinogenic properties and have led the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to categorize carbon black as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” Whether this is an issue in the containers used for many prepared foods, including those that are to be microwaved, is not clear, since the carbon black is locked within the matrix of the plastic and may not leach out in any significant amounts. Prepared food marketers like the black containers because they are cheap and are visually more appealing than their clear counterparts. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-did-you-know/d...
Carbon black is why the black nylon zip ties have a reputation for aging better all the other colors (like for like, not comparing a $20/100 hipster zip tie to a $2/100 cheap one).
I appreciate your skepticism. This article has that feeling of almost being designed to create a panic. First, there's the headline, which is written in the same tone as someone warning you that you're about to step on a snake—a tone which does not invite critical thinking. Then there's the fact that since most people aren't subscribers to The Atlantic, they'll just see the first couple paragraphs and make their decisions based on that. I currently do not know how much weight I should put on what this article says, but I'm certainly scared by it, and I have enough media literacy to know that's when I should be really careful not to be fooled.
Journalists I get. They're paid to attract eyeballs and they're not above being a little misleading in pursuit of that goal. "When a man's salary depends..." and all that jazz. I see it the same way I see cops who are misleading on the stand, despicable but understandable.
The people who's moral compass seems far more faulty are the people in the comments who are doing the same thing but who have no comparable motive to behave in such a way. Generally, though there are a couple minor examples in here today.
There may be no investigation of your specific question, but is there evidence of known dangerous chemicals. If it was covered in dog poop, would you use it unless there was evidence that the use of dog-poop-covered spatula at the exposure level of domestic cooking caused significant physiological effects?
A more fundamental error is say 'there's no proof, therefore I assume it's false'. There's no proof that it's safe either. We make almost all decisions without mass longitudinal studies.
And worse, IMHO, is the poison rhetoric: 'If I can shoot their plane, I'm smarter than the person trying to fly.'
I thought this was going to be about clean cooking fuels. One of the significant projects of the WHO is transitioning the world towards cooking with clean fuels that reduce indoor air pollution. In the worst case certain populations are burning plastics to heat their water, food, and homes, and as you can imagine this is incredibly destructive to health.
We also need trash collection, otherwise people are forced to burn plastic to get rid of their trash. The whole city of Kinshasa is nauseating due to this.
What better option? resistance electric is clearly worse in other ways. I've heard induction is good but it is an expensive luxury option and not common even in that niche.
i've heard it is reasonable priced in other countries but not the us.
It's a tale as old as time: "I don't want to poison myself, but I also cannot bear a minor inconvenience." This is honestly one of the main reasons I believe that environmentalism will never meaningfully succeed.
There are many options to make environmentalism also the better choice. My electric is 104% from wind last year (which is to say for every 100kwh my entire city used last year, my utility claims they generated 104kwh from wind - I don't know what they did when the wind wasn't blowing or what happened to that other 4kwh) Cooks tell me induction is better, but there are enough roadblocks that shouldn't exist such that I can't try it.
My real rant though is there is no reason why induction should be an expesnive niche. There is no reason I should pay extra for features that don't cost extra.
Right, but the premium tends more to $1000 for the brands that have earned a bad reputation. If you want something that you can expect to be good quality you are looking at more like $2000.
Hence getting the 200 $ total of 4 hobs as a premium to whatever the base standalone stove costs, assuming that you could in the factory just mount these units in the hobs. Just need to modify a little to have remote control as the original uses a microcontroller to handle the touch IO and the high frequency transistor triggering, which may both not work over a wire long enough to reach from the back hob to the front of the stove where you'd want the controls to be to not reach over or even in-between the hobs in operation.
Is $59 for a single hub, or $849 for a full cooktop really that much of an "expensive luxury"? These things last for decades and cost less than most mobile phones.
A hob takes up space my tiny kitchen doesn't have to spare, and besides the limited power available at the wall in the US means it isn't that useful.
In the US we almost always use a range not a cooktop. I need one with an oven. Something like https://www.homedepot.com/p/Amana-30-in-4-Burner-Element-Fre... - which is several hundred cheaper than what you linked. As long as I'm going to replace what I have, spending a little more for the other features I want seems like a good idea - I will likely use it for decades as you say, and induction is in a very limited selection such that I can't really get any other options at any price. (well I did eliminate some Samsung options - Samsung has earned their bad reputation in kitchen appliances)
You're linking to literally the lowest end builder grade piece of crap* non flat range, you even picked the one that doesn't have the oven window! I've even had near slumlords at least spring for the windowed glass top GE special when it was on sale. (I say crap, but that is unfair, having used these growing up, they are simple and basically won't break down and exceptionally easy to get parts for and repair [because it doesn't have any, not even a timer], and if the tenants destroy it, who cares). But Ikea doesn't even cater to that market at all, so it's disingenous to use that as a counter example.
Most people are looking for something at least slightly better and those are going to cost more in the $800 and up range.
And now that I have a job and a little money I would never willingly go back to a calrod electric cooktop. I'm sure there are some John Bircher types that pine for the days of mom's 1961 GE P7, but that seems like a minority.
Yes, induction is still more expensive, but it is not crazy more expensive either for middle class homeowners that no matter the fuel want something nicer than that shitty Amana linked (that's low end even for grad student slums).
What must have features are you unable to find in the current crop of induction ranges?
ikea is for people who will settle for worse than builer grade so long as they can convince themselves it is better. sure it is better than walmart furniture and a lot of 'high end' is just as bad, but it isn't real quality. Rant over, I'm sure some who don't know better will challenge that, but I'm not responding.
I expect my range to last for a few decades and I cook often. If I'm going to spend several thousand dollars I want something worth it and so far I can't find anything that fixes all the issues with the 40 year old range that came with my house and so I'm saving my money for some other 'toy' I will enjoy. as an engineer I'm in good finiancial shape but not so good I can replace my range whenever I feel like it (if I was I'd have a much larger kitchen)
> ikea is for people who will settle for worse than builer grade so long as they can convince themselves it is better. sure it is better than walmart furniture and a lot of 'high end' is just as bad, but it isn't real quality.
Irrelevant. I'm not debating the merits of Ikea furniture, but they do not produce appliances, they rebadge Electrolux, Whirlpool (Amana) and Frigidaire, and the models they are offering are simply not the most basic ones (though they have just the tier above - this gets you at least a fucking oven timer and lighted, windowed oven), that's just a fact.
I grew up with a Calrod cooktop, like non-stick cookware they are iconic post WW2 marketing Americana. Like Oscar Mayer bologna, they were considered suburban "luxury" and marketed as superior to gas (the marketing of gas superiority is whole other thing, but prior to inductive it was actually superior for most things, that's why it was/is the mainstay of the restaurant industry).
https://thisoddhouseblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/electric-s...
But I have no desire to go back to that. Terrible heat conductivity, slow response, imprecise temperature control, terribly inefficient especially in the summer (as a side effect, piss poor cooking power compared to even a domestic gas range, yet no ability to go as low). It's hard to overstate how much easier (if not just possible) to cook certain foods on something with precise wide range heat control whether it be gas or inductive.
Obviously people made do with these for years, and if one is happy with that level of functionality and convenience (especially at the lowest of the low end of features), and it allows them to prepare what they want, it's unlikely they'll appreciate any of the benefits of an inductive cooktop.
But it gives precise and rapidly changeable heat control, a radiant heater does not. This is important to people preparing more varied dishes. This sounds like this is simply of little benefit to you, because you still haven't mentioned what features on the current selection of inductive ranges is missing.
They're also wickedly more efficient because you're not radiating a ton of waste heat into the conditioned space (at least in summer and warm climates). There are people that cook and bake enough that the electricity of both the heating and the space cooling are a noticeable monthly expense. Not the primary benefit point though, true.
This would be a relatively major thing, since you generally have no choice but to breathe the air in your dwelling. As a policy matter (i.e., one in which the government can offset out-of-pocket costs for greater savings on the back end), subsidizing electrification so that Americans can have a better quality-of-life with less incidence of cancer, respiratory illness, and catastrophic detonation of inhabited residences seems like a no brainer.
And for people who must have their gas appliances, there are always portable units/generators. They can use those.
I don't think any cook at home has ever used enough energy that that matters. Once in a while someone will have a broken furnace and try to use the oven to heat their house (this is dangerous: don't try it), but otherwise cooking doesn't use energy to really matter.
I'd like to see a good comparison in running cost of a gas stove versus an induction stove.
Comparing BTU's wouldn't be an accurate metric since with gas a lot of the heat is lost just going around the pan/pot and heating the air. This source [1] claims it took 992 BTUs for gas and 430 BTUs for induction to boil 1qt of water.
I went through my drawers and I have a bunch of black nylon Joseph Joseph spatulas and fish slices and things [1]. ChatGPT tells me that nylon is not frequently recycled because it's tough to do so - so I'm hoping that these are safe. They also say:
> All of our food contact products comply with EU regulations which states that materials do not release their constituents into food at levels harmful to human health. [2]
and they aren't some no-name brand that wouldn't suffer from lying about that.
After I learned about the harmful effects of Teflon, I became much more cautious about consumption. It's nearly impossible to avoid the toxins when eating out because wax has been replaced with synthetics that leach into food from packaging.
