Teflon pans are still legal in every country in the world and used in every restaurant and food preparation industry.
It's basically impossible to avoid this stuff unless you cook all of your meals from scratch and never eat out anywhere
It's basically impossible to avoid this stuff unless you cook all of your meals from scratch and never eat out anywhere
Which is pretty much what you should do if you are concerned about your health at all.
Thinking that you must optimize every single bit of your health 100% of the time or you do not care about your health at all is just pathological black and white thinking. What a miserable way to spend the mere decades you have on this planet.
Isn't this the message we get from the food companies marketing departments every day. Sure you can eat that thousand calorie desert once in a while as part of a healthy diet. Then before you know it we are in an obesity epidemic