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Comment by MrSkelter | Hacker News Reader

The precautionary principle plus what we know about heating plastic makes your reticence seem churlish.

There are easy, safe alternatives in wood, metal and silicone. There’s no need to risk it.

The problem is that even when there are easy, safe alternatives trying to avoid every little risk in your life will drive you crazy.

This is a clear case where a regulator should step in and just ban these black plastic utensils in favor of their safe alternatives.

That way you're not just protected from exposure in your own kitchen, but also when joining your friends for dinner.

Being deliberate about the materials you choose for your cookware is not the same as stressing out over every little risk in your life. For some people these are the materials that they use to prepare their food literally every day and one purchase will last years.

> one purchase will last years

Indeed. Although now I’m pretty annoyed about the 6 or so black plastic cooking utensils I received as a wedding gift nearly twenty years ago lasted this long, so I’ve been using them this whole time. Oh well, at least I don’t cook much :/

Sure, but this is pretty low hanging fruit. Moving to only metal and wood spatulas, cooking spoons, etc. has been a pretty cheap and easy switch. I would love to ALSO see regulation, but in the meantime I can at least improve things for myself.

Those are either going to (metal) scratch my non-stick pans, which I’m also told (on scant evidence I believe) causes cancer, or they’re (wood) going to be inflexible and hard to wash (can’t dishwasher them), which is inconvenient.

Putting wooden spatulas in the dishwasher shortens their life, but it doesn't destroy them straight away. I don't feel bad at all about putting cheap wooden cookware in the dishwasher. And, of course, if you're using non-stick pans, worrying about black plastic is a mote/beam kind of situation.

> shortens their life

I'm not even sure it does that. My cheapo wood spoons/turners/spatulas get dishwashed ~every time they're used, and they're 10? years old at this point. One finally cracked a few years ago but the rest are going strong.

Well, I stopped using non-stick years ago (though I have a waffle iron which I suppose has a non stick coating) and haven't missed it.

There is plenty non stick that doesn't contain teflon. Like ScanPan CTX.

> The problem is that even when there are easy, safe alternatives trying to avoid every little risk in your life will drive you crazy.

Not really, just avoid them as they come up. Case in point: Throw out your black cooking utensils and use an alt. Simple simple. No crazy to it.

Agreed. I don't have the time to pay attention to every 'maybe this is bad' thing. Figure it out for sure then ban it.

Indeed, panicking about everything little thing like this is a psychological nightmare— it leads to the same mental fatigue as the infinite list of item known to the State of California to cause cancer.

And yet the State of California helps drive regulation forward; e.g. the case of Red 3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq9dhQIoDw8). CA may err too much on the cry wolf end of the scale, but it's serving a vital function.

Why, exactly, would those California notifications cause even mild anxiety (let alone "a psychological nightmare") if you know as you claim that they are merely "panicking about everything little thing"?

If you're certain they're trivial concerns, then they should be easy to dismiss.

If the problem is that you're not sure if they're trivial -- or which are and which aren't -- then what we've uncovered is the shortcomings of a policy oriented primarily around notifications. You'd want judgments made by people with toxicology qualifications whose job it is to focus on questions like this. Which was the point of the comment you're responding to.

I don't really understand that POV. It is easier to never have to worry about it if you simply decline to use plastic cooking utensils. You never have to revisit the topic, never had to read any Atlantic articles at all coming out with "new risks" because you just decided to use wood long ago.

Except, I don't think wood would be any better as you still have to worry about how it was sourced and made to make sure nothing was added to it, right? I see a lot of people using bamboo for example. The only really safe alternative is stainless if you want to avoid thinking about it again.

Wood utensils are often coated to improve their stability (just like the inside of cans is coated in plastic, so joke’s on you if you choose cans for that reason).

Have you considered the safety profile of the ink used for any markings, the stain on the wood, and any oil or wax coatings?

Haha, well, yes. I actually made all of my wood cooking implements from scratch. I cut down the trees and carved them. eg:

https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1473049577905401859

I use Tried and True linseed oil or linseed oil + beeswax for my coatings. Occasionally I'll use pure walnut oil.