Just use metal wood or glass. One thing I'm not aware of is if Pyrex or the other tempered glasses are safe or if they also contain plastic. That would be good to learn.
Regardless of the health concerns that arise from using Teflon, the industrial process used to produce it has caused significant issues that were covered in the documentary "The Devil We Know"[0].
Teflon itself is not the issue (unless it goes over about 260°C), but the PFAs which should have been phased out of modern non-stick coatings. The problem is if the surface is scratched from using metal utensils or scourers as this can cause PFAs to leach into the food.
It's not possible to fry in a safe range. The safe range is <500F. I use pans at a greater temperature than that for frying. Additionally, when the pans wear the surface degrades and becomes your food. This probably always occurs, but more when the products wear.
Also the vaporization of teflon is probably not a step function but a curve, and they set the safety range at some threshold. So in all likelihood you are inhaling who knows what at even the safe ranges.
Tempered glass does not contain plastic. No glass contains plastic. The formula to make glass has been known for centuries. Tempering is a thermal process, it doesn’t change the chemistry of the product. Old school pyrex involved the addition of Boron —- no hydrocarbons in the mix.
Will I actually see actual difference if I throw away all my cook ware and replace it with non-non-stick ones and wooden utensils?
What about pollutants in the air from car and industry exhaust? Is this cookware worse? Should we first consider moving somewhere else than worry about cookware?
What about just the ingredients you cook with? Is using teflon worse than buying highly processed foods? What about GMO vs non-GMO? What about grass fed/free range vs in-prison-meats? What about vegan vs meat?
What I am trying to say is that it is easy to point to something that is (or even might be) toxic and say that we should fix it, but we have to put things in context. You simply can not be afraid of everything. Like drinking out of plastic vs glass vs metal, I know people who swear that drinking from a plastic cup is about the worst thing you can do, but I have been doing it my whole life and at least aren't dead yet.
There are many things to consider and it's up to each individual. It can become exhausting if you choose to continue to learn and grow, but if you don't ... what are you doing?
I don't think it's like that. These substances cause nasty forms of cancer and are easily avoidable. I don't understand the purpose of Teflon other than to poison people. It's really odd how people follow even when they admit they're killing themselves for no benefit. Other than to fit in.
Heat is a transforming agent in nature, and time is the ultimate test. That's the context i think missed from your thesis.
Every single thing you mention, except for cooking, does not get exposed to fundamental transformation via heat, or if they have (such as ingredients), they have passed the test of time (nutrients).
Ingredients being heated has happened for millenia with fire wood and metal. This is why we care about what we cook and what we put into our bodies. Have we done this before for a long time? Was it safe for a long time? Time matters
I can't say the same about teflon, highly processed foods, etc.
So let me ask you again. Its Friday. You have a rib eye, asparagus, and an old credit card on your plate. I’m sure you would not eat a credit card, and would think people were insane for doing so.
So why not try and avoid it if you can. Sure you can’t avoid everything but if you can avoid some things in your control why wouldn’t you?
Well, for one it does not say that. And if that was the case does most of it just pass through me or why isn’t there hundreds of credit cards worth of plastic in my body?
The argument is that you probably are doing way worse things health wise than using a teflon cookware or black plastic cooking utensils. This is just a scare click bait.
TBH it might not matter in a normal life for the individual. But (as long as the claims have some truth too it) statistically, it definitely matters.
The "scares" are overwhelming only because you live in a society where things are (slightly) toxic by default, because those things are cheaper and can be engineered to barely pass safety standards.
We can and should change this situation. Hopefully not on the individual level, but at least public awareness is useful.
The "scares" are also overwhelming because some people are extreme in everything, for example the person who swears never to drink from a plastic cup. But it doesn't mean the opposite stance (i.e. drinking from plastic cups is good for you) is true. You can believe plastics are slightly bad for you without overreacting, and acknowledge that if it's feasible it's better to avoid them. Reacting emotionally to extremists isn't what a rational person would be doing.
A lot of vintage glass things including Pyrex contain high levels of lead. I need to look into it more, but it seems to be from paint or colors added, and clear glass items are likely fine.
I have some old glazed ceramic plates that I won't use any more. One of them developed a crack half way through and I noticed that, in the microwave, food on it would stay frozen but the plate would be blazing hot. The glaze was conductive with presumably lead and was absorbing all the energy. The crack created a slot that blocked eddy currents.
I never use glass for cooking. I've had two Pyrex dishes explode on me. One was contained in an oven, thankfully, so that all that was lost was a week's worth of chicken. The other, unfortunately, shattered in the "kitchen" of my studio apartment, 5 feet from my bed. I had to spend the next hour using a flashlight to try to find and pick up the tiny shards that had flown everywhere.
> One thing I'm not aware of is if Pyrex or the other tempered glasses are safe or if they also contain plastic.
They're glass. They don't contain this. In particular, oven-safe glass is supposed to be of the borosilicate variety... but about 20 years ago manufacturing was moved to China (haha!). They're not properly formulated or tempered anymore, and in many cases not oven safe. They tend to shatter with large temperature changes, spilling hot casseroles over people who aren't in the habit of having steaming hot casserole showers and then complain about those.
> Just use metal wood or glass.
I like those materials, but think of the damage you're doing to the CPI with your advice. How would we combat inflation if we weren't able to constantly substitute in cheaper packaging materials and so forth?
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 382 ms ] threadPress release: https://toxicfreefuture.org/press-room/first-ever-study-find...
Personally, I just got afraid of ever buying takeout sushi, put a label on the black spatula and hope to use it for garage experiments but you do you...
(@dang, please consider using it as the main link.)
one tool is for scraping food (generally solid) inside a hot frying pan
the other tool is for scraping foods (generally liquidy generally cold) from the sides of a bowl or other container.
in the first case you want to flip your pancake and it's sticking to the pan
in the second case you want to get all of the pancake batter to pour into the frying pan.
The picture is the article is of a hot frying pan black plastic scraper.
GP's picture is a silicone cold bowl scraper.
is the disconnect
it is potentially true that you should eliminate all such spatulas made of "plastic" hot or cold, and it is potentially true that in all cases substitutions with silicone is the right move, but I'm not sure if that's what is being suggested
However we have an extra word for the silcon one to get all the pancake batter: marise. It is not used very much, though, outside of some cooking books or shows.
https://www.seriouseats.com/best-nonstick-silicone-spatulas-...
But if you’re cooking on a pan that tolerates stainless steel, this one and its smaller cousin are excellent:
https://www.oxo.com/large-stainless-steel-flexible-turner.ht...
The black one makes an acceptable bowl scraper, but it seems to not appreciate dishwasher life as well as a typical rubber scraper would.
Plus it won't scratch anything enameled or nonstick etc.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KSMBL26
For reference it is how wok cooking is done and they use extremely hot pans/burners. If you're using gas switch off the heat for a second.
That said, at Waffle House, we used carbon steel pans for eggs. There was a point where every pan would start to stick, no matter how it was heated. Those pans, we would clean with oil and salt, which is very abrasive. I'm not sure exactly what the effect was: either cleaning off accumulated dirt or filing out scratches and dings that would develop. I'm not sure because the salt should have created more scratches, but there was definitely a "worst" pan that had a deep scratch in it that always had some sticking problems.
1) Amazingly smooth, clearly old cast iron pan in an Airbnb. Perfect surface.
2) Cook some of the breakfast sausage they left in the fridge for us (it was a farm)
3) Cook the eggs in the sausage grease.
No sticking at all.
I can’t do this nearly as well in the pan I have. Yeah, yeah, I’ve seasoned it a dozen times. Doesn’t do much, really.
- hot pan
- high smoke point oil
- high heat
- hot oil
- move it once it’s got the brown crust
I’ve made scrambled eggs in it before too but these were the things I did today and I’m not expert enough to minimize them without experimentation. I frequently eat eggs and don’t have much trouble.
Cast iron is fine for certain applications but not many others. I’d fry and egg in one but you can’t make a great matter in one due to the thermal capacity properties they have.
Steel lined copper is the king. But yes they are cost prohibitive for some. Carbon steel is nice too.
Maybe they are the same people who praise Apple and Tesla products for the same reason?
The pans are magic. I even take my pans camping for cooking on a fire. Truly amazing things
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794145/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2887943/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQL64qG7pNs
Consider trying carbon steel. It's lighter than cast iron and just as non-stick once it's well seasoned. It's ubiquitous in restaurant and hotel kitchens.
I love my carbon steel skillets.
It is very fast and reproducible, regardless if you scramble them or leave them intact to look like fried eggs or if you separate the whites and the yolks and cook them separately (which I prefer), and regardless whether you prefer to add some oil or not.
Even without using any oil the glass vessel will be easy to clean. You must use reduced power at the oven, to avoid explosions (obviously you should never cook eggs in their shells and you should puncture the yolks before cooking and glass vessels with a glass lid are preferred).
i've cooked a lot for a long time, and I have never gotten stainless steel to not stick absolutely everything (except water for pasta :)
I use cast iron and anodized aluminum and they are slippery AF
Stainless steel has relatively poor heat conductivity, so a direct flame would heat it very non-uniformly in comparison with an aluminum or even a cast iron vessel. Hot spots lead to sticking.
