Study finds link between 'forever chemicals' in cookware and liver cancer

It might be more ethical to stop selling the dangerous product until a replacement can be found, but I’m not a huge chemical manufacturer.

You mean like on a stovetop?

Almost everything else doesn't require particular consideration on stainless steel IMO. Potatoes can be more difficult than others though. Hash browns are easy, but little stir-fried potato cubes tend to stick.

With meat, generally, the food will unstick when it's sufficiently cooked, which is a handy coincidence if you ask me.

I'd love to get any pointers, too.

This makes very low-temp or delicate cooking in non-teflon pans a lot tougher, of course. Or anything for which starting from a low temp and slowly increasing is a nice thing to be able to do (tempering chocolate, for example)

[EDIT] Basically the value prop of teflon pans is that they can do just about everything at least well-enough (if not always being the best possible option) with just one type of pan, and that they are much more forgiving of lazy/untrained use or mistakes than stainless or cast iron. They can't do much that's impossible elsewhere, but it may require better technique and closer attention, and maybe having multiple types of pan, if you don't have a teflon option available. The above is one of the ways in which you have to apply some extra care and technique to avoid bad results, which can be all but totally ignored if you're using (undamaged) teflon.

Their main down-side (any health concerns aside) is that they are easily damaged by hard tools. With stainless and cast iron you can scramble your eggs with a metal fork, in a pinch, and it'll probably be entirely fine. Do that in teflon and you'll ruin the finish before long.

I've not seen any that were nonstick at low temp and with no fat in it, as teflon pans are. I can cold-start eggs in a bare teflon pan with no butter or bacon fat whatsoever, and make totally fine scrambled eggs while keeping the temp very low the entire time. I've seen some extremely well-seasoned cast iron pans (and they are damn nice, and quite nonstick, compared to steel or new cast iron) but they couldn't do that. Not without leaving a mess to clean up after and losing half your eggs to sticking. You could cook eggs in them and nothing would stick, but you had to start fairly hot and add a layer of fat first.

They also leach flavors into everything, which really comes through if you cook anything delicately-flavored in them, and even well-seasoned ones are vulnerable to anything acidic and will leach a ton of unwanted flavors if you cook with e.g. tomato sauce.

I still like them for lots of things, but they're not magic. Teflon... kinda is magic.

Anyone using stainless cookware should be using Bar Keepers Friend, it's like magic on stainless steel.

The oxalic acid in it removes calcium buildup and helps passivate the stainless steel, the surfactant in it somehow dissolves browned oil stains (even the nasty burned in ones on the bottom of the pot) and the feldspar dust in it provides a bit of abrasive action. Smells funny though. And wear gloves.

The only extra work is it really needs to thoroughly rinsed off or the feldspar dust leaves white residue when it dries.

But seriously it makes stainless look like new.

I don't cook anything that causes me a problem using stainless steel but I accept there may be cases where non-stick is essential.

My earlier point could be expanded to:

Make stainless steel your primary cookware and only fall back to a non-stick option when absolutely necessary. In doing so, you're risking far less exposure than someone who uses that stuff for everything they cook.

It’s significantly easier to fry eggs on seasoned cast iron vs stainless. I routinely use both.

This is strange to hear from a professional chef. I cook eggs overeasy on my cast iron all the time. What works for me is preheating the pan on moderate heat for a minute or two, putting in a bit of butter, and using a metal spatula. Haven't had a broken egg in forever.

I've certainly found you need less oil to prevent sticking on a well-seasoned cast iron compared to others. It really is a semi-nonstick layer. I've made eggs on mine with no butter just to test it out and with the right heat they didn't stick.

But I guess if you have other tools that are easier for the same result, there's not much reason to learn the harder one. Personally I like having a small collection of cast iron I can do anything with, one part saving space and one part just having a thing for cast iron.

If you then put fish / eggs in it after heating up a generous amount of oil to >boiling, it effectively acts nearly as good as a brand new nonstick pan.

Mirrored finish is worse for some things (browning vegetables) but great for delicate tasks like French omelettes.

[0] the trick is getting the pan hot enough for a water flick to jump and dance before putting oil or butter in.

Any time there is incomplete combustion of carbon compounds like cooking oil, carcinogenic molecules like benzo-a-pyrene are formed, which appears to cause or contribute to skin, lung, and bladder cancer.

Could be wrong.

I probably don't do anything at all 29 out of 30 uses or more. The other 1 gets a thin swipe of oil while drying under heat and that's it.

It's one of my fav kitchen purchases. The only annoyance was getting the beeswax off the pans on the first day.

So, use two pans, one foot the fillings and a fresh one for the eggs, adding the fillings once the eggs hit the oiled pan. Afterwards, neither needs more than a rinse out.

I just love cooking everything with it, including eggs.

I don't move the cast iron pan around a lot when I cook, but they're too heavy to do that anyway really, and unlike some thin stainless pans they don't warp so won't "walk" around the surface.

I have successfully removed the cast-iron crud from a glass-ceramic cooktop using a paste of 91% rubbing alcohol and baking soda. You can speed up the process by scraping with the back of a knife a few times first. Overall, it's not slower than cleaning the grease traps on a coil stove.

Induction works great. You onnly need gas for wok. It also doesn't become dirty like a resistive stove but you do have to be careful not to drop the skillet onto the glass.

You should avoid putting some cookwear directly into cool water though - the temperature shock can cause cracking and other damage if it's coated. I don't have a great rule of thumb for this, you should just double check any advice you can find specific to your cookwear.

1. https://www.bonappetit.com/story/what-does-deglaze-mean

EDIT: For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4029104/

Different oils have different smoke points, and heating an oil beyond that smoke point can polymerize the oil and produce free radicals.