I understand that not everyone likes to make such things! But I don't suspect its hard to find pure wood ones. Lots of people make them. Even just searching "unfinished wooden kitchen utensils" yields a lot of results.

> It is easier to never have to worry about it if you simply decline to use plastic cooking utensils.

> I actually made all of my wood cooking implements from scratch. I cut down the trees and carved them.

Is this trolling? "It's easy, simple, just carve your own tools out of trees". Sounds like "just don't be poor" to me.

I'm not trolling, the commenter asked me if I had considered something, and it happens I have actually made them myself. Not because I think its necessary, it certainly isn't, I simply like to make things by hand and use things that I've made.

It is inexpensive to buy unfinished wood utensils, anyone can search for them. And in the context of the problem, silicone is just as well if wood seems too difficult to find.

To be fair, making wood utensils from scratch is multiple orders of magnitude easier than not being poor.

If you are a regular city dweller, not necessarily...

Sure and that protects you in your own kitchen, but not if you're eating anywhere else. Also what about all the other harmful chemicals with easy alternatives that you don't know about yet?

Only a regulating agency can truly protect you from exposure to harmful chemicals, because they can spend the time cataloguing all these chemicals and remove them not just from your home but everywhere else as well.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try and reduce your own exposure, it seems like a good idea. But ultimately it may just be a token effort because of all the other ways that you're exposed to those chemicals.

"Should I risk this?" is the wrong question in life. The burden of proof, as it were, is on those who are alleging a risk. I'm not gonna go through life worrying about every little thing just because it might be a problem. That goes double because people are constantly finding new things to worry about, most of which amount to nothing in the end.

Obesity 5% to 42%, Alzheimer’s 0% to 33% in the last century.

I think there’s a balance between being neurotic and being blissfully ignorant, but given the high level health data in the west it’s probably time to be more neurotic.

Holding its probability constant, if the cost of avoiding a risk is sufficiently low and the potential harm sufficiently high, avoiding it is more rational than both looking further into it or taking it.

That would make sense in a just society. Here in the USA, I would factor evidence in such as, do corporations have a habit of using chemicals that are later shown to be toxic? Do corporations prefer to let people die rather than recall, say an exploding car? Do corporation put out armies of lawyers and doctors to convince everyone that their product does not cause lung cancer? Do corporations now use automation to brigade and create the appearance of a majority?

Maybe a stupid question, but how can I tell the difference between plastic and silicone? We use a black spatula that's flexible (shapes a bit to the curvature of what you're wiping, super convenient) and doesn't scratch the pan while not being porous like wood (where I always wonder how many bacteria live in these crevasses). It seems perfect and is being sold specifically for cooking so I assumed this plastic, if that's what it is, is safe for that. Now, reading the article, it says it's not, but then in the comments I read it may be yet another material. How can one tell what's what?

Plastic isn't as heat tolerant, so you could subject the utensils to high heat (200°C should do it) and see if they start to melt. Whilst it's a destructive test, it's probably worth destroying and replacing plastic utensils as silicone ones are much better.

Edit: apparently you can tell the difference by squeezing them too - silicone will feel rubbery.

Side note: If you regularly and promptly clean your wooden utensils, bacteria and germs won't set in. Bacteria only becomes an issue when the wood splinters or is damaged in some way.

Also "capillary action" takes place in wood, meaning water and/or bacteria on the outside of the wooden surface essentially diffuses into the wood, "choking out" the surface bacteria and therefore not providing them with a good environment on which to grow. Additionally, wood has antimicrobial properties.

I recall hearing from somewhere that it's not so much the cleaning, but the drying that kills off the microbes.

There's no single important thing— It's a combination of killing as many pathogens as you can with heat or chemicals, removing as much material as you can that bacteria feed on, and drying. Drying isn't going to do any good if your spoon is contaminated with hepatitis a, for example, and drying is much less important if you're really taking down the bacteria count by sanitizing it and don't have much for bacteria to eat in there. But if the spoon has been around the block and you're just throwing it in the dishwasher on a regular cycle, drying is a larger part of the risk reduction.