For this reason the better stainless steel cooking pots have a bottom that encloses a copper sheet, to spread the heat. In such pots or pans you will not normally have problems with sticking. With simpler pots or pans you must use an external heat spreader.
Every time I go over to mom's place it's so shocking to see these utensils being used for high heat applications they were never meant to be used for.
Flipping burgers in a pan, moving fries on a baking sheet - the ends of them are all warped and disfigured, bits carved out of them from scraping something and a piece of plastic chips off and ends up in the food.
Same with the pots and pans, she's been using the same teflon coated set for the better part of a decade and to her it doesn't matter that there's a spiral from the stovetop element burned into the inside of the pot where the teflon's overheated and chipped off.
I've tried buying her new pots and pans, utentils, etc. and educating her about how much plastic and teflon she has (and by extension I have) been eating over the years but it's in one ear and out the other.
We really need to stop making plastic cooking utentils. I've moved mostly to glass or metal bowls for storing, microwaving, baking foods - silicone for utensils (which I've heard is still somewhat risky even though it's inert?)
Microplastics are the leaded gasoline of my generation it seems like.
>educating her about how much plastic and teflon she has (and by extension I have) been eating over the years but it's in one ear and out the other.
I have much the same problem, though luckily I haven't lived with her for ages. According to her, eating plastic and teflon isn't a problem because she's so old that it's not going to make a difference.
She also has guests and visitors, so even if she doesn't care about ingesting microplastics herself, she should worry more about them I should think.
https://a.co/d/3IND56X
The real solution is sunsetting single-use anything for any other applications outside bio labs or medical procedures. But $$$
Indeed. The first step is for the planet to get rid of the pesky pollutants, perhaps by way of launching several “natural disasters” such as mighty strong winds, excessive floods, and particularly pesky deathly organisms. Then it can deal with plastic at its leisure.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
Those $$$ correspond to real-world costs.
For examplee, we also want to lower car usage. Do you imagine that people who commute by bicycle or train are going to carry around durable versions of every single-use item they currently encounter? Cups, straws, plates, utensils, napkins, takeout containers, grocery bags, produce bags, tissues? Carrying around dirty versions of all the above until they get home to clean them?
Even if they do, detergent is also single-use, and damaging to aquatic environments.
I'm not some kind of hyperlibertarian, but I think we need to properly tax externalities (such as poisoning customers and destroying the viability of the biosphere), use the proceeds of that for mitigation, and let the market take care of the rest.
Napkins and tissues are not made of plastics.
So, yes I fully expect people to carry around reusable things even when they bike. It’s not that hard. You know how I know? Because I do it every day.
Honestly stopping using single use items must be the easiest thing to do to limit the amount of trash you generate. It has absolutely no impact on your daily life.
Would you be surprised to learn that napkins and tissues and paper towels have all sorts of plastic coatings on them? It’s an untold story and I’d love one of these pubs to do some research the way they did about pizza boxes back in the day
Your 100% cotton sweater has petroleum-derived coatings on it too, which give it a soft handfeel in the store and keep bugs from eating it on its way over from SE Asia :)
No one is asking you about buying using refilable containers you bring to the store. That's not what's talked about when people talk about single use items.
I am 100% in favour of putting in place a container-deposit scheme however because these glass containers are actually reusable most of the time and should be collected back. Plastic overpackaging should just be banned. The whole thing is just a waste of ressource only possible because externalties are not priced in.
As far as I am aware, those are mostly obsolete/moot/whatever. Still used for pickles, to the best of my understanding. Tomato sauces (spaghetti, etc) have started to switch over already several years ago. Glass is mostly for premium products, the $12/qt organic-grass-fed-shoulder-massaged milk.
Even if I'm generous and assume you're not talking about grocery stores... it's practically impossible to have a fast food industry without single-use packaging. Most of the McDonald's in my area are designed around drive-thru and delivery. The closest probably seats 30 inside, but has two drive-thru lanes and a large rack right next to the counter for the Uber Eats bags.
They won’t be if you start pricing plastic packaging generated externalities in the products prices.
> it's practically impossible to have a fast food industry without single-use packaging
It’s so impossible it’s actually done in France if you eat it and they are mandated by law to use your reusable containers if you bring them.
Sure. let's make food more expensive for poor people. That's always grand policy. It'd be one thing if it was limiting how many Chic-Fil-A sauce packets they got in their drive-thru paper bag, but this also (believe it or not) affects those trying to eat at home with minimally processed foods. At some point the 72-serving Gigantosaurus bulk Hot Pocket box in the freezer section looks better than some of the stuff that resembles food people should eat.
> It’s so impossible it’s actually done in France if
I have no clue why people can't just magically wish themselves French and have entire centuries of French culture and habits imprinted on them just because people who played too much SimCity 2000 as a kid think that other people's lives should be micromanaged for a higher score. God save us from the technocrats.
I know I started this whole argument by speaking up in favor of efficiently throwing things away, but I do want to speak out in favor of making (harmful) things more expensive for poor people; and giving poor people enough money to make up for it.
This also applies to a lot of other things, like taxing semi trucks for the insane amounts of damage they do to the roads compared to other vehicles, and then paying poor people for the increased price of goods at Wal-Mart. It may sound like taking extra steps to have the same result; but because you're reducing externalized costs instead of subsidizing them, everybody ends up better off.
The magic of deposit refund system is that you only pay more once. Plus really poor people can actually collect unreturned items to make some change. Have you ever considered how things worked before plastic?
> I have no clue
That much is pretty clear.
I’m very happy to see that you are able to claw at anything so that your initial impossible as actually been exposed as entirely possible. I think it’s nice that you are so afraid of change you can’t even fathom taking such large steps as using reusable containers to limit trash.
Your insight into the economics of this is shallow. If plastic is cheaper than glass, a "deposit refund scheme" doesn't fix the fact that forcing everything to glass makes it more expensive. Glass jars aren't just washed and reused, they have to be melted down to be reused at all. There's a big fuel usage penalty there (not to mention this is fossil fuel, so all the climate change connotations). In some really pathological scenarios, the single-use plastics can actually be better for the environment, since once the plastic is landfilled the carbon stays out of the air.
> That much is pretty clear.
Cheap shot. About all you have, isn't it? Just big dumb ideas that make you feel good, that you've never much contemplated to any depth, that would make things worse for everyone.
Glass, unlike plastic, is impermeable. In Germany, the pfand system incentivizes bottle return by around $.10 to $.50 per glass bottle; and they're washed & sterilized, then re-used.
This does work as a subsidy for poor people with time on their hands; pfand bottles are often left next to outdoor trash cans instead of in them, and they usually disappear very quickly.
Glass jars tend to have small fractures, especially around where the lid/cap are, making them unfit for reuse. Inspection is tedious and manpower-intensive. Melted down and put back into the blow molds, if reused at all. Industry works differently than the political perception of it. You might want them to be reused, but it's just not the way the world works.
Instead of jacking off over political videos, go watch some of the non-political ones of the "how it's made" variety once in awhile.
I couldn't tell you whether it's economically efficient or energy-efficient to do things that way, when you consider all the direct and indirect inputs; any more than I could tell you how to make a pencil. But I can tell you that Germany does it.
This used to be done in the UK with milk delivery, the empty bottles were exchanged for clean, full ones. They even used electric vehicles!
Some of the reason being that they are planning their trips and know what they can carry, and know that they don't want to carry more. Reusable water bottles in a work backpack are an example.
The other aspect is you don't have to carry all of these things. If you eat in a restaurant or at a house you are more likely to have reusable options available (ie washable plates and dinnerware). In many ways, car culture is linked to takeaway culture, which causes single use culture.
Top of mind; it's easy to picture the American automobile with bags of fast food trash.
Doesn't seem uncommon at all to me, that's what my colleagues and I do, same for my wife and her colleagues (and we work in very different environments and places, different countries even).
Some of my colleagues wash their dishes at work, I just bring them back and put them in my dishwasher a home. My wife has a dishwasher at work so they just put their stuff there. The products we use for washing at home or at work claim to be biodegradable and not harmful for the environment.
Properly taxing externalities is an obvious thing to do though of course.
It's bizarre to see how new chemicals are basically "allowed because they are new" (maybe except in food additives), and the producers are expected to do inhouse undisclosed self-testing without being held to any standard.
and it absolutely won’t be limited to coffee lids. when we don’t hold creators and sellers of products to any kind of real standard, they over and over and over will cut corners. we know this is a fact.
when we don’t hold them responsible for the harms they directly or externally cause, we have to waste our fucking time scrutinizing ridiculous items like coffee lids. soon it will be each of the hundreds of items we buy during our regular trips to target—from toothbrush to laundry soap to shampoo to batteries.
we have to get some actual enforceable testing, standards, and holding bad actors to account soon or it’s going to be a very very real mess.
when we can’t trust companies to sell us safe spatulas or the lids on our coffee cups, we know we’ve gone off the rails.
no one has time to “do their own research” on the hundreds or thousands of random products they come in contact with every single day, “the market” has never fixed this, this requires regulations with teeth.
