[kaitai]

People "overheat" their cookware all the time. Do you know anyone who measures the temp of the surface of their cookware?

Teflon and nonstick coatings kill birds (house pets) when overheated. A nonstick pan in the oven to catch the drippings from your chicken baking at 400 or 425 can kill your parrot quickly. A nonstick wok left unattended for a few minutes during a high-heat stir fry easily reaches 400, enough to kill your cockatiel.

And as another poster has noted, those coatings always start flaking off.

Why buy something that produces fumes enough to kill your house pets and also has planned obsolescence built in when you can get a cast iron pan that's indestructible and will increase your iron intake a bit? It's not hard to develop a great seasoning on it that's essentially non-stick. I use cast iron for almost everything, and enamel for a few remaining applications.

[bumby]

I was maybe (mis)remembering studies that showed the pans had to be heated to a high-temperature relatively fast (in the order of under a second) for the off-gassing to occur, but I couldn't find that yet. I did find some interesting information about the dangers at different temperatures [1] and common cooking temperatures[2]. Without finding that study about quickly heating being necessary, they seem to corroborate your point.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-017-0095-y/...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-017-0095-y/...

[nate_meurer]

Notice that the reports in your first link of PTFE coatings breaking down at less than 260 deg C are anecdotal. The lowest temperature at which PTFE coatings have been verified to give off breakdown products is 240 deg C. Even then, the only detected product was PTFE sublimate (small particles of PTFE flying off), which can lead to what we call "fume fever" if it's inhaled in large quantities, but reports of this happening in real life are rare, even in factory workers who are exposed at higher levels.

PTFE is chemically stable well past 300 deg C (540 deg F) and many nonstick cookware lines are marketed for these temperatures. For example, I have Calphalon pans labelled for use up to 550 deg F, which are advertised for searing steak. I get them pretty hot, and they show no signs of degradation.

At around 360 deg F (650 deg F), PTFE starts to give off detectable pyrolysis products, which are theoretically able to cause health problems, but even then reports of actual harm are few and far between. This is remarkable given that billions of pieces of nonstick cookware have been in use every day around the world for the past seventy years. Between the end users and the factory workers who make stuff, and all of the accidents and episodes of overheating that occur all the time, if there were going to be significant health effects I think they'd show up by now.

The real problem is the PFAS chemicals that are sprayed on our clothes, upholstery, carpeting and other home furnishings, that the military and civilian airports have dumped in our water supplies. This is a shaping up to be a true environmental catastrophe, and the manufacturers of nonstick coatings have no doubt contributed to this pollution. But the teflon cookware itself is not the slightest threat.

[yabones]

Cast iron pans are wonderful. I inherited one that was purchased originally in 1929. It's used every day or two to cook eggs for breakfast, and as I've found over the years butter is fantastic for keeping the seasoning in great shape. It's more non-stick than teflon, just a little shake is enough to send my eggs sliding to the other side of the pan. All it takes is discipline.

Best part is, this same pan will probably live well beyond 100 years. Possibly 150 or more. How many household items last that long? This is what we've lost with our culture's planned obsolescence, products that last for generations. It my have been expensive back then, but that was the last person in my family to buy this type of cookware. Safe, long lasting products isn't an innovation, it's a very welcomed regression.

[nate_meurer]

I agree, I love vintage cookware. My favorite pans are a bunch of All-Clad LTD's I assembled from Ebay over the years. I use them for omelettes and french toast. Super thick aluminum clad with a stainless cooking surface, made sometime in the 1980s. They're as tough as cast iron, but they heat way more evenly, they're much lighter, and you don't have to worry about hurting the seasoning.

With cast iron, you can easily destroy the seasoning by overheating the pan, or if your mother who doesn't know how to care for cast iron puts it in the dishwasher. I put my All-Clads in the sink and scrub them with a steel tuffy. They're probably the most indestructable tools I own.

[gruez]

>Do you know anyone who measures the temp of the surface of their cookware?

They don't need to, because the oil is going to start smoking before the coating stacks degrading.

>And as another poster has noted, those coatings always start flaking off.

That doesn't really matter because the coating itself is inert.

[loudtieblahblah]

i'd have to buy a new stove if i had a cast iron pan

i have a glass top stove.

cast iron has several problems. Learning how to "season" it (which i never figured out how to do when i had a different oven), the fact it's usually expensive and there's no "one size fits all scenarios" type of pan to use and re-use, thus resulting in you have to buy several.

Then there's stainless steel pans but good luck with that - everything sticks to that.

I just want to cook some eggs without having to use some chemical solvent to actually clean the egg remnants off the pan.

[nhyun]

I have a glass top stove and a cast iron pan. Just don't slide the pan around on top of the stove and you'll be fine.

As for cleaning, we use a chainmail scrubber and water to clean off the bits that stick.

[verall]

Because rice will still stick to the cast iron and enamel pans?

People don't just choose PTFE because they are lazy. I tried a carbon steel, cast iron, and "oiled enamel" and rice stuck to all of them.

