[roboben]

Since a few years, I do own only iron pans. Teflon for home use as pans was a ridiculous idea: you need to take care of it and it will wear out after some time and needs to be replaced. Iron pans need very little care and get better with age. What is the point?

[etblg]

It's super non-stick.

I know you're going to rebut with saying that iron pans are too, and I'm sure they are, but most people don't want to put in any level of the effort needed to make iron pans as non-stick as teflon.

A lot of people care only a mild amount about cooking, and don't want to invest the time to know how to properly use a cast iron or a carbon steel (which I have and only seldom use). They'd rather get a non-stick pan which lasts a while anyway, throw whatever on there, and never worry about food sticking or cleaning it after.

[wkat4242]

This. I absolutely hate cooking. With a passion. I don't want to spend time on it.

I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :(

We can outsource pretty much everything else that's a chore. I drop my washing in a bag to be ready for a tenner tomorrow. Groceries can be delivered for cheap.

But delivered or takeaway food is generally very expensive and not very healthy. It's still viewed as a luxury.

There's just no benefit to cooking for a single person and I just hate doing it so much. So I get implements that make cleanup as simple as possible. Like the non-stick pans.

It's very different for someone who would view coming as a hobby and takes pride in it.

[teekert]

Idk to me this sounds like: I hate washing myself or I hate going to the bathroom. Maybe it’s a cultural thing but adults just need to be able to cook in my society. No place for hefty emotions. Just a fact of life.

It might be nice to live in a society where not cooking is possible. Probably less healthy though, you have different incentives than people making your food. (Taste [salt levels] and “adictiveness” vs healthy and nutritious).

Cooking is a skill, it takes practices and you have to develop some dexterity. But I usually enjoy it now.

I have to admit I never really cooked extensively for 1 person. I imagine I’d use the freezer a lot for lasagnas and sauces etc.

Check out “Nat’s what I reckon”.

[jdietrich]

>Maybe it’s a cultural thing but adults just need to be able to cook in my society. No place for hefty emotions. Just a fact of life.

I have an impaired sense of smell, as do 20% of the adult population. Most foods are utterly bland or actively repulsive to me. Sweet tastes are mildly pleasant, but otherwise I do not enjoy eating, I just do it to avoid hunger. I maintain a BMI of 19, but only because I actively monitor my food intake to avoid becoming clinically underweight.

Cooking is a chore that I will perform in the most perfunctory way possible in order to keep myself alive, but it is also something I will avoid wherever possible. Any effort I might put into making a delicious meal is wasted on me, because I don't have the sensory apparatus to perceive deliciousness.

From my perspective, the world seems almost pathologically obsessed with food. People often struggle to understand my complete indifference to food ("surely there must be some foods you enjoy"), but I struggle to understand how vast numbers of people eat so much that they become disabled and die prematurely. I can only make sense of it through the lens of addiction, which would raise all sorts of questions about the way in which we think talk about food versus other addictive substances.

My experience is obviously atypical (although not as uncommon as you might imagine), but I can't help thinking that the rest of you would be better off if you took a slightly more functional and utilitarian approach to eating. Obviously you can't just all pretend that you don't enjoy eating, but maybe you could all spend a bit less time talking and thinking about food?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15064632/

[wkat4242]

I don't agree. I lived in Thailand where it's common to just buy a plastic bag of food from a street vendor. Most houses apparently don't even have full kitchens.

[redwall_hp]

People in ancient Pompeii didn't either. They bought bread from bakers, or paid for time in public ovens, and bought premade food from pubs or other vendors. Preserved homes very clearly did not typically have the means to prepare food.

It's a statement kind of like insisting that everyone should know how to farm or do animal husbandry, when those were specialist jobs (sometimes serfs' jobs...) since time immemorial. Humans built cities millennia ago and lived in semi-specialized social groups before that.

The outmoded self-sufficiency obsession is very culturally American, due to its relatively recent status as a more or less agrarian colony.

[teekert]

Yeah I loved that about Thailand, I’d eat small things all day from street vendors. Good stuff.

[NoboruWataya]

I would say paying a tenner to wash a bag of clothes is luxury pricing, it's far more expensive than sticking it in the washing machine. It wouldn't surprise me if it was the same factor more expensive as takeaway vs cooking, and cooking is more laborious.