Frankly, the idea of using recycled plastic with no control for its origin for cooking utensils looks weird to me. OTOH it should look like a great opportunity to cut costs, and shoppers very often try to save that last cent as a matter of principle and sport, so...
Coffee machines from reputable makers should be safe, I think.
This is evidenced in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
"To investigate the extent to which kitchen utensils are contaminated with BFRs and the potential for resultant human exposure, we collected 96 plastic kitchen utensils and screened for Br content using a hand-held X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer. Only 3 out of 27 utensils purchased after 2011 contained detectable concentrations of Br (≥ 3 μg/g). In contrast, Br was detected in 31 out of the 69 utensils purchased before 2011."
Let me emphasize: Only 3 out of 27 utensils purchased after 2011 contained detectable concentrations of Br.
Further vital information: "Simulated cooking experiments were conducted to investigate BFR transfer from selected utensils (n = 10) to hot cooking oil, with considerable transfer (20% on average) observed."
Fine, I don't cook with hot oil. I don't melt my utensils when cooking, I don't damage them at all. I see the reason for concern, but for my cooking styles this really doesn't affect me.
Article says flame retardants are added to recycled plastic, not virgin plastic.
At the end of the article, the author states this is why she does not recycle her old black plastic.
Your reading and comment of that is sophomoric.
"Of the more than 200 black plastic products Liu bought at retail stores for her study, hardly any were labeled as being made from recycled materials, she said. Consumers have no way to tell which black plastics might be recycled e-waste and which aren’t. “It’s just a minefield, really,” Turner said."
I'm well aware of and own many of the more manual options that don't have this issue. However, the automatic feature is killer (heh) and this seems like an obvious miss by manufacturers.
The latter you can for instance get in porcelain.
Then again, the only things in the cold-water path of my machine are:
- silicone gaskets
- silicone grease
- PTFE
- silicone tubes
- clear plastic water tank
As for the hot path:
- silicone gaskets
- silicone grease
- aluminium
- steel
- copper
- brass
- PTFE (in contact with steam)
Definitely not.
But the thing about cold-brew is that it tastes mostly sour to me and nothing else (which is unsurprising given our taste-buds are most sensitive at higher temperatures, and proper extraction of coffee can't happen at those lower temperatures as some compounds just won't dissolve at the same rate, and sour compounds in coffee dissolve the fastest). With warm brewed (+ warm drank) coffee things are more balanced (not just straight sour) and you get the interesting flavour notes from the bag.
I don't think the quality of the coffee I am using is the problem. It might be the variant, but I enjoy natural light roasts (and light roast is already difficult to brew without it getting too sour).
700 ml water, 50-60 g beans, 24 hours in fridge. When drinking we mix with 3-4 parts water. I always drink cold, wife drinks it hot. Lots of flavour and fun to try the local roasterys seasonal tastes.
They're substantially more expensive than consumer units.
Instinctively, I'm much more worried about the latter, though I admittedly don't know anything about the science behind what temperatures flame retardants or other undesirable contaminants might leach out of the plastic.
The article also speaks of a black necklace for children that was found to be 3% flame retardant chemicals by weight, saying
> Those flame retardants migrate into toddlers’ saliva and into the dust in our homes
Perhaps it's fine if you don't lick your coffee machine, or perhaps not. I guess being less worried makes sense but I'm not sure that we need not be worried about boiling our drinks in fire retardants (assuming they're present in these materials)
I was just recently looking at bicycle seats for small kids and the one I found interesting happened to recently have a recall (Thule) as they grossly over applied the flame retardant to a point where it was immediately toxic. I am guessing it was in the foam pieces but such a depressing idea that we need to make outdoor bicycle seats flame retardant.
In general though, through the 50s-70s there were some tragic events where people died in fires. Part of this is federal legislation, part of this is California who required household furnishings to withstand an open flame. Most of the legislation still stands, some of it like CA's has been reduced to a smolder test but it still requires some retardants.
People don't pay attention to this one but its in everything, mattresses, couches, baby sleep wear. And for me, a bigger issue than PFAS.
As another commenter stated laws were passed but more so than that the companies who make things were concerned about lawsuits and reputation damage so treating consumer textiles for flame retardants just became standard industry practice.
As an aside, I know a historical reenacter who had a need to make some char-cloth. The only thing he could find that wasn't treated was cotton work gloves.
https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/teflon-polytetrafluor...
* When heated to high temperatures
Below 450F or so they don't react with anything. PTFE won't react with your egg you're frying, or the inside of your knee. (PTFE is used in surgical implants, among other things that can safely go inside your body)
And if you did encounter such temperature, and you had oil on the pan - well you've poisoned yourself more than the Teflon would!
The answer is that Teflon is safer.
I thought people in many long-living cultures often cook with high temperature oil, and not just the street food wok cooking. There is bad chemistry that can happen with other food components at high temperatures but what is the problem with oil itself?
My point is that the temperature necessary to cause this oil toxicity, is lower than what you need to make Teflon toxic. Teflon becomes toxic at temperature FAR above any cooking process (unless you eat charcoal).
i.e. if you cook normally and don't burn things Teflon is obviously fine, if you do burn things you have bigger things to worry about than the Teflon, since the other stuff will kill you first.
And you don't even have to forget about the pan. Just setting the stove to high temperature when the pan is cold can quickly create superheated spots due to the way induction works (the temperature sensor is hidden and so it "lags" a bit).
Obviously, if you're careful, always start with a low power, wait for the pan (and stove top) to heat up, then gradually increase power, you'll be fine.
With a stainless stell pan, the worse that could happen is the bottom of the pan might warp. But there is no toxic hazard.
Also, maybe you do it differently, but I put the oil in before heating - so if I had stainless, with oil, heated in your "unsafe" manner I would have toxic smoke in the air long before I would have fumes from Teflon. Meaning avoiding Teflon isn't helping you in any way at all.
Of course in actuality there's simply no issue, induction does not perform as badly as you describe. Go ahead and heat at full power and simply cook, it will work fine and not overheat.
I fully understand that this may just be the manufacturer covering his, um, behind. But I am not going to risk it.
Teflon begins to decompose above 260°C which can be reached by heating an empty pan, but yes you wouldn't want to be cooking at that temperature.
Same with most kitchen cooking implements.
Stainless steel pots and pans are much cheaper, last longer, you can scrub and scrape them and the big upside is you don’t have to consume DuPont non stick chemical coating nor feed it to your children.
Despite all the celebrity chefs in the world attempting to sell you their name brand chemical coated fry pans.
It is possible to cook with cast iron in a way that won't leech too much iron into food, just as it is possible to cook with nonstick in a way that won't leech Dupont chemicals. But I'd much rather just use foolproof stainless or ceramic cookware that doesn't have these issues.
I mean I know iron and blood are related but this particular statement just won't compute
Hemoglobin in blood contains a lot of iron; it's used to bind oxygen. Too much iron intake apparently can result in its overproduction, and too much is no good. Donating blood rids you of excess iron, while also benefiting other people.
I suppose you should first check if your levels of iron are indeed excessive.
Also, you get a free iron/anaemia test before donating.
The way the comment is phrased, it implies that it's bad for men in general. Your link says for people with a specific issue.
The link actually says iron overload can also be called haemochromatosis too so a bit confusing that that page says it’s inherited…
My understanding is that to get iron overload, your body would need to absorb excess iron and store it. This happens with haemochromatosis over a long time (30+ years), but it can also happen if you consume way too much iron by, for example, taking too many iron supplements when you don't need them. In normal circumstances and with a standard diet, the body will regulate it's iron intake so that too much doesn't get stored and so there's no iron oberload.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this leaves me a little confused about what the commenter meant. If you have a normal diet and don't have haemochromatosis or some other confounding factor, I don't see how enough iron could be leached from a cast iron pot to cause iron overload.
https://examine.com/articles/are-cast-iron-pans-unsafe/
It makes no sense to fixate on elemental iron residue from your cast iron pan, especially if you're still getting heme iron infusions from red meat.
Anyone who doesn't lose blood somehow - for modern humans that usually means either menstruation or blood donation - should be careful of sources of excess iron in their diet. It's one reason why multivitamin supplements are often labelled as "for men" or "for women". The women's one will have iron.
A pan is about 1 kg (a good cast iron one could be much heavier). That's enough for 200,000 bowls of cereal.
Even if you reckon the pan is degraded enough to be obviously useless after losing 5% of its weight, that would require you to use it every day for 30 years, not "a handful of cooks".
[0] https://www.haemochromatosis.org.uk/breakfast-cereals-and-th...
Consider all outside food is toxic too.
If so, my huge respect! (Otherwise...)
"you have to grow your own" is hardly the way to think about it .. we source the vast bulk of our food locally from our state and various farm groups.
To address your questions; Yes, we (the household I live in) have our own poultry, yes we grow our own grain, yes we have our own sheep. Ditto potatoes, figs, oranges, lemons, manderins, blueberries, garlic, herbs, olives, olive oil, etc.
No to "milk cow" - this isn't prime dairy country; that's some 500 km south and that's where we get milk from .. still extended family though. Beef cattle and the best fish is some 1,000+ km north - still the same state and still from extended family.