Honestly though, in home kitchens, you're waaaay more likely to get foodborne illnesses from accidental cross-contamination or time/temperature abuse of particularly risky ready-to-eat foods that people aren't as careful with as they are with meat— like cut melons and questionable been sprouts, cooked cut vegetables, cooked rice, and others. It's funny how careful people are with jarred mayonnaise, which is pretty indestructible. If that potato salad left out on the table at the picnic made you sick, it's the potatoes, not the mayonnaise.

As an aside: most people are completely wrong about what gave them food poisoning. To get a better idea, you need to look up specific symptoms and incubation periods... But contact tracing is the only way to be sure. And the most common— norovirus— could have been picked up anywhere. Even if you wash your hands right before eating, you could have gotten it from the seat you pulled out before sitting down, and alcohol isn't great at killing it. Working on restaurants, when someone said "you made me sick! I'm going to call the board of health!" I'd say "feel free. They're going to tell you to get tested to see what you have so they can compare it to other reports, and in the unlikely event that some of the other hundreds of other people who ate here when you did got the same illnesses, I'd want the board of health to know about that."

Yeah, I get the impression that bagged salads are probably the most dangerous food item.

Well they've got a couple things going for them— they're sealed so there's very little chance of cross-contamination in transit or storage, and since it's a ready-to-eat food item rather than a raw ingredient, at least the more reputable companies probably need a pretty solid HACCP plan (short for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points— a formal for safety risk analysis and their mitigation procedures), which means at least someone is paying attention. But that's not a guarantee of course, as we've seen from McDonald's current sliced onion debacle, or Boar's Head's recent listeria recall that lead them to discontinue liver wurst and shut down their huge plant in Virginia. Either way, it's probably safer than store-cut stuff, but there are a lot of factors.

The big problems I've seen with greens all came from field contamination that couldn't be washed off, but that could also be because other types of contamination don't have a single source point and therefore don't trigger a recall/definable outbreak/news coverage.

And when it comes down to it, these are natural organisms that don't come from industrial food production, and will always be somewhat of a risk as long as we eat natural foods. Botulism spores naturally occur more frequently in parts of the western US in places that grow a lot of garlic and onions, which is why we need to refrigerate garlic oil and such— industrial food production is excellent at killing botulism and cases of poisoning come from improperly prepared home canned goods, because doing it 80% right kills everything else, and you could go 3 generations using that recipe before getting over contaminated with botulism, and then everyone at dinner that night dies. Eating industrial canned food exclusively could eliminate most risk of pathogens altogether, but then there's other risks like chemical leeching in many products, nutritional considerations, other contamination (normally a negligible risk, but would it be if you only ate industrial food?) and who really wants to do that, anyway.

But in the US, no for we sell is as risky as raw chicken. Not by a long shot. It's really bizarre that the FDA is so upright that they won't allow soft raw milk cheeses to be sold, but the USDA still, I believe, doesn't legally classify the deadly Salmonella Heidelberg to be an adulterant, as they do e. Coli OH157. Not sure if it's outdated, but when I was in culinary school some time ago, 1 in 4 chickens had enough Salmonella or campylobacter to make a healthy adult sick.

The most impactful things it seems to me home cooks can do to reduce their risks are a) don't to anything else while cutting raw meat, and immediately wash everything that touches it as soon as you're done, b) invest in an instant read thermometer if you cook meat that has a lot of surface area exposure to equipment (e.g. ground meat, sausage, cube steak), c) don't keep cut melons or bean sprouts for more than a few days, d) keep all uncooked meat in the bottom of your fridge below everything else.

There are other things that are risky that people don't realize— cooked room temperature rice, raw flour, room temperature brewed tea, etc etc etc— but they're less frequently problematic. It's a risk/reward just like anything else. A tea shop in Boston made a ton of people sick not refrigerating it's iced tea some years ago, but it didn't kill anyone, and lots of people have made sun tea without getting sick. People WAY overestimate the risk of eating raw eggs, but something like 1 in 10k eggs could do it.