I do agree that it's annoying cooking as a single person though. Batch cooking and freezing can help.

[Bjartr]

I've heard of people finding a large family (through Craigslist or something) that's already making many servings for every meal, often days ahead, and paying them to make one more serving and freeze and deliver it on a weekly basis.

[Closi]

> I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :(

I mean that’s pretty much what supermarkets sell right? Ready meals that can be heated, which are effectively cooked the same way as at the home but just on an industrial scale. Or pasta that’s pre-made and pre-filled and you just have to heat and add some sauce that’s already pre-made.

Im in the UK where we have services like Cook that are good quality meals you can heat up.

[pixl97]

There is still a trade off here. Typically pre-made at industrial scale is looking for 'cheats' they can use to increase transportability and shelf life of food before it's served. It is not common it means the quality of 'decent home cooked' food.

There are made at store foods like you're talking about, but quite often they are 2-3x the cost of the ingredients.

[Closi]

Shelf life can also be improved by freezing rather than other techniques (as is the case with Cook).

[wkat4242]

Those ready meals are full of salts to preserve them. And not very nutritional.

[doublerabbit]

With the added bucket-load of sugar to ensure the taste meets the standard of those without any taste buds.

[mrighele]

I like cooking, but I don't want to take care of the small details, so I just get a non-stick pan and cook what I like with it.

(Similarly, I like programming, but that doesn't mean I enjoy taking care of all the mallocs/free that a C program requires, I just use a language with a GC)

[bluejekyll]

The utility isn’t what’s in question, it’s the safety. There’s enough questions around the safety of teflon for consumption… is it really worth risking your or your family’s health to avoid some annoying cleanup?

[Dylan16807]

Lots of things about cooking are risky. If you ask one by one if that's really worth risking, it's tempting to say no every time, and then there's almost nothing left. It doesn't work to treat risk as a binary factor.

[runarberg]

I think the Teflon question is different though. It is like lead in a sense, we know it is carcinogenic, just like we know lead is a neuro-poison. The only question is whether we are doing good enough job at preventing it from leaking into our bodies.

With lead, a lot of people thought so, but still they put it in our gasoline, in solder for our water pipes, etc. and a lot of people got some pretty bad neuro-developmental disorders as a result. I certainly hope we are not repeating the same story with teflon, though I, personally am not willing to risk my and my families bodies to it.

[Dylan16807]

> we know it is carcinogenic

Do we? PFOA is "possibly carcinogenic" but they've stopped using it when making teflon.

[sudosysgen]

We do not know that PTFE is carcinogenic. Some of the products that can be used to make it are, but they should not be in the final product, if they are it's a manufacturing defect.

We also know that using more oil in cooking is bad, and who knows what results from the incomplete polymerization of oil and carbonized food. I'm at least as suspicious of it as I am of Teflon.

[JoeAltmaier]

Hm. My cast-iron skillet I've used for 20 years doesn't stick. Ever.

If there's a little stuck-on stuff on the bottom after use (should have put a little wine in there, gotten that flavor back into the dish, oh well) then a Scotch-brite bad and 30 seconds fixes it.

[raincole]

> If there's a little stuck-on stuff on the bottom after use (should have put a little wine in there, gotten that flavor back into the dish, oh well) then a Scotch-brite bad and 30 seconds fixes it.

For people seriously care about cooking (perhaps you're one of them), this is non sticking.

For a lot of people this is the definition of sticking.

[NegativeLatency]

> doesn't stick. Ever.

> If there's a little stuck-on stuff

So it does stick?

[JoeAltmaier]

Not so I should use exotic plastic coatings (Teflon) and expensive cleaners to avoid. A few seconds gentle washing.

There's way, way too much made over so-called 'non-stick' pans. Worst experience I even had with sticking? A non-stick pan.

[wastholm]

The best frying pan I've ever owned is the cheapest-possible cast iron one I got when I moved out of my parents' house 30 years ago or so. Very rarely does anything stick and when it does I fill the pan half way with water, put it back on the stove, let it boil for a couple of minutes while I do something else and then wipe it clean.

I have parrots so I theoretically have a strict "no Teflon in my house" rule but with a Japanese wife I've had to grudgingly tolerate a Teflon-coated rice cooker.