Essentially what we eat comes from our land or that of people we know either directly or with a single intermediary.
It's pretty healthy that way, we have one of the highest life expectancy's on the planet and COVID was a non issue here, both of the two roads in|out of the state were "closed" (goods trucks loaded | unloaded with no driver social contact, just sleep over, move on) the ships and airports quarantined with a mandated seperation of people or a mandated one-two week isolation if coming in.
Here's the local grain co-op: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group .. we can pass harvest on and get back ground grain in sacks for home use.
State land area is 3x that of Texas, state population 2.5 million (ish), mostly city dwellers.
"Outside food" - overly processed as found on (say) US supermarket shelves ... dunno much about that.
The south west corner of the state is dairy country, forrests, caves, big surf, cool year round, the northern part of the state can get pretty hot - the Pilbarra is sparse dry desert country that explodes with colour when the rains pass through.
Do people on this site now just read the headlines and then come to comment their stream of consciousness based on the title?
This article relates to "hidden dangers of cookware." If he was talking about the vagaries of the solar cycle on Mars, I'd be on your side, as it is, this comes across as reflexive gatekeeping.
> Do people on this site now just read the headlines and then come to comment their stream of consciousness based on the title?
And.. what, precisely, do you think _you're_ doing in this comment? Is it not precisely what you complain about?
People use non-stick pans because it's easier and they are bad at cooking.
If you don't understand why a stainless steel spatula would be preferable to a plastic one, maybe you're just not paying attention much to the world.
Though you won't need to scrub very long if you use this:
https://barkeepersfriend.com/products/cookware-cleanser-poli...
Because of chemistry I don't understand, oxalic acid is amazing at removing burnt on food.
The chemicals don't appeal to me - I don't want them in the house, in the sewage water or as residue on the pots.
Soak pots in plain water for several hours and they'll clean easily.
Of course, you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware, but they are, so...
- I tend to re-season my cast iron every time I use it and it’s a chore to do this for my early morning meals.
- Non-stick is just more non-stick, with cast iron I am constrained to using a certain heat and/or fat content to create the non-stick property which I might not want for a certain dish.
But I have to agree that non-stick pans are even more non-stick. That's why it took some convincing here to not buy new ones in my home.
But I just wanted to make sure you don't re-season it with the whole procedure, like oil, potato peels and salt fried for a long time. Because that would be definitely a lot of work each morning ;)
You don't even need the entire paper towel. During the Hamas attacks last year I was unable to leave to the store for quite some time and began seriously reducing consumption in the house. Half or even a quarter paper towel is enough.
And even that doesn't need to be thrown away - the paper towel is still clean for purpose of reoiling the pan the next day if you absolutely need.
Use soap to actually clean it.
Or maybe Im mistaken, but does cast iron work equally well on a “hot surface” (ceran) type stove?
Actual steel is an alloy that is much more advanced, even when it is not a stainless grade.
Eggs and egg dishes (e.g. pancakes) mostly. No other pan works as well. Washing after cooking is also very quick and easy. Perhaps you've never used a non-stick pan that was maintained correctly, i.e. never overheated, stirred only with silicone utensils, and washed by hand using only non-scratching sponges. Most non-stick pans I've seen owned by other people have been in poor condition. If you think cast iron makes better food you probably use it for searing, which should never be done with non stick. And many people falsely believe wooden utensils are incapable of scratching non-stick pans.
> Eggs and egg dishes (e.g. pancakes) mostly.
That non-stick spray PAM is straight out, unless maybe you're huffing it. For eggs & pancakes I find that cast iron is responsive enough to temperature changes when used with induction, and that butter works to prevent sticking just fine.
Things like the weight of the cast iron means lifting it with wrist, cleaning it (in the sink). Other things like making it easy to cook proteins. Seasoning and maintenance.
Cast iron is heavier, can't cook acidic foods, and just isn't as non stick. They have their place, of course, and are excellent for searing.
Oh and wash your cast iron. Soap no longer contains lye, and won't remove the seasoning.
I use a wood spatula at home. I flip pancakes and eggs.
I opened an incognito tab and googled "spatula" and this is literally the second result https://www.target.com/p/acacia-wood-solid-turner-brown-figm...
> I’ve not gotten sick from home cooking once.
How would you know that? Unless you’ve never been sick at all, I don’t know how you could say that.
And many people do not understand where actual danger comes from. For example it is a really bad idea to rinse raw chicken meat. Yet this practice is still widespread.
https://www.cdc.gov/food-safety/communication-resources/wash...
Every argument there could be used to justify not washing your hands. Just lick them to keep the germs to yourself. Wouldn't wanna spray them around.
I'm in my mid-50s. I use wooden cooking implements a lot. I clean them pretty carefully. So far as I know, no one has ever got sick from eating food I've cooked.
The sample size is one person cooking but it isn't only one opportunity to get food poisoning. Let's say 20 years, 300 days per year, one meal per day; that's 6000 food-poisoning opportunities, none of which has obviously resulted in food poisoning for anyone involved. That is in fact quite good evidence that the risk of serious food poisoning on any single occasion, if you use wooden implements but are reasonably careful with them, isn't high enough to be noticeable above the baseline rate of people getting sick.
If someone doesn't take any particular precautions and never gets COVID-19, that is evidence that COVID-19 is less of a threat than it's sometimes felt to be. But not very much evidence, and it can readily be outweighed by all the other people who have got COVID-19, including some who did take reasonable precautions. Similarly, my and iamacyborg's anecdotal evidence could absolutely be outweighed by statistics correlating food poisoning with type of cooking implements. If anyone has those, I'd be very interested to see them.
Wooden boards need to be maintained, however, which with frequent use means occasionally sanding them down a bit in addition to the usual cleaning and oiling. The problem with wooden boards is mostly that they're not dishwasher-safe and people are too lazy to clean them properly by hand. A plastic cutting board you regularly put in the dishwasher is probably safer than a wooden one you only half-heartedly rinse, at least in terms of contamination.
Using metal spatulas with non-stick is a big no due to the scratching. Ideally, you should throw away any non-stick cookware that gets a scratch on it.
You should use silicone spatulas instead.
For what it's worth, the simulated cooking experiments involved cutting up the utensils into small pieces, grinding those into a powder, then vigorously combined with hexane (the terms "vortexing" and "ultrasonication" are used), then subsequently combined with sulfuric acid, and dried. Small samples were then immersed in olive oil maintained at 160 Celsius for 15 minutes. (I may have misinterpreted this section, but it described the first step as "pre-treatment of samples")
It's perhaps interesting to note that the only sample listed as "new" in Table 1 with substantial levels of bromine was a thermos cup lid (180 μg/g), and only a small number of other items had detectable levels in the 3-10 μg/g range. Meanwhile, many samples purchased to 2011 had levels well over 100μg/g. That said, I also don't know how representative this study is in the context of, say, a thermos lid if you're not storing any liquids substantially above 100 C.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
A nice, smoothly polished stainless steel spatula with round corners and a slightly convex edge shouldn't do anything to your non-stick pan.
You have to deliberately be trying to damage the non-stick surface with such a spatula to do any harm.
If the non-stick surface actually working, you shouldn't be using any force to scrape anything off. And there's margin for that.
I use one of those 5-in-1 painter's tools to remove grime from just about any surface without damaging it. I would cheerfully use it to take a dried paint splatter off a $100K Steinway. :)
Non-stick cookware was invented for a reason.
The cooking process it also far better, with the whole pan being uniformly hot and staying that way.
Eww, gross.
This is not necessary, you can (and should) actually clean your cast iron pans. I certainly clean mine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/taz86n/comment/i04...
Or clean as in industrial degreaser or varnish stripper?
Soap artist and still do that process though. Handmade soap will probably have some sodium hydroxide in it.
(Does anyone use that for dishes?)
I see people worrying about this shit while walking on cliff edges, honking down cans of energy drinks and puffing away on vapes. There are probably larger health and risk considerations to make in your life.
Plus stickiness affects quite a few foods - eggs, pancakes, but also ie low burn simmer. There are cca inert linings like porcelain enamel on La creuset and similar, but in convenience its still subpar to non-stick and prices are high.
The whole point of why people go for non-stick is that you don't become a bit a slave to such an insignificant stuff like freakin' pans. Maintaining them, redoing the 'non-stick' surface... that's not direction we generally call quality of life, in fact it goes directly against it (have less things, free up yourself to have more time for yourself and our closest ones and not just continuously maintain gazillion stupid little or bigger things).
> You will get tremendous amount of iron oxide (rust) into the food to the point when you can taste it
is generally not a problem. In fact, cereals are fortified directly by adding iron oxide—enough that if a magnet is run over it, it will pick up a substantial quantity of iron filings.
If you're especially concerned about your food tasting iron-y, a good substitute is stainless steel. Bring it up to 200°C, add in a small touch of high smoke point oil, add your proteins, and cook. No sticking.