> It's really bizarre that the FDA is so upright that they won't allow soft raw milk cheeses to be sold

I'm in the UK and didn't realise that. We easily buy raw milk cheeses here, but they do carry a warning about people with compromised immune systems and pregnant women.

> There are other things that are risky that people don't realize— cooked room temperature rice, raw flour, room temperature brewed tea

I was aware of the issues with pre-cooked rice and how reheating it is unlikely to make it safe. Raw flour is a new one for me - I would assume that it being dried would kill off most nasties.

However, room temperature brewed tea is incredibly dangerous here in the UK as you're likely to get lynched if you serve that to someone as a nice cuppa. Otherwise, I'd guess that it's the sugar content that gives the bacteria something to munch - it's why kombucha can be dangerous if not brewed carefully though that's more a case of getting the desirable bacteria to out-compete the nasty ones.

The danger in the US involves general poor tea handling with iced tea. Sun Tea involves leaving water and tea bags in the sun for a long while to do kind of a cold brew. Many places (shitty donut shops, greasy spoon diners, etc) make iced tea by stuffing the filter basket on their coffee pots with tea bags, often not getting the tea up to a safe temperature to kill pathogens. It's often then let at room temperature until it's served. It doesn't need sugar in it to be a problem— heck, legionnaires disease grows in closed water circulation systems. It's not common, but in the past decade-and-a-half, there have been a few outbreaks in the US. Also, studies have shown that the containers for sliced lemons in restaurant service stations are frequently teeming with fecal coliform bacteria. If they toss lemons in there to cover up the disgusting residual old coffee flavor, even better.

Heathens over here.

So properly made kombucha wouldn't be risky, but as you noted, it isn't always properly made. You can do most culinary things wrong enough to get you sick if you really put your heart into it.

I recall reading many years ago when I was making some kombucha that one of the problems was using a ceramic container that could leach lead into the brew - presumably related to the acidity of it.

Nowadays, I like to make kefir as that seems like the easiest fermentation - milk and kefir grains in a covered glass jar (not airtight) and leave for a day. Temperature isn't critical and there's no sterilisation needed.

Yeah I avoid porous things in general for that sort of work, but I remember hearing that the lower-end of Mexican ceramic crocks are particularly bad. I see a lot of lead recalls for Chinese products but it could just be because there are so many products coming out of China. When I'm doing any yoghurt type thing, I use my instant pot. Works like a charm.

I make spoons and spatulas from various hardwood, one of me favorites being Mexican cocobolo. They hold up exceedingly welland despite reports of it containing irritants, neither myself or those I've made them for have any problems - I believe it's pretty much only the dust that tranfers the irritant.

Most of my utensils do not float. I finish them with a homemade or food grade beeswax. The act of cooking alters the new look, but they acquire their own, slightly less perfect, but reasonable finish.

I'll be making some katalox spoon/spats soon... another glorious wood, but not quite as remarkable as a good piece of cocobolo, which can be really special.

Anyway, my work with these utensils started for the precise purpose of avoiding plastic.

I read somewhere that if you bend/squeeze silicone, it shouldn't turn white. If it does, it's plastic. You may need to really bend/squeeze it.

Not all plastics do either, but it’s something.

Nope. In fact, the higher density silicone with better heat resistance will turn white on bending far more readily than the low grade stuff designed for hair dryer pockets and such.

The black part in plastics is due to the addition of cheap carbon black to recycled plastic which is usually pale and unappealing grey, it is a form of 'soot produced by the incomplete combustion of coal, petroleum or vegetable matter. It is added to plastics as a reinforcing substance, the same reason for which it finds widespread use in tires' .https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-did-you-know/d...

Silicon is rubbery, but unlike rubber it is normally not sticky to either your hand or food.

Buy something that is silicone and use it as a reference. Silicone is distinct, but a lot of the words that one would use to describe it can also apply to plastic, strictly because language is vague. But once you have a reference it becomes pretty clear what is and isn't silicone.

