Having said that, I'm really liking the two nonstick ceramic pans I bought a few months ago, and I'm not sure if I'll need to toss them next year, yet.
Really? "Real" nonstick pans (not walmart) sell for something like $40 to $100+ a piece, but cast iron (Lodge Inc, etc) sells for something like $20. So CI works better, last forever, is cheaper, and its less toxic.
Its true that you can buy a pan shaped object from walmart for $5 that doesn't really work, but in all fairness the CI equivalent is the "free to a good home" pile of CI at an estate sale, so CI is still cheaper.
I will say there is one, exactly one use for teflon pans and thats burned cheese or burned eggs. Just something about it chemically that makes it stick to cast iron. Yet meats don't stick, very strange.
Poor quality control in manufacturing, natural crystalline formation defects, excessive impacts in handling, extreme thermal stresses, etc.
Cast iron, being a non-ductile material, in the daily thermal cycling of cooking, any minute microscopic fissure will start to propagate through a process known as metal fatigue, and eventually fail catastrophically.
To some degree, cast iron can be annealed or hardened, depending on your cooking habits. Something I do which I would not recommend to anyone else: I buy cheap cast iron cookware, heat it up red hot and pour cold water in it. If it didn't crack, them I heat it up again in an oven and let it cool down as slowly as possible to anneal any internal stress.
In any case, if the skillet is of great value to you, there are places that actually can repair it for you.
As a last tip, stop practicing skillet abuse and trying to be an iron chef. :-)
There's no need for toxic cookware. Get high quality cast iron and you can give it to your future generations like my grandmother did for me. And if that flakes into your food, it's just iron which your body needs!
But Big Bird is okay in the kitchen? ;-)
Smoke inhalation and Teflon toxicity are really different death mechanisms -- if you're interested, a quick read of the abstracts of articles on mass bird deaths from PTFE toxicity at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10879927 or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3276392/ is illuminating.
Butter in cast iron is toxic at 260 degrees. Teflon isn't toxic until 280 degrees.
Check out http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4723395
> Abstract: Japanese quail and parakeets were exposed to the pyrolysis products of: (1) commercial fry pans coated with Teflon® finish, (2) plastic fry pan handles, (3) corn oil, and (4) butter. Other materials used in the test were commercial aluminum fry pans and cast iron fry pans. A four-hour Approximate Lethal Temperature (ALT) was determined for each test material for each specie. All products tested were lethal to Japanese quail with ALT's ranging from 260° C for butter in cast iron to 370 °C for a plastic handle in a glass container. The ALT for a fry pan coated with Teflon® finish was 330°C. All products were also lethal to parakeets with ALT's of 260°C for both the pan coated with Teflon® finish plus butter and the cast iron pan plus butter. The ALT for a fry pan coated with Teflon® finish was 280°C.
Dupont and 3M love you.
And a frying pan is mostly metal, it'll get recycled at some point and the teflon burned away anyway.
The operating temperature of teflon (approx 600f) is higher than the operating temperature of the oil (approx 400f) you cook with.
When burned with a wick, no. But if just heated till is smokes? Just as toxic as any oil.
> even if oil is toxic, it seems to be something that is a required part of cooking - we assume the risk. Teflon, not so much.
Oil does not have to be toxic. Just don't exceed the smoke point. And like oil, in normal cooking Teflon is not toxic either. It's completely inert.
> Teflon does get that hot in the course of regular cooking. And it releases toxic fumes under those conditions.
No it does not. No one cooks at over 660f. (OK, maybe some specialized stuff, but not with regular cooking where you would use a pan.)
> Especially when there are choices for pans/cookware that do NOT release fluorocarbons at high temperatures.
Like Teflon? Which does not release them either?
Remember that Teflon and related products aren't only for stovetop use. There are many non-stick baking sheets and muffin pans as well, and it's not that unusual to cook muffins, scones, cakes, or pizza (esp pizza [3]) at temperatures above 400. Moreover, using the broiler can quickly get you to a high temperature.
Interestingly, there are a lot of documented cases of bird death in conjunction with Teflon usage [4]. Birds are very sensitive -- hence "canary in coal mine" -- but it is interesting to see that bird death can happen during normal use of Teflon and related products, certainly at temperatures below 400F.
[1,2] http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/06/the-food-lab-for-the-best..., http://www.boedeker.com/ptfe_p.htm [3] http://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-homemade-thin-crust-pizza-re... [4] http://www.ewg.org/research/canaries-kitchen/teflon-kills-bi...