All my cookware is metal including my spatulas, spoons, pots, and pans etc which are stainless steel, aluminium, or enamelled cast iron. Metal is infinitely more durable and flexible (in terms of where and how it can be used, not literal flexibility à la Young's modulus) than any silicone/plastic/non-stick cookware. You can pop a stainless steel pan directly from the stove into an industrial oven. You can put metal (even cast iron, really) in a dishwasher. You can violently scrub at any metal with steel wool and Cif/Gif to attack stubborn stains. The likelihood of something sticking to it is a small price to pay for the sheer peace of mind and flexibility.
Oh, final point. If scrubbing stuff off is such a pain, get a dishwasher.
That statement doesn't seem compatible with the chemistry. The seasoning on a cast-iron is a (plastic) polymer that is fairly resistant to acid attack—especially the weak acids in food. It's why the strongest and most concentrated acids are stored in plastic and not glass beakers.
in every pot or pan i have ever used, scratches were a problem. and only metal tools could have caused them.
They are obviously something like 70% plastic resin, 30% sawdust.
The way it really works for plastic is this: almost all bad plastic is black, but not all black plastic is bad. That's it.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with virgin black plastics. (Well, at least, nothing more than is wrong with plastics in general.) So there is no reason to fear black plastic from reputable sources.
The trouble comes in when plastics get recycled. There may be sourcing issues for black resins, but the root of the matter is this: black plastics are typically pigmented with carbon black. Carbon black as a pigment is cheap, safe, and very effective. That's good! But that also means that when you throw together a pile of recycled sludge mix and it comes out beige, greige, or worse, you can't sell that (who would buy greige resin?? wait, don't answer that)... so you color it, cheaply... which means carbon black. So almost all random crappy recycled plastic resin ends up black. That's the real problem with black plastic.
That is, a reputable source, e.g. an established cookware company, may proclaim that their existing black plastics are fine, safe for cookware, and have been tested. But a smart move for them would be to stop using black plastics for cookware, because a customer will just remember one highly reductionist association: "cookware + black plastic = poison". It's not always true, but it may sometimes be true, and that's enough.
Even if the particular research will be found lacking by new investigations and reproduction attempts, a lot of people will still remember this association for years, due to its shock value, simplicity, and trust to The Atlantic (which is generally a really good resource).
This and the fact that it's a high risk / low reward scenario.
There's no reason to not forgo black plastic now
Frankly, nobody should be so credulous as to trust what a consumer goods company claims. You just have to look up how often well trusted consumer goods companies get caught "accidentally" using slave labor.
The need is for a regulatory body like the EPA or FDA to step up and check that the claims are more than just that.
The issue here is that these plastics are super cheap and testing is expensive enough. I have absolutely no faith that a consumer goods company will follow through or continue to follow through without a monetary penalty. This is something that's just to easy to cut once headlines die down.
Is there a way to see if/how comment was edited?
I'll try to quote things more directly from now on...
But how do you even judge that? My coffee machine is all black plastic. It has dozens of parts. The hot water runs by/over black plastic.
It's an expensive and reputable brand of coffee machine, but I have absolutely no illusions that some/most of the black plastic parts it contains are straight from different factories in China.
And I would be surprised if anybody QAs the chemical makeup of raw plastic input. As long as the parts mold correctly and hold up structurally, nobody would notice when the Chinese injection molder changes suppliers mid-batch.
Yes, they are.
> I would be surprised if anybody QAs the chemical makeup of raw plastic input. As long as the parts mold correctly and hold up structurally, nobody would notice when the Chinese injection molder changes suppliers mid-batch.
And yes, they do care. Critical parts (and food contact parts are always critical) usually specify a specific resin from a specific manufacturer on the procurement documentation. The major brands absolutely 100% audit this when they check in on their suppliers. And the major brands absolutely do check on their suppliers. (Many of them are even supplying the resin themselves, so they really care if it's getting diverted.) The factories are not incentivized to mess this up, because they know it's game over for their business with that brand (or even OEM/CM) if they screw up, so they instead get it right and just charge more. This is what you pay for when you buy name brand products.
And it's what you give up when you "save money" buying on AliExpress!
Everyone wants to reduce their plastic intake, but nobody wants to throw 80% in their kitchenware in the trash. There's no obvious steps you can get people to follow to check if their spatula is one of the "good" ones, so tossing black plastic is a good concrete step to advise people to take.
Since the article repeatedly made a point to talk about cooking spatulas and hot oil, our only hope is that those flame retardants don't dissolve well in water - but dissolve very well in oil.
But if they do dissolve in water, it's safe to assume you're boiling them out of your kettle lid every time that thing runs.
HN seems to have huge unfounded FUD around anything plastic related even when there's no scientific evidence.
Toxicological evidence takes a long time to acquire. By it's very nature it's a lagging indicator. Remember when everybody freaked out about BPAs? That's because good studies showed the accumulation of those compounds in the body, and the potential health issues it could drive.
And what about now that we have all these BPA free plastics? Most of them have replaced the BPA with other compounds. They haven't been studied, so there isn't evidence against them. But the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Finally: what, in their long and storied history, has led you to believe that 3M, DuPont, or Eastman are acting in the best interest of your health? Because their incentive structure favors wealth creation, not population health.
That's not exactly relevant. Relevant is if it leaks from the plastic into liquids or not.
>what, in their long and storied history, has led you to believe that 3M, DuPont, or Eastman are acting in the best interest of your health?
I don't. That's why we have EPA and FDA.
The glass one is most likely going on my Christmas list (even though that is sort of expensive for what it is)
Once you have nailed the grinding process (with a single dose grinder for consistency, for example), the filtering parts of the procedure are 2 minutes.
Or the thought of pressing too hard on a glass AeroPress, having it tip over and shatter, slicing through my arm. Would be the silliest way to go out.
This said, the parent article recommends silicone utensils among the safer alternatives.
Are we saying that plastics are bad and then redefining "plastic" as the subset of the previous classification which are bad? That's the kind of language trickery that duped us into making utensils out of an industrial waste product in the first place. If we're going to protect future generations from whatever harm comes after plastic we're going to need to stop being so vage.
Silicone is better for food preparation as it withstands heat better, has low toxicity (especially compared to additives used with plastic utensils), low reactivity, high resistance to oxygen, ozone and ultraviolet light, doesn't support microbes and repels water which is great for things like spatulas.
Removing spaces after punctuation has the physiological downside of making my eye twitch.
Often media will say "people exposed to Y have increased Z" but fail to mention that in studies those people worked in industrial settings with Y and the exposure level is hundreds or thousands of times higher than in a consumer setting.
The industrial setting offers the hints that there might be a problem but, as you rightly point out, also might just be a case of too much exposure.
An example of this is radiation exposure, it took an embarrassingly long time for society to link radiation to cancer, and that was a somewhat obvious link. Radioactive beverages were literally marketed as health beverages because of their radium content.
Most of it comes from China, presumably from people who see waste byproducts of rare earth metal processing as a business opportunity.
There are easy, safe alternatives in wood, metal and silicone. There’s no need to risk it.
Precautionary principle? I'm sorry to say stainless steel may leech heavy metals into food during cooking [1]
And also silicone may leech potentially harmful chemicals into food [2]
Nonstick coatings? Teflon flu "could be a real concern" [3]
Wooden spoons are porous and can crack, making them a breeding ground for germs, and they can splinter [4] - and good luck finding a wooden spatula that doesn't suck.
So personally I don't think it's churlish to take these warnings with a grain of salt. Especially for rarely-used pieces of cookware.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4284091/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19680914/ [3] https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/teflon-flu-r... [4] https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1941959/replace-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever
I don't have a cultural analogy for this situation but whatever it is is worse than "boy who cried wolf".
Edit: apparently you can tell the difference by squeezing them too - silicone will feel rubbery.
Also "capillary action" takes place in wood, meaning water and/or bacteria on the outside of the wooden surface essentially diffuses into the wood, "choking out" the surface bacteria and therefore not providing them with a good environment on which to grow. Additionally, wood has antimicrobial properties.
Honestly though, in home kitchens, you're waaaay more likely to get foodborne illnesses from accidental cross-contamination or time/temperature abuse of particularly risky ready-to-eat foods that people aren't as careful with as they are with meat— like cut melons and questionable been sprouts, cooked cut vegetables, cooked rice, and others. It's funny how careful people are with jarred mayonnaise, which is pretty indestructible. If that potato salad left out on the table at the picnic made you sick, it's the potatoes, not the mayonnaise.
As an aside: most people are completely wrong about what gave them food poisoning. To get a better idea, you need to look up specific symptoms and incubation periods... But contact tracing is the only way to be sure. And the most common— norovirus— could have been picked up anywhere. Even if you wash your hands right before eating, you could have gotten it from the seat you pulled out before sitting down, and alcohol isn't great at killing it. Working on restaurants, when someone said "you made me sick! I'm going to call the board of health!" I'd say "feel free. They're going to tell you to get tested to see what you have so they can compare it to other reports, and in the unlikely event that some of the other hundreds of other people who ate here when you did got the same illnesses, I'd want the board of health to know about that."
The big problems I've seen with greens all came from field contamination that couldn't be washed off, but that could also be because other types of contamination don't have a single source point and therefore don't trigger a recall/definable outbreak/news coverage.