[meristohm]

I might go with “because they are lazy” for many of the shortcuts we take. We have one well-seasoned cast-iron pan and several not-so-well-seasoned which I’ve been too lazy to properly treat, so for now I spend the extra time scrubbing. I even use soap (!), though only after the dog gets the big stuff off. Teflon pans required too much care, so we never repaced them. I agree that rice sticks easily to iron pans, so I usually cook rice in inox/stainless saucepans or in ceramic in the pressure cooker. Eggs we cook in the seasoned iron pan. We can change our habits so that we don’t do so much harm to life on earth.

[verall]

I think that you are correct in most cases, people choose nonstick for the easy cleanup afterwards. But that's not what I'm referring to. I have not found a pan, other than PTFE coated, which can fry rice to crispy without using excessive tons of oil. All of the best crispy rice will get stuck to the pan and become inedible.

[doctorsher]

When you tried the carbon steel pan, was it properly seasoned? They stick like hell before they are well seasoned, but seasoning them gives the carbon steel its non-stick properties. Woks are the ultimate tool for this, as they are carbon steel (so non-stick when seasoned) and their shape minimizes the amount of oil necessary to fry the rice. It is ubiquitous for fried rice across almost all of Asia.

[nate_meurer]

Yeah but they use a lot of oil in those woks, and they get them really hot. Any Chinese street vendor with an open fire and cheap steel wok can do shit I can't dream of doing in my fancy ass American kitchen.

[doctorsher]

J Kenji Lopez-Alt has a lot of great wok content for American kitchens. In [0], he uses a butane torch to get the smoky wok flavor (wok hei) in a standard kitchen. He also reviews outdoor wok setups for those who want something close to Chinese street vendor-type vibe.

[0] https://youtu.be/iac_idcz6XE

[verall]

I cook with my carbon steel somewhat often, and it seems to have built up a nice thin black layer that keeps most things from sticking. Cleaning is a breeze, some dish soap and a couple scrubs. None of the black layer comes off.

Rice does not stick at first, but as it gets hot it does, unless I put around 3x the oil I would prefer. I have a gas range with a large burner so it gets very hot.

[nate_meurer]

This is my experience as well. I also use a lot of slowly sauteed garlic, like pretty much every day, and I'm completely reliant on a small nonstick pot to do it without sticking and burning.

Scrambled eggs too, especially the soft-scrambled kind ala Gordon Ramsay's famous short video. They simply wipe out of nonstick pan, and I've never seen this work with any other kind of cookware.

[mahogany]

But people must have cooked rice in pans before these recent inventions. How did they do it?

[nate_meurer]

> Do you know anyone who measures the temp of the surface of their cookware?

Yes, I do. I have a cheap IR thermometer with my kitchen utensils, and I use it all the time. I use it every time I roast seeds and spices, because I'm picky that way. I've also used it when I've accidentally left a pan on the burner too long. I'm careful but I screw up now and then. I accidentally heated a stainless pan to nearly 500 deg F once, but 've never gotten a nonstick pan over about 400 deg F.

> Teflon and nonstick coatings kill birds (house pets) when overheated. A nonstick pan in the oven to catch the drippings from your chicken baking at 400 or 425 can kill your parrot quickly. A nonstick wok left unattended for a few minutes during a high-heat stir fry easily reaches 400, enough to kill your cockatiel.

Stories of such low temperatures killing birds are anecdotal. The lowest temperature that has lead to bird deaths in a controlled laboratory setting is 280 deg C, which is about 580 deg F. [1]

Keep in mind that birds are easily killed by common cooking smoke and fumes, as well as natural gas. The problem with these anecdotes is that it's likely there were other fumes involved, and there's no way to know what actually kills a bird oustide a controlled lab setting.

> And as another poster has noted, those coatings always start flaking off.

As I noted in another comment, it's not hard to keep a nonstick pan indefinitely. I have a lot of ten and fifteen year old nonstick pans that are as good as the day I bought them. My daily drivers are about five years old now, good as new. I'm careful not to overheat them and I never use metal utensils in them. Following those two rules, even my kids were able to use them without damaging them.

> Why buy something that produces fumes enough to kill your house pets and also has planned obsolescence built in when you can get a cast iron pan that's indestructible and will increase your iron intake a bit?

If you overheat that cast iron pan, or if you burn food in it, it will kill birds just as easily as a nonstick pan. Also note, there is vastly more evidence of harm from excess iron consumption than there is of harm from overheated PTFE coatings.

That said, I like steel and iron pans. I regularly use enameled steel pans for toasting spices, and I cook crepes and pancakes on steel pans. I don't use cast iron for much because it's heavy as shit and its heat distribution sucks.

I've actually had good luck with seasoned bare aluminum pans. This is more common in some restaurant kitchens, but not so much in home kitchens. Aluminum seasons just as well as iron, and the heat distribution is way way better. But for some reason "cast aluminum" doesn't have quite the same old-timey panache as does cast iron.

[fomine3]

+1 for measuring temp. I recommend everyone to buy $10 IR thermometer from AliExpress, despite it's not absolutely accurate, it's very helpful to measure and see changing temperature.

[camgunz]

I have never heard of cast aluminum, thank you for the tip (as well as the rest of this post)!