Wood is not dishwasher safe, metal will damage the cookware's non-stick coating, which may be worse than the plastic I'm trying to avoid. I guess that leaves silicone.

Wood is technically not dishwasher safe, but I have wooden spoons that I’ve inherited from my grandma and they still hold up despite being in the dishwasher regularly.

The anecdata of this thread alone might be enough to re-categorize wood spoons as dishwasher safe.

Silicone is not rigid, which is sometimes a problem.

If we're talking about health and cookware, you're not going to want nonstick cookware.

Didn't read the whole comment did you?

It's fine if it's not scratched and you don't overheat it.

> don't overheat it

Good luck with that. Temperature isn't perfect and hot pockets of higher temperatures form.

The problem temperature is 260°C which can easily be avoided by not heating an empty pan (oil/liquids will distribute the heat more evenly) and you'd be unlikely to want to cook at that kind of temperature.

Teflon is not very thermally conductive, so the bottom contacting the metal substrate may be at a significantly higher temperature than the top. Chemistry reactions have activation energies, and you can generally always trade temperature for time. If it happens in a minute at 260 C, it will still happen at 200 C, just slower.

> If it happens in a minute at 260 C, it will still happen at 200 C, just slower.

I don't think that's particularly accurate unless you're considering the action of individual atoms. e.g. Water is considered to boil at 100°C but there will be some water evaporating at lower temperatures but this is a different process that only occurs at the surface. I don't think it's accurate to say that water is "slowly boiling" at low temperatures unless you're reducing atmospheric pressure.

Well yes water does evaporate at lower temperatures, it just takes a lot longer. But you’re right we don’t call that boiling.

The result is the same though. The water leaves the container and enters the atmosphere as vapor. You can call the former "decomposition", and the latter "leaching", but you are eating the degradation products either way.

Because of the way toxicity works happening slower is quite relevant. Similarly if you drink a bottle of vodka slowly enough you will have no significant health effects but if you drink it in 2 minutes then it’s not going to be great.

Different poisons have different accumulation characteristics. The relevant part here is that perfluorocarbons are fairly persistent in your body. Your body needs a few hours or a day to process the vodka, but the PFAS in your blood takes months/years to leave your body.

Diamond coated ceramic should be fine.

For what it's worth, I stopped using non-stick cookware in favour of carbon steel and haven't missed it.

My carbon steel pans are essentially non-stick and a fraction of the weight of my cast iron ones. They're cheaper than their stainless All-Clad counterparts. They're a pleasure to cook with.

Sure, you can get a cheap non-stick pan that may or may not give you cancer, but why? I'm in my 40s and since I can remember thought it made no sense to cook with plastic anything. My parents still cook with the same wooden spoons my dad brought back from Algeria before I was born. The pans will last multiple lifetimes. The same can't be said for their plastic and non-stick counterparts.

I spent some time fiddling with seasoning, etc. but at this point I just cook like normal, use a bit more oil with eggs (still not much), and keep steel wool handy. Some people decry steel wool but for me it works great and the pan is a delight.

Sincere question - my mom always told me to never put wooden utensils in the dishwasher, but I never got a great answer as to why. I put my wooden spatulas in there. My question is, is it just because it's destructive to the wood? Or is there something else that I should be concerned about?

The wood dries out and cracks.

Just to echo this comment. I don't put my wood cutting boards in the dishwasher because they dry out and crack. Wood utensils have been fine in the dishwasher. They seem much less prone to cracking than cutting boards and, when they do crack, I just throw them out and replace them with cheap new ones. I see wood utensils as a wear-item.

It really depends on the wood used. Some should absolutely, under no circumstance, be expose to a hot + wet environment. Some, you can put in the dishwasher and they are fine. I do use a lot of wooden cooking utensil and most of them go in the dishwasher. But I do have some nicer wooden spoon that are made from a more precious wood that I would always wash by hand.

Another thing is that a loot of wooden utensil are made in several piece stick together with glue. A lot of cutting board are made that way for example (especially the cheap ones). Most glue are not very dishwasher safe. It might be fine for a few wash, and then you end up with pieces of a cutting board.