And when it comes down to it, these are natural organisms that don't come from industrial food production, and will always be somewhat of a risk as long as we eat natural foods. Botulism spores naturally occur more frequently in parts of the western US in places that grow a lot of garlic and onions, which is why we need to refrigerate garlic oil and such— industrial food production is excellent at killing botulism and cases of poisoning come from improperly prepared home canned goods, because doing it 80% right kills everything else, and you could go 3 generations using that recipe before getting over contaminated with botulism, and then everyone at dinner that night dies. Eating industrial canned food exclusively could eliminate most risk of pathogens altogether, but then there's other risks like chemical leeching in many products, nutritional considerations, other contamination (normally a negligible risk, but would it be if you only ate industrial food?) and who really wants to do that, anyway.
But in the US, no for we sell is as risky as raw chicken. Not by a long shot. It's really bizarre that the FDA is so upright that they won't allow soft raw milk cheeses to be sold, but the USDA still, I believe, doesn't legally classify the deadly Salmonella Heidelberg to be an adulterant, as they do e. Coli OH157. Not sure if it's outdated, but when I was in culinary school some time ago, 1 in 4 chickens had enough Salmonella or campylobacter to make a healthy adult sick.
The most impactful things it seems to me home cooks can do to reduce their risks are a) don't to anything else while cutting raw meat, and immediately wash everything that touches it as soon as you're done, b) invest in an instant read thermometer if you cook meat that has a lot of surface area exposure to equipment (e.g. ground meat, sausage, cube steak), c) don't keep cut melons or bean sprouts for more than a few days, d) keep all uncooked meat in the bottom of your fridge below everything else.
There are other things that are risky that people don't realize— cooked room temperature rice, raw flour, room temperature brewed tea, etc etc etc— but they're less frequently problematic. It's a risk/reward just like anything else. A tea shop in Boston made a ton of people sick not refrigerating it's iced tea some years ago, but it didn't kill anyone, and lots of people have made sun tea without getting sick. People WAY overestimate the risk of eating raw eggs, but something like 1 in 10k eggs could do it.
I'm in the UK and didn't realise that. We easily buy raw milk cheeses here, but they do carry a warning about people with compromised immune systems and pregnant women.
> There are other things that are risky that people don't realize— cooked room temperature rice, raw flour, room temperature brewed tea
I was aware of the issues with pre-cooked rice and how reheating it is unlikely to make it safe. Raw flour is a new one for me - I would assume that it being dried would kill off most nasties.
However, room temperature brewed tea is incredibly dangerous here in the UK as you're likely to get lynched if you serve that to someone as a nice cuppa. Otherwise, I'd guess that it's the sugar content that gives the bacteria something to munch - it's why kombucha can be dangerous if not brewed carefully though that's more a case of getting the desirable bacteria to out-compete the nasty ones.
Heathens over here.
So properly made kombucha wouldn't be risky, but as you noted, it isn't always properly made. You can do most culinary things wrong enough to get you sick if you really put your heart into it.
Nowadays, I like to make kefir as that seems like the easiest fermentation - milk and kefir grains in a covered glass jar (not airtight) and leave for a day. Temperature isn't critical and there's no sterilisation needed.
Most of my utensils do not float. I finish them with a homemade or food grade beeswax. The act of cooking alters the new look, but they acquire their own, slightly less perfect, but reasonable finish.
I'll be making some katalox spoon/spats soon... another glorious wood, but not quite as remarkable as a good piece of cocobolo, which can be really special.
Anyway, my work with these utensils started for the precise purpose of avoiding plastic.
This is a clear case where a regulator should step in and just ban these black plastic utensils in favor of their safe alternatives.
That way you're not just protected from exposure in your own kitchen, but also when joining your friends for dinner.
Indeed. Although now I’m pretty annoyed about the 6 or so black plastic cooking utensils I received as a wedding gift nearly twenty years ago lasted this long, so I’ve been using them this whole time. Oh well, at least I don’t cook much :/
I'm not even sure it does that. My cheapo wood spoons/turners/spatulas get dishwashed ~every time they're used, and they're 10? years old at this point. One finally cracked a few years ago but the rest are going strong.
Not really, just avoid them as they come up. Case in point: Throw out your black cooking utensils and use an alt. Simple simple. No crazy to it.
If you're certain they're trivial concerns, then they should be easy to dismiss.
If the problem is that you're not sure if they're trivial -- or which are and which aren't -- then what we've uncovered is the shortcomings of a policy oriented primarily around notifications. You'd want judgments made by people with toxicology qualifications whose job it is to focus on questions like this. Which was the point of the comment you're responding to.
Have you considered the safety profile of the ink used for any markings, the stain on the wood, and any oil or wax coatings?
https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1473049577905401859
I use Tried and True linseed oil or linseed oil + beeswax for my coatings. Occasionally I'll use pure walnut oil.
I understand that not everyone likes to make such things! But I don't suspect its hard to find pure wood ones. Lots of people make them. Even just searching "unfinished wooden kitchen utensils" yields a lot of results.
> I actually made all of my wood cooking implements from scratch. I cut down the trees and carved them.
Is this trolling? "It's easy, simple, just carve your own tools out of trees". Sounds like "just don't be poor" to me.
It is inexpensive to buy unfinished wood utensils, anyone can search for them. And in the context of the problem, silicone is just as well if wood seems too difficult to find.
Only a regulating agency can truly protect you from exposure to harmful chemicals, because they can spend the time cataloguing all these chemicals and remove them not just from your home but everywhere else as well.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try and reduce your own exposure, it seems like a good idea. But ultimately it may just be a token effort because of all the other ways that you're exposed to those chemicals.
Good luck with that. Temperature isn't perfect and hot pockets of higher temperatures form.
I don't think that's particularly accurate unless you're considering the action of individual atoms. e.g. Water is considered to boil at 100°C but there will be some water evaporating at lower temperatures but this is a different process that only occurs at the surface. I don't think it's accurate to say that water is "slowly boiling" at low temperatures unless you're reducing atmospheric pressure.
Sure, you can get a cheap non-stick pan that may or may not give you cancer, but why? I'm in my 40s and since I can remember thought it made no sense to cook with plastic anything. My parents still cook with the same wooden spoons my dad brought back from Algeria before I was born. The pans will last multiple lifetimes. The same can't be said for their plastic and non-stick counterparts.
Another thing is that a loot of wooden utensil are made in several piece stick together with glue. A lot of cutting board are made that way for example (especially the cheap ones). Most glue are not very dishwasher safe. It might be fine for a few wash, and then you end up with pieces of a cutting board.
plus side, it's very clear when the piece is damaged beyond repair.
Lots of things can also absorb dishwasher detergents which is probably not great for your health. But for non porous things dishwashers are great !
It's why I like wood. You don't need to baby it, and if it breaks down, you throw it out and it returns to the earth.
a cast iron or "stainless" steel pan will get some gruff from cooking since its nonstick. It regularly goes to the dishwasher, some stuff won't get cleaned. Mostly oil burn stains it seems ("stainless" hardly!) .
Is that completely safe/expected ?
We obviously diddn't get that with the nonstick pans. We got rid of that stuff for a reason, now i'm not sure what is worse: nonstick pan surface OR hard-stuck burnt oil on a stainless steel pan. Thoughts?
I use mine daily for anything and everything. I wash it with Dawn. It continues to work as well as any cast iron I have ever seen.
Apparently the "don't use soap on it" advice stems from the era of harsher lye based soaps.
Stainless is pretty easy to get totally clean with steel wool and/or scotchbrite pad sponges.
Worst case-- you've gone too high in temperature for too long and you need some bon-ami.
I have never been able to figure out stainless steel on the other hand. Apparently the trick is getting to the right temperature but I have never gotten it to work.
On the health side, Teflon pans used to be considered totally safe until they were not. Now they are considered safe again as they no longer use PFOA. Burnt oil and iron oxide might not be ideal either but at least it isn't novel to humans as it has been used for thousands of years. Unfortunately, difficult to get hard science on such subjects as it would have extremely large studies conducted over large periods of time to overcome the noise. In any case there are probably far more impactful decisions in life than which kind of pan to use.
Stainless is can do the job too, but temperature and shortening is even more important. There's a much tighter window of temperature that it works at. You do the "water drop test" to determine that it's ready. See youtube for an infinity of videos on how to check the stainless is at right temperature!
I've given up on non-stick pans. They're semi-disposable because the don't last very long and you don't want to use them at high temperatures. All it takes is a little bit of skill to never have to use non-stick teflon pans.
My trick though is that I have a cast iron only for eggs... if I cook other stuff in it the smooth buttery coating gets lost and the eggs start sticking again. After a few days of eggs-only it becomes nonstick again.
Stainless steel also works very well. You just need to preheat it to get the Leidenfrost effect.
I haven't played much with preheating though, I'll have to try that - thanks for the suggestion :-)
There isn't really any clear data on what exactly the seasoning on our pans is, and what by-products are also formed. It seems somehow no one has done an academic deep dive on cast iron. Heating oils to the point of polymerization is very likely to have byproducts.
Now for the conspiratorial part, it seems likely that large manufacturers (Lodge) have done the research internally, but they haven't released anything along the lines of "We have research backing the safety of our pans!".