[PeterisP]

I use non-stick pans so that I don't ever have to care about things like that.

"should have put a little wine in there" - well, I should not have to! I expect that after I sear some meat, there will be nothing that will require scrubbing the pan with a Scotch-brite pad and that I don't even have to check if there's any little stuck-on stuff.

I don't care if fixing this is easy, because I can live in a world where it isn't something that needs fixing in the first place - and apparently moving to a cast-iron skillet would make me have to fix them. Also, why would I want to spend time (and, more importantly, attention) on 'seasoning the pan'? I expect the tool to be functional with minimal maintenance, a good tool is one that reduces the amount of care and attention that needs to be done, and a tool that requires extra attention itself isn't worth it if there are alternatives that don't require that. It makes sense to spend an hour preparing or maintaining an expensive tool, but it doesn't make sense to do that for something like pan, where you can get a new functional one for less than an hour of pay.

[JoeAltmaier]

Not a cook, are we? You put wine in there to get all the 'fond' back into the finished dish, so it tastes yards better. Not a burden or a duty; something good cooks know to do.

I never seasoned my pan. I never work to clean it, not any more than washing that non-stick on.

We've been sold a bill of goods, by the non-stick pan people, that there's some problem that needs solving. There isn't. The worst sticking problem I ever had, was with a non-stick pan. Threw it away, went back to iron.

[buildbot]

FYI scotch-brite pads are plastic and shed microplastics into your pan.

As a replacement, there are coconut fiber based pads that work better actually.

[dragonwriter]

For cast iron, the best scrubbers are steel chainmail, IME.

Last forever, too.

[morsch]

I mean, you'd typically rinse it pretty thouroughly, I doubt a lot of micro anything remains. I'm not sure pan cleaning is a significant source of overall micro plastics emissions, though I'm open to it.

[buildbot]

Yeah really hard to measure, but the thought of little bits of plastic melting back into the pan makes it worth the 5$ to "splurge" on a nicer scrubber that causes less anxiety haha.

[sneak]

My cast iron is 4 years old and every time I use scotch-brite on it, I have to spend hours stinking up my house with flaxseed oil to reseason the pan because scotch-brite makes little dots of shiny iron show up.

[markl42]

Don’t use flaxseed!

https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/b4pxaq/yay_kenji_...

[arcanemachiner]

Good lord.

> You MUST use flaxseed oil to season your pan.

Then

> You MUST NOT use flaxseed oil to season your pan.

Just season the fucking pan with some cooking oil and be done with it.

I swear, the internet has made some of the simplest things into this relentless pursuit of perfection.

[InSteady]

flaxseed has an atrociously low smoke point (225 F). You really shouldn't be using it for cooking whatsoever, let alone seasoning cast iron.

In general I agree with your sentiment though. Find something that works for you and go with it.

[richiebful1]

That seems excessive to me. I use my cast iron every day, clean it off with steel wool, and just throw a little oil on there. No fancy prep, and it cleans up with less effort than 2 year old no longer non-stick pans

[JoeAltmaier]

Put oil in the skillet next time you use it (every time you use it). No problem.

Hell, I scrub the hell out of it sometimes. Use oil the next time - no problem.

[williamdclt]

Nothing can beat Teflon on non-stickiness, for sure. But really, it’s actually fairly rare that it is a useful property when cooking: mostly for eggs. I mostly use stainless steel and have no problem of food sticking.

It asks for a bit of technique, but it’s just technique needed to make good food anyway (preheating pan, using fat, deglazing, managing heat)

I wouldn’t recommend cast iron either, it’s just too much faff. Stainless steel by default, Teflon for the few things that it’s useful for!

[dclowd9901]

I usually use stainless and cast iron but with green chef meals I’m often tasked with searing chicken or fish in a pan and cleaning those types of pan after a cook like that gets mighty old. So I bought a Tramontina non stick exclusively for those cooks. I suspect it may last a bit longer since it’s a secondary pan I only use for those cases so it feels less wasteful as a purchase.