Charring foods can create heterocyclic amines, which are associated with cancers.

This in no way damages your seasoning.

If I need to fry some fish or steak, I use my cast iron frying pan.

Due to our permission-first society, manufacturers can just replace BPA with a similar analogue, claim that it's BPA-free (which is technically true, but doesn't mention that the replacement is probably similarly problematic), and likely charge a premium for it.

Glass is competitively heavy and thick so adds to transport requirements. It also can't [generally] be made on site, unlike cans which are generally formed in the food factory for larger scale producers.

There is also breakages to consider. Modern 'bottling' plants move at an incredible speed and where glass is fragile any chips or breakages can shut the line down for cleaning; shards of glass are nasty to get in your drink. There is also transport, rough handling is much more likely to break glass bottles than burst cans, the cleanup is also easier with cans, and as glass weighs more it also adds to handling costs. This also applies to recycling, a bottle takes up much more space in your recycling bin than a bottle does.

Personally I too prefer glass, but once you get beyond extremely local small scale production the considerations change dramatically.

Go ahead.

I think it's a legitimate complaint about rainwater not being safe from PFAS.

> Mercury, a naturally occurring element, is released into the environment through a variety of natural processes and human activities, including mining and coal-fired power plants. "Mercury is a global pollutant," said Weiss-Penzias. "What's emitted in China can affect the United States just as much as what's emitted in the United States."

> As atmospheric mercury rains down on oceans, it is converted by anaerobic bacteria in deep waters to methylmercury, the most toxic form of mercury. Upwelling brings some methylmercury to the surface, where it is released back into the atmosphere and carried by fog. At high concentrations, methylmercury can cause neurological damage, including memory loss and reduced motor coordination, and it can decrease the viability of offspring.

> "Fog is a stabilizing medium for methylmercury," said Weiss-Penzias. "Fog drifts inland and rains down in microdroplets, collecting on vegetation and dripping to the ground, where the slow process of bioaccumulation begins."

You get the vast majority of those salts just from the food you eat.

After I learned to be a halfway competent cook, I discovered most cooking methods don't stick at all! Caramelizing, braising, roux, simmering, on and on- mankind learned to cook with ordinary cookware, and all the classic recipes and techniques reflect it.

It's not a matter of being a great cook - you simply don't need nonstick to braise or simmer, for example. So I'd phrase the exercise of learning to cook with steel pans as simply "learning to cook".

There's no maintenance to do with nonstick pans. Take off shelf, use, put in dishwasher, put back on shelf, repeat. When all you use are silicone spatulas (because they are frankly the best kind of spatula) then there's also no danger of scratching them.

I still can't get over how you guys think this is in any way sanitary. Not to mention that if any soap touches it you have to re-do the oil burning thing to remake the nonstick layer thing which isn't exactly practical, not to mention the seasoning thing. They're also rather heavy in comparison, not sure what kind of shape you're in that you manage to flip pancakes in one hah.

It's definitely harder than chucking the thing into the dishwasher for it to be washed with zero effort and maintenance. Scratches are also an impossibility with silicone spatulas.

> 1. Cast iron unseasoned (and you do the seasoning)

It's usually just grapeseed oil and you have to season further anyway...

--

Seriously, While travelling SE Asia, every single rice field from Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan.... etc.

It was REALLY common to see the petro-chem signs in the fields advertising the petro-chemical compound's name brands. (I couldnt read local languages and the 'English' name brands were not what we have here, so they didnt form a stark imprint... But the root OEM was mostly Monsanto et al ptrochems.

The point being, and this will be controversial, but its true:

There are a much higher % of trans/gay folks in these rural communities whereby the entire water table is permeated with petrochems. and their water, while treated, is still victim to contaminants of the petro chems in the water. (Its all about the Endocrines)

SOURCE: My FIL was the civil-hydro engineer for the largest water plant in Mindanao Philippines. His son was on the board of the "rice consortium" (I cant recall what it was called -- the governmental agency concerned with ensuring that everyone in the PH has access to rice as the main staple foodsource, and more about pesticides. Think of NASCAR branding of vehicles. (like Shell Oil) - but now imagine PESTICIDE branding of rice farms... with label signs for the pesticides being used.

Recall when Indian farmers were committing suicide over GMO seeds that produced no yield and they killed themselves before they could starve to death?

So I got rice production and water production information from these two engineers... And the dots were compelling.

Its the same type of contamination the fish are receiving from SunScreen.

This is replicated in essentially every mammal study where one provides an unlimited amount of food and comfort to an environment.

If sugar were taxed 1000% percent we would see a massive change in global health.

The worst that non-ionizing radiation can do to you, is burn you. Just like all stoves, an induction stove is non-ionizing radiation. So just like all stoves, it can burn you (if you touch the steel pan). Even the heat from a flame is non-ionizing radiation.

Microwave ovens also use non-ionizing radiation -- specifically, they use sub-infrared light -- AKA, radio waves. In your body, there are molecules that due to their shape & constituent ions have a dipole moment (water being the most prevalent example.) The dipole moment causes the molecule to vibrate, i.e. heat up in the presence of an E-M field. This is exactly why sunlight feels warm: it is jostling the dipole-momented molecules in your skin. The only reason microwaves are "scarier" than sunlight is, meat is translucent to radio waves, so microwaves -- despite being less energetic than visible light -- can heat up the inside of you where there are no pain receptors.

Then we have ionizing radiation, like UV, X-ray, Gamma-ray, etc. Ain't nobody cooking with those.

TL;DR don't worry unless you're standing next to an unshielded kilowatt radio transmitter.