In some ways I really would not be surprised if it comes out that the seasoning process creates all manner of nasty byproducts.
Personally I make a lot of pressure cooker stews and things with more liquid which is less hassle and less chance of burning. If it needs to be seared in the outside then that can be done quickly without needing to cook the whole thing (pan or oven)
Maybe, but they're so easy to clean without a dishwasher. And even easier to clean later if you rinse them off immediately after cooking so stuff doesn't stick.
Some other options include getting a spouse that will do it for you, or to use the dishwasher and just accept that you will have to replace things more frequently.
Listen to yourself man. Get a spouse because you can't personally wash cookware by hand? If you make decisions in your own life how you're suggesting I should then I shudder to think what a horror show it must be.
For cookware with PTFE non-stick coating, it is basically the only solution, with silicone, but I personally don't like silicone utensil.
In any case, I also started to avoid PTFE coated cookware, because no matter how well you treat them, the coating will eventually get damaged (and PTFE is supposedly not very good for you). Now I just use stainless steel for anything that is not too sticky, and carbon steel for everything that need a bit of a non-stick surface to be cooked properly. They are not too hard to maintain and they don't get damaged like PTFE non-stick pan.
18/0 stainless steel is the best. No nickel etc.
I think there’s a balance between being neurotic and being blissfully ignorant, but given the high level health data in the west it’s probably time to be more neurotic.
There's more information on our current understanding here: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea...
The people who's moral compass seems far more faulty are the people in the comments who are doing the same thing but who have no comparable motive to behave in such a way. Generally, though there are a couple minor examples in here today.
A more fundamental error is say 'there's no proof, therefore I assume it's false'. There's no proof that it's safe either. We make almost all decisions without mass longitudinal studies.
And worse, IMHO, is the poison rhetoric: 'If I can shoot their plane, I'm smarter than the person trying to fly.'
i've heard it is reasonable priced in other countries but not the us.
My real rant though is there is no reason why induction should be an expesnive niche. There is no reason I should pay extra for features that don't cost extra.
So spending more than a 200 $ premium over a resistance stove with 4 hobs means you're being ripped off or spending on luxury.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/induction-cooktops-20813/
In the US we almost always use a range not a cooktop. I need one with an oven. Something like https://www.homedepot.com/p/Amana-30-in-4-Burner-Element-Fre... - which is several hundred cheaper than what you linked. As long as I'm going to replace what I have, spending a little more for the other features I want seems like a good idea - I will likely use it for decades as you say, and induction is in a very limited selection such that I can't really get any other options at any price. (well I did eliminate some Samsung options - Samsung has earned their bad reputation in kitchen appliances)
This might be a better comparison:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Frigidaire-Gallery-30-in-6-2-cu-...
Yes, induction is still more expensive, but it is not crazy more expensive either for middle class homeowners that no matter the fuel want something nicer than that shitty Amana linked (that's low end even for grad student slums).
What must have features are you unable to find in the current crop of induction ranges?
I expect my range to last for a few decades and I cook often. If I'm going to spend several thousand dollars I want something worth it and so far I can't find anything that fixes all the issues with the 40 year old range that came with my house and so I'm saving my money for some other 'toy' I will enjoy. as an engineer I'm in good finiancial shape but not so good I can replace my range whenever I feel like it (if I was I'd have a much larger kitchen)
Irrelevant. I'm not debating the merits of Ikea furniture, but they do not produce appliances, they rebadge Electrolux, Whirlpool (Amana) and Frigidaire, and the models they are offering are simply not the most basic ones (though they have just the tier above - this gets you at least a fucking oven timer and lighted, windowed oven), that's just a fact.
I grew up with a Calrod cooktop, like non-stick cookware they are iconic post WW2 marketing Americana. Like Oscar Mayer bologna, they were considered suburban "luxury" and marketed as superior to gas (the marketing of gas superiority is whole other thing, but prior to inductive it was actually superior for most things, that's why it was/is the mainstay of the restaurant industry). https://thisoddhouseblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/electric-s... But I have no desire to go back to that. Terrible heat conductivity, slow response, imprecise temperature control, terribly inefficient especially in the summer (as a side effect, piss poor cooking power compared to even a domestic gas range, yet no ability to go as low). It's hard to overstate how much easier (if not just possible) to cook certain foods on something with precise wide range heat control whether it be gas or inductive.
Obviously people made do with these for years, and if one is happy with that level of functionality and convenience (especially at the lowest of the low end of features), and it allows them to prepare what they want, it's unlikely they'll appreciate any of the benefits of an inductive cooktop.
But it gives precise and rapidly changeable heat control, a radiant heater does not. This is important to people preparing more varied dishes. This sounds like this is simply of little benefit to you, because you still haven't mentioned what features on the current selection of inductive ranges is missing.
They're also wickedly more efficient because you're not radiating a ton of waste heat into the conditioned space (at least in summer and warm climates). There are people that cook and bake enough that the electricity of both the heating and the space cooling are a noticeable monthly expense. Not the primary benefit point though, true.
When you add up all the things we're "supposed" to be doing for one reason or another it's a pretty large cumulative burden.
And for people who must have their gas appliances, there are always portable units/generators. They can use those.
I have been doing most of my cooking on a gas hob for 5 years now. Could you share more detail on this point?
I feel the need to be scared today (it is Halloween after all).
Comparing BTU's wouldn't be an accurate metric since with gas a lot of the heat is lost just going around the pan/pot and heating the air. This source [1] claims it took 992 BTUs for gas and 430 BTUs for induction to boil 1qt of water.
https://www.treehugger.com/which-more-energy-efficient-cooki...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_fuel#/media/File:Access_...
> All of our food contact products comply with EU regulations which states that materials do not release their constituents into food at levels harmful to human health. [2]
and they aren't some no-name brand that wouldn't suffer from lying about that.
[1] https://www.josephjoseph.com/products/elevate-carousel-utens...
[2] https://us.josephjoseph.com/pages/faq?search=recycle
Just use metal wood or glass. One thing I'm not aware of is if Pyrex or the other tempered glasses are safe or if they also contain plastic. That would be good to learn.
Old Pyrex was borosilicate glass.
Most conveniently differentiated by the branding on the product.
All caps "PYREX" is the classic (high quality) borosilicate stuff.
Titlecased "Pyrex" is the modern ordinary glass stuff.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_We_Know
https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/y...
Will I actually see actual difference if I throw away all my cook ware and replace it with non-non-stick ones and wooden utensils?
What about pollutants in the air from car and industry exhaust? Is this cookware worse? Should we first consider moving somewhere else than worry about cookware?
What about just the ingredients you cook with? Is using teflon worse than buying highly processed foods? What about GMO vs non-GMO? What about grass fed/free range vs in-prison-meats? What about vegan vs meat?
What I am trying to say is that it is easy to point to something that is (or even might be) toxic and say that we should fix it, but we have to put things in context. You simply can not be afraid of everything. Like drinking out of plastic vs glass vs metal, I know people who swear that drinking from a plastic cup is about the worst thing you can do, but I have been doing it my whole life and at least aren't dead yet.
B) Unless you scratch the hell out of your pan the teflon coating (probably) isn't that bad
C) Cooking on a teflon pan is just so much more pleasurable
Every single thing you mention, except for cooking, does not get exposed to fundamental transformation via heat, or if they have (such as ingredients), they have passed the test of time (nutrients). Ingredients being heated has happened for millenia with fire wood and metal. This is why we care about what we cook and what we put into our bodies. Have we done this before for a long time? Was it safe for a long time? Time matters
I can't say the same about teflon, highly processed foods, etc.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B4T...
So let me ask you again. Its Friday. You have a rib eye, asparagus, and an old credit card on your plate. I’m sure you would not eat a credit card, and would think people were insane for doing so.
So why not try and avoid it if you can. Sure you can’t avoid everything but if you can avoid some things in your control why wouldn’t you?
The argument is that you probably are doing way worse things health wise than using a teflon cookware or black plastic cooking utensils. This is just a scare click bait.
The "scares" are overwhelming only because you live in a society where things are (slightly) toxic by default, because those things are cheaper and can be engineered to barely pass safety standards.
We can and should change this situation. Hopefully not on the individual level, but at least public awareness is useful.
The "scares" are also overwhelming because some people are extreme in everything, for example the person who swears never to drink from a plastic cup. But it doesn't mean the opposite stance (i.e. drinking from plastic cups is good for you) is true. You can believe plastics are slightly bad for you without overreacting, and acknowledge that if it's feasible it's better to avoid them. Reacting emotionally to extremists isn't what a rational person would be doing.
They're glass. They don't contain this. In particular, oven-safe glass is supposed to be of the borosilicate variety... but about 20 years ago manufacturing was moved to China (haha!). They're not properly formulated or tempered anymore, and in many cases not oven safe. They tend to shatter with large temperature changes, spilling hot casseroles over people who aren't in the habit of having steaming hot casserole showers and then complain about those.
> Just use metal wood or glass.
I like those materials, but think of the damage you're doing to the CPI with your advice. How would we combat inflation if we weren't able to constantly substitute in cheaper packaging materials and so forth?