[williamdclt]

Can you sear with a non stick? Searing requires preheating the pan hot, which isn’t recommended with Teflon I think

[EGreg]

Asking the biochemists here…

Is all searing associsted with carcinogens regardless of how it is done — eg toaster, grill in open flame, in a pan? I tend to really like the seared pieces on bread, steaks, and especially slices of Schwarma / Gyro / Doner

[mplanchard]

AFAIK almost all charred compounds contain some amount of carcinogens of some kind. The question is just whether it’s worth it to you.

[dclowd9901]

You’re not really supposed to blast heat stainless without anything in it either. But you can certainly get it hot. Just as with nonstick. At least to Leidenfrost temps.

[ruined]

you can deglaze that on the stove. heat a very shallow layer of water in the pan, the stuck layer will soften and dissolve. push a roux spoon gently around the bottom and then simply pour it out.

beyond that, if you are using stainless, go ahead and clean it with steel wool. a bundle of small chain is a good equivalent for cast iron.

[devbent]

White vinegar does a better job deglazing than hot water.

[dclowd9901]

Yeah I usually deglaze my dishes at some point if I am cooking with my stainless.

[morsch]

Huh. Stainless steel is like the perfect cooking surface for searing chicken and salmon. Cleanup is super easy, ten seconds with a steel wool and/or, unique among pans, you can put it in the dishwasher with zero worries.

[dclowd9901]

I mean you’re not wrong (well kinda wrong, it’s more like a few minutes). But with 2 kids, a full time job and myriad other hobbies, I couldn’t be arsed to spend another 10 seconds on dishes.

[numpad0]

It seems some people have misconception that excessive oil and overcooking are causes for sticking, while opposite of that is how to completely eliminate sticking. When they can't accept the latter, they might resort to Teflon and steel wool sponges.

[InSteady]

A tbsp or three of a good vinegar or wine + some scraping at the end of a nice sear adds so much flavor back into the dish, and cleanup is that much easier. When the pan is extra crusty just put a bit of warm water in it while the pan is still hot and let it sit till after the meal. Unless you are charring the absolute crap out of your food (in which case, practice your technique and heat management), everything is going to come off with a few seconds of hot water + soap + scrubbing.

Teflon is hot garbage. I wont even use it for eggs.

[RealityVoid]

I care about cooking. I have a bunch of pans I experimented with in my kitchen, including cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel.

None are as non-stick as the non-stick ones. Sometimes I can cook eggs in them without it sticking, but the results are inconsistent and underwhelming. Of course, when the cooking fails and it sticks, I need to re-do the non-stick layer of oil.

I also need to use way more oil when cooking than when using non-stick. I care about this because I'm trying to cut and I'm calorie counting.

And my wife is unhappy whenever I pull out the "wierd" pans, since she can't use them and they're heavy as hell for her.

So, overall, the non-stick sees the most usage.

[mrcode007]

“An early use was in the Manhattan Project as a material to coat valves and seals in the pipes holding highly reactive uranium hexafluoride”

Considering the applications, I’ll pass :)

[jtbayly]

Why?

One of the first uses for wood was burning it for heat, creating toxic poisonous fumes.

I don’t have any problem using it as a material for my utensils, though.

[mrcode007]

As one commenter posted. It is unreactive and it bioaccumulates in your body. Removing unwanted molecules from your body is done by means of chemical reaction. If a substance doesn’t react then what?

By your analogy, we should all be eating uranium because it produces clean nuclear energy. Yes?

[jtbayly]

No. My analogy doesn't say what we should eat. It only says that in spite of something having an association with something bad for you, it might still be just fine for you.

Here's another example. "Potassium explodes on contact with water! I think I'll pass on potassium in my diet, thanks!" That would not be a good reaction. Note the logical difference between saying "that's a bad reaction" and saying "you should eat everything that explodes." You're implying that I'm saying the latter. I'm not. I'm saying the former.

[mrcode007]

Okay Mr Logic. My response was tongue in cheek but this detracts from the main point.

I hope you’re not living under the DuPont shitstorm umbrella as appealing as it may sound.

Check out the 3M/DuPont Missisipi teflon lawsuits as well as the story of Robert Bilott, and his nationwide class action lawsuit for anyone with detectable teflon in their blood:

https://www.taftlaw.com/news-events/news/taft-wins-class-cer...

https://theintercept.com/2018/10/06/dupont-pfas-chemicals-la...

More recently, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-08/how-cance...