What is your opinion on food-grade mineral oil for helping with wood that is starting to get dry (and dramatically extending the useful lifespan)? I've been told that it's fine, but who knows these days.

No clue honestly. I usually use something like sunflower oil to maintain wooden utensil. This is what Opinel recommend for their knife, although it is more for the metal locking mechanism.

> glue

plus side, it's very clear when the piece is damaged beyond repair.

Within the last 20+ years one of about 5 wooden spoons in our household has cracked even though they're always cleaned in the dishwasher. I don't see the problem.

Silicone's flavor leaches into your food, which some people can notice.

I'm one of those people. Absolutely can't stand it

isn't it more that silicone absorbs lipids and soaps? so you are tasting the dishwasher or last meal. I bake silicone cookware in the oven on broil, as it removes absorbed food. Fair warning, this is a terrible idea if the cookware isn't 100% silicone.

This is why I never put silicone in the dishwasher

Lots of things can also absorb dishwasher detergents which is probably not great for your health. But for non porous things dishwashers are great !

I have wood spoons that go in the dishwasher multiple times per week for years and they're fine.

It's why I like wood. You don't need to baby it, and if it breaks down, you throw it out and it returns to the earth.

Use a carbon steel or cast iron pan and learn how to season properly. They are very nonstick if you cook correctly in them, and their surface is incredibly durable (I use metal spatulas and I primarily cook on carbon steel and a cast iron griddle.) you can also incorporate stainless steel pots, although stainless pans are not nonstick and very hard to use for beginners.

question since you obviously know the topic!

a cast iron or "stainless" steel pan will get some gruff from cooking since its nonstick. It regularly goes to the dishwasher, some stuff won't get cleaned. Mostly oil burn stains it seems ("stainless" hardly!) .

Is that completely safe/expected ?

We obviously diddn't get that with the nonstick pans. We got rid of that stuff for a reason, now i'm not sure what is worse: nonstick pan surface OR hard-stuck burnt oil on a stainless steel pan. Thoughts?

Not the person you're replying to, but here's my $0.02. We have a couple stainless frying pans that we've had for a long time, and I've never been much a fan of them. I find they stick pretty bad no matter what procedures you use. Our main pan is a 12" cast iron that I smoothed out the bottom cool surface with a flapper wheel on an angle grinder. It's been used thousands of times over at least a decade and never gives me any trouble. I usually clean it with a stainless steel scrubber and hot water, and then either wipe it clean with a paper towel, or just put it on a burner on low to dry out. I'm not afraid to use soap if needed, but I find it rarely is. We also cook anything in it, including tomato sauce or whatever, and have never had a problem related to that. I find that most of the conventional wisdom around cast iron is just a bunch of voodoo. Just use it and don't worry about it. Beyond the cast iron, we have some ceramic coated cast iron dutch ovens/pots (including a real Le Crueset and a couple knock offs) and stainless steel pots. I'm real happy with our setup. No teflon, no grief, lots of thermal mass for even cooking. I don't feel like we've had to make a tradeoff. With the right equipment, it's really all upside from my point of view.

thank you, i will follow this advice

I can second your advice about the cast iron. A lot of people are too precious about these things.

I use mine daily for anything and everything. I wash it with Dawn. It continues to work as well as any cast iron I have ever seen.

Apparently the "don't use soap on it" advice stems from the era of harsher lye based soaps.

Cast iron is intentionally seasoned with oxidized cooking oil to make it non stick, and that should not be cleaned off.

Stainless is pretty easy to get totally clean with steel wool and/or scotchbrite pad sponges.

And Barkeeper's Friend makes it easy to polish up stainless if you like it to look fresh. I find it's mostly cosmetic, but I still do it a few times a year.

Stainless, when used properly, won't have hard-stuck burnt oil on it. They clean up nicely by just boiling some water in it and then a light scrub-- no need for dishwasher.

Worst case-- you've gone too high in temperature for too long and you need some bon-ami.

