Carbon steel or cast iron all the way.
Enameled cast iron is also great
Is this the ceramic coated ones?
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I guess they don’t want our traffic then.
It’s unfortunate - I thought it was a fairly comprehensive and readable overview of the differences between enamel and ceramic coated
A bit ironic that a group labeling themselves the “Cookware Sustainability Alliance” is fighting to continue making unsustainable cookware.
Both the fact that they have a voice that influences politicians more than their actual voters and that they’re allowed to call themselves that name is really a perfect representation of society.
Keep in mind that nonstick cookware is still very safe when handled correctly. The problem lies in the manufacturing of these needed chemicals. When these chemicals get into the environment, because of improper safety management, it will stay there for hundreds of years, taking it’s toll on flora and fauna.
very safe when handled correctly
Too many people are not educated about that.
The problem lies in the manufacturing of these needed chemicals. When these chemicals get into the environment, because of improper safety managemen
Which is one of the reasons for that law, see:
Dubbed “Amara’s Law” after 20-year-old cancer victim Amara Strande, who in 2023 succumbed to a rare type of liver cancer linked to PFAS after growing up near a Minnesota-based 3M plant that dumped them into the local water supply, the new regulation bans the chemicals and any items made with them from being sold within the state.
Too many people are not educated about that.
I’ve never met the sort of idiots who put an empty pan on some turbo heat or use metal with nonstick, but I know they’re out there.
You’ve never known anyone to forget a pan on the stove? I know several and even did it once myself
You’ve never kept a nonstick pan despite visible damage to the coating “it looks ok…”?
You’ve never kept a “good” non-stick pan past its recommended life expectancy?
What about the broiler? Even though I should know better, it was just this year when I finally made the connection that I’ve been using a non-stick baking sheet under the broiler for decades.
No, no, don’t know, not sure what that means
You can find online a lot of surprisingly short life expectancies for non-stick pans. Most commonly you should replace after 5-7 years or any visible sign of damage to the coating. Do you make sure to replace all your pans by then?
PFOA was legal until I think 2012. That’s not only a failure of the government to establish safe standards, but all too many people kept that cookware years past when it was no longer used, perhaps even until today.
Non-stick cookware can off-gas toxic fumes when used too hot. A common broiler can do that: you should not use non-stick pans under a broiler. However most bakeware is non-stick. An actual broiler pan uses a ceramic coating to withstand the higher temperatures: you should not just use any bakeware of the right shape.
If my pans start breaking then ofc I will replace them.
PFOA was legal until I think 2012. That’s not only a failure of the government to establish safe standards, but all too many people kept that cookware years past when it was no longer used, perhaps even until today.
I thought cookware wasn’t really a concern here, more the plants making it and it getting into drinking water, being used in food packaging, that sort of stuff. “Overall, PTFE cookware is considered an insignificant exposure pathway to PFOA.”
Non-stick cookware can off-gas toxic fumes when used too hot. A common broiler can do that: you should not use non-stick pans under a broiler. However most bakeware is non-stick. An actual broiler pan uses a ceramic coating to withstand the higher temperatures: you should not just use any bakeware of the right shape.
You need to heat it up to 260’C which is quite hot. I haven’t had the heat limit be an issue personally.
Cookware isn’t a major vector for pfoa anymore
By 2007, studies showed that the concentration of PFOA in a sample of the U.S. population’s bloodstream (collected in 2003-2004) was 25 percent less than that in samples collected in 1999-2000
Normal cooking appliances can be hot enough both on stovetop (such as with a dry pan left on a burner) and in the broiler to damage non-stick coatings
Teflon and other coatings can begin to break down when the temperature reaches 500˚F
Yeah I guess that converts to 260°C but the point is that ovens do get this hot
You’re lucky then. I have had multiple flatmates who don’t understand what a nonstick pan is, scraped the pans up, and continued to use them. Despite warning.
Finns must be particularly smart folk hah
I was that idiot once. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you
*pushes all the nonstick pans into a cupboard to keep them safe*
Spoken like somebody who did not marry a person that is even more careless and ADHD than themselves, lol.
That sucks
Fortunately we only have one tiny nonstick pan that she uses for occasional eggs. And I’m the only one that uses the carbon steel wok or occasionally cast iron.
For everything else, stainless steel with an internal aluminum layer, and a nice black circle in the center of the pans, haha.
And how do you dispose of it correctly? Cookware shouldn’t need to come with an MSDS sheet
Put it in the metal recycling bin in my case. But depends on your local recycling/waste management system.
Wait, it’s not the material on the Pans?
That’s the first part, used correctly it’s a non issue so just use your nonstick correctly.
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Please don’t hawk tuah your pans while cooking
Using nonstick correctly: Don’t use metal and don’t heat it over 260 °C
Source on the pan giving you cancer?
Yes, non-stick becomes stick because the teflon coating comes off, it’s really hard to make teflon stick to anything. Using metal utensils will hasten this but afaik simply using heat will help loosen the teflon coating.
I don’t mind buying a new non-stick pan about every 5 years (last one lasted 7), I usuall stick to the cheapest ones, they serve a specific service to me that stainless ones can’t do.