[BobaFloutist]

Just wait until you hear what stainless steal gets used for!

[BenjiWiebe]

So, highly unreactive. Sounds like a great thing to use for cooking.

[nobodyandproud]

Cast iron wares are heavy.

I had a lovely fight with my wife many years ago, because she threw away my cast irons; in her words it was “dirty” and “sticky” and she replaced them with teflon.

Years later she is a convert—from small, personal pans to dutch ovens that heat retention makes a difference—but I’m called to move them around but she’ll ensure that it gets oiled and seasoned after every use.

We also have high quality multi-ply stainless steel pots and pans but lightweight or not those are used less frequently.

If you only want non-stick without the fuss and don’t care about the health implications, it’s hard to beat teflon.

[axpy]

I used to cook almost exclusively with cast iron but lately I bought a set of heavy carbon steel skillet, they are now my favorites. They have a very similar heat retention as CI but are a bit lighter and that make them a real charm to work with.

[Tade0]

I received a granite pan recently and I can't recommend it enough.

It doesn't stick and contains no teflon or any other such material.

[542458]

I’m assuming this is one of those enamel/ceramic non-stick pans. I’ve used a number of these over the years. They’re great for “non-stick that isn’t teflon” (I have a bird, so that is useful to me), but they do degrade very fast if you’re not extremely careful, and even if you are careful they still usually only last a short while before becoming significantly less non-stick. I’d recommend saving them for eggs and other very sticky foods, and using cast iron or stainless or carbon steel for everything else.

[amluto]

I’ve never heard of an actual granite pan. You surely mean a metal pan coated with a combination of silicone-ish things and silica, and maybe the silica is derived from granite.

Sadly, it seems that some of these things still contain potentially nasty highly fluorinated compounds. Here’s a patent for such a thing:

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/6d/25/ca/9ff2bbd...

Hmm, the “FAS” additive in the outermost layer has a perfluorinated C6 chain. Whoops. I wonder whether this is better or worse than PTFE. At least intact PTFE ought to be harmless. PFHxA is not so wonderful:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorohexanoic_acid

edit: some brands of “ceramic” nonstick pans are quite explicit about being PFAS-free, and CA AB1200 really ought to help here.

[almostdigital]

I thought those pans that are marketed as "granite" with a speckled pattern where just PTFE coated aluminium, is this something different?

[namdnay]

I think “granite pans” (which aren’t) are basically enamel, like a Le Creuset

[tdeck]

I have one of these "marble" pans.

https://www.amazon.com/Ceramic-Marble-Coated-Aluminium-KW/dp...

I bought it at an Asian kitchen store 8-9 years ago because I needed a pan, and it's still unbelievably nonstick. I have overheated it multiple times, but carefully avoided using metal utensils on it. I'm not sure if it's really made of marble but it certainly is durable.

[cesaref]

It really depends on your kitchen, and the sort of cooking you do. There's definitely been a trend towards disposable kitchen equipment in the pro kitchens, no longer do you see chefs with carbon steel knives, but cheap stainless knives with plastic handles, plastic cutting boards etc. These are considered consumables, which I find weird, but that's what their world now looks like.

I personally use hard anodised aluminium pans for non-stick duties, and use le creuset pots for lots of stuff, and these last a long time if you take care of them. The non-stick stuff is typically eggs or reheating stuff like soup. I'd guess 10 years from the anodised stuff without much trouble, and more like 50 years for a le creuset (i've got a hand-me-down one from an aunt which was from the 70s).

[Mistletoe]

The point was to sell Teflon pans to you repeatedly.

[ahoka]

Iron pans are heavy and work horribly on anything but gas, which is even worse for the lungs.

[thatcherc]

They work phenomenally well on induction stoves! I use a single-burner plug-in induction unit in my small apartment kitchen and it works so well cast iron pans and an iron dutch oven.

[alwayslikethis]

They work just fine. If anything, the high heat capacity makes the heating more even if your heat source is unstable.

[numpad0]

Teflon allows pans to be made of aluminum, which makes fabrication easy. The coating also scratches easily, leading to more sales. There is no point for consumers but there are few reasons market as a whole erroneously incentivize Teflon pans.

[teekert]

I use steel or iron where possible but fish… it’s just impossible. I have some nice greenpans for that but those are also controversial.