Not a cooking enthusiast but you should not put cast iron in the dishwasher. Heat some water in the pan, add a tiny drop of soap and use a spatula to scrape off any residue. Once dry add some oil (otherwise it will rust)

I have never been able to figure out stainless steel on the other hand. Apparently the trick is getting to the right temperature but I have never gotten it to work.

On the health side, Teflon pans used to be considered totally safe until they were not. Now they are considered safe again as they no longer use PFOA. Burnt oil and iron oxide might not be ideal either but at least it isn't novel to humans as it has been used for thousands of years. Unfortunately, difficult to get hard science on such subjects as it would have extremely large studies conducted over large periods of time to overcome the noise. In any case there are probably far more impactful decisions in life than which kind of pan to use.

A weak acid (tomato paste, dilute vinegar, ...) will help with burned-on stuff, but the real trick is just good, hard scrubbing with an abrasive (steel wool or similar).

A properly seasoned cast iron pan can be non-stick but the temperature has to be right, you need shortening, and you can't just put any amount of food in it at any temperature.

Stainless is can do the job too, but temperature and shortening is even more important. There's a much tighter window of temperature that it works at. You do the "water drop test" to determine that it's ready. See youtube for an infinity of videos on how to check the stainless is at right temperature!

I've given up on non-stick pans. They're semi-disposable because the don't last very long and you don't want to use them at high temperatures. All it takes is a little bit of skill to never have to use non-stick teflon pans.

I use cast iron for everything I possibly can, but there is one use case I still need non-stick pans for: frying eggs. The only way to get them to not stick in even the best seasoned cast iron pan is copious amounts of oil, which seems like it's probably worse than a few molecules of PTFE derivates.

I've been frying eggs in my cast iron every morning for years, works like a charm! I use a small slice of butter and it's nonstick. The eggs don't freely slide around like they would in a non-stick pan, but after frying on one side for a moment I can easily move them with a metal spatula.

My trick though is that I have a cast iron only for eggs... if I cook other stuff in it the smooth buttery coating gets lost and the eggs start sticking again. After a few days of eggs-only it becomes nonstick again.

Just get a normal stainless steel pan. And leave it alone. It never sticks.

I’m guessing your cast iron pan isn’t polished. If it is, you can get it to be non stick.

Stainless steel also works very well. You just need to preheat it to get the Leidenfrost effect.

I did actually polish this one, and to be fair it works mostly OK in that I'm not scraping the eggs off with a metal spatula, but it still sticks enough to be annoying, and for a teflon pot to be a measurably superior solution.

I haven't played much with preheating though, I'll have to try that - thanks for the suggestion :-)

I think you will be surprised how well stainless works when it has thin layer of fresh oil and preheated to the right temperature such that it passes the "dancing drop" test.

Really? I fry eggs in a cast iron pan almost every day, with just a little cooking spray or wipe of oil (like, put a little oil in, wipe it out with a paper towel, painting the whole surface with oil in the process). I mean, it's not no oil, but it's far from copious amounts.

Just gonna throw this out that as a long time seasoned cookware junkie:

There isn't really any clear data on what exactly the seasoning on our pans is, and what by-products are also formed. It seems somehow no one has done an academic deep dive on cast iron. Heating oils to the point of polymerization is very likely to have byproducts.

Now for the conspiratorial part, it seems likely that large manufacturers (Lodge) have done the research internally, but they haven't released anything along the lines of "We have research backing the safety of our pans!".

In some ways I really would not be surprised if it comes out that the seasoning process creates all manner of nasty byproducts.

I could be wrong but I thought it was well known and studied that the seasoned part of oil in cast iron were types of trans fats. Not great for you in any amount but also probably very tiny amounts are actually consumed.

Personally I make a lot of pressure cooker stews and things with more liquid which is less hassle and less chance of burning. If it needs to be seared in the outside then that can be done quickly without needing to cook the whole thing (pan or oven)

I'm with Kenji Lopez-Alt on this one. No matter how nonstick your cast iron or carbon steel pan is, it's not as nonstick as Teflon, which is so nonstick that we had to come up with new methods to get it to bond to surfaces. Carbon steel pans are great, but they simply are not a replacement for nonstick.