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Afaik the coating is not a carcinogen only under certain circumstances like high heat can it produce something unsafe but even there it’s just potential, not yet proved to be carcinogenic but feel free to prove me wrong.
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I bought a cheap stainless pan about 20 years ago. Don’t have issues with food sticking, don’t have to worry abouy coatings coming off, and if the handle breaks I can make a new one.
Coating breaks down, stainless doesn’t.
I have a mix of stainless steel and cast iron. I’m not terribly worried about consuming small amounts of either of those.
A bonus is that because it’s all metal I can use most of it in ovens or while cooking outdoors.
Sticking isn’t really that much of an issue if you’re careful. I feel like non-stick would’ve never taken off if people knew how toxic it was in 1970.
Like throw it away every 6 months.
Edit: or 1 or 2 years, it was hyperbole. Instead of like never throwing it out?
The nonstick pans I’ve using are several years old now without any signs of deteriorating nonstick surfaces. Use cookware out of wood or plastic to not scrape off the coating.
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I have been a pro chef as well.
Doubt
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If you use it incorrectly then yeah. You might as well stop making food as well because clearly you don’t know what you’re doing.
What are you even talking about?
Are you le grand anti-adhesive chef?
It is the material on the pans, but the only case where the companies making the stuff were successfully sued was when they were caught for dumping intermediates of the chemical in to a tributary of Ohio river.
It’s hard to pin down how impactful the coatings on the pans are because of how many other sources of these kinds of fluorocarbons are in house hold items, and in the environment due to large companies disposing of them recklessly. We know for a fact that basically everyone has some level of these compounds in them due to their ubiquity.
The pans are just one potential source and a particularly notable one because they’re in contact with food.
What a ridiculous world we live in. The board members should be facing prison sentences, the company’s liquidated and the money back to the people.
How about the suggestions that they are selling a product that should last for several lifetimes but instead lasts for 5 years if you treat it very well?
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If we didn’t live in capitalist plutocracies masquerading as “democracy”, every non-stick pan ever sold would be blatant false advertising and they wouldn’t be profitable to sell anymore.
Lifetime guarantee my ass. None last more than a couple years of daily use regardless of how meticulously they’re cared for.
You’ll find that lifetime guarantee almost always means for production errors. Not wear and tear.
Just use cast iron and stainless steel. I don’t own anything else.
Cast iron ftw!
My mom has like “chemophobia” is is constantly afraid medications or “GMO”. Well looks like she got this part right tho, she was always afraid of a non stick stuff chipping off and hate any “non stick” cookware. Broken clock, twice a day, ya know.
All real nonstick cookware is Teflon or chemically related to it. I almost always use cast iron or carbon steel but they are not nonstick, you have to control heat and acidity for them to release well. You can even see in nonstick pans that liquids will tend to bead up and not spread out because of the surface, versus in any other pan you’ll only see water bead up when you hit certain temps. I can only achieve something like a French omelette in a nonstick pan, carbon steel has always been a disaster, because of that me and a lot of other people keep a nonstick around just for certain egg and crepe recipes.
Never really had any issue with Teflon (and Teflon substitute) pans, but I’ve been impressed with the non-stickiness of my dirt cheap “ceramic” wok.
The issue is that we don’t have much research on the ceramic coatings ether. They might be fine, but, there hasn’t really been enough testing to know. We might just be walking in to the same problem all over again, fluorocarbon coatings seemed fine at fist to, then they turned out to be a huge problem.
I’ve found that the ceramics lose their non stick quality at around the 2 year mark
These non-stick pans are usually cheaper then stainless steel and cast iron, so people with lower income are more prone to buy it. Consequently, considering that low education is associated with poverty, poor people are buying more of this type of pans and not using it “properly” so getting exposed to possibly more harm and not knowing about it.
Also, " just discard the pan if flocking occurs", is everything that this industry wants: you’ll continue in an indefinitely loop of trowing away pans and buying new ones for the maximization of their profits. Thus is expected that flocking will occur more soon than ever.
I use Greenpan, a ceramic nonstick pan
I was shopping around for nonstick pans some months ago, and exhaustively looking to see if any of them were free of pfas and other toxins. By the end I was nearly pulling my hair out because they pretty much are all bad, including Greenpan. I no longer have the variety of sources I found back then, but here’s one source on them (mind you I wouldn’t necessarily trust this site’s recommendations either).
https://www.leafscore.com/eco-friendly-kitchen-products/why-we-no-longer-recommend-greenpan/
Good to know, thanks for the link. I’ll be sure to check out the top picks in the article
You’ll want to do more research from multiple sources. My memory of it is hazy, but I think I remember the enameled cast iron sets being relatively the best option (albeit expensive), but the biggest thing I remember is every time I would find one source saying brand [a] was the good one, it wasn’t long before I’d find another source saying that tests showed the same brands had toxins in them. It’s an exercise in frustration.
It really boils down to what are you’re willing to tolerate and how much do you want to spend. Unless you want to go copper/stainless/cast but even those probably leach something into the food, and can be difficult to cook with. We need to invent the Star Trek replicator
Same! I love my Greenpans.