Glass...which is silicon I guess.

> Wood is not dishwasher safe...

Maybe, but they're so easy to clean without a dishwasher. And even easier to clean later if you rinse them off immediately after cooking so stuff doesn't stick.

I have a disability which makes hand-washing cookware impractical, regardless of how "easy" it is for a "normal" person.

After you have finished cooking and have transferred the food to the plates or serving dishes or wherever (and your cookware is still hot!), add some cooking wine or tomato juice (anything that is a bit acidic) and deglaze the cookware. You can use the result or discard it, but the end result is cookware that is far, far easier to clean.

Some other options include getting a spouse that will do it for you, or to use the dishwasher and just accept that you will have to replace things more frequently.

> Some other options include getting a spouse that will do it for you

Listen to yourself man. Get a spouse because you can't personally wash cookware by hand? If you make decisions in your own life how you're suggesting I should then I shudder to think what a horror show it must be.

A lot of wood is dishwasher safe. But you should ask / check before hand. If it is made a several pieces glued together, it will probably not be.

For cookware with PTFE non-stick coating, it is basically the only solution, with silicone, but I personally don't like silicone utensil.

In any case, I also started to avoid PTFE coated cookware, because no matter how well you treat them, the coating will eventually get damaged (and PTFE is supposedly not very good for you). Now I just use stainless steel for anything that is not too sticky, and carbon steel for everything that need a bit of a non-stick surface to be cooked properly. They are not too hard to maintain and they don't get damaged like PTFE non-stick pan.

The only unsafe thing I've ever experienced with wood in the dishwasher is a fire risk from a spoon getting blown off the top rack onto the heating element at the bottom.

In my country we have some ridiculous newspapers that will publish any story with "may cause cancer" in the headline. So for a lot of people these stories are a boy-who-cried-wolf situation.

Precautionary principle? I'm sorry to say stainless steel may leech heavy metals into food during cooking [1]

And also silicone may leech potentially harmful chemicals into food [2]

Nonstick coatings? Teflon flu "could be a real concern" [3]

Wooden spoons are porous and can crack, making them a breeding ground for germs, and they can splinter [4] - and good luck finding a wooden spatula that doesn't suck.

So personally I don't think it's churlish to take these warnings with a grain of salt. Especially for rarely-used pieces of cookware.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4284091/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19680914/ [3] https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/teflon-flu-r... [4] https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1941959/replace-...

A well made point, but you won't get through. When you're in the fad, it's the center of the universe. Plus there will be an endless number of presently unknown medical worries and niggles. It all comes out in the wash, the best bet is diversification.

I can relate to your distrust of the various click-baity headlines of papers, but Teflon flu is a real thing. It's easily avoided by not over-heating pans - keep them under 260°C and don't heat them when empty as that can result in hot spots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever

I think that’s kind of the point - all the things they listed are real things. Which are most important to avoid?

i only use wooden spoons and spatulas and i almost never had them crack or splinter. if an edge does break off i can use a knife or sandpaper to make it smooth. the only downside is that some spatulas are not thin enough on the front edge, making them more difficult to use for things like pancakes or omelettes. i always keep an eye out for good wooden spatulas. i had some quite nice ones over the years. and when i move i take them with me, just in case i can't get another good one in the next location.

The part that really drives me up the wall is that the demographics who decades ago decried plastics to be superior because they don't harbor bacteria like wood or break dangerously like glass are roughly the same ones who are now complaining about plastic.

I don't have a cultural analogy for this situation but whatever it is is worse than "boy who cried wolf".

What an irrationally angry sentiment. Praytell, what "demographic" would this be?

'Busybodies'

I am old enough to remember when we needed to switch to plastic bags over paper to "save the trees"

Dismissing the papers as lies is very different from considering your usage of the studied tools/materials, and deciding you're not actually recreating the failure-modes studied in the papers enough to worry about your current tools.

in California, every metal utensil is marked with "causes cancer"

I'll add to that.

18/0 stainless steel is the best. No nickel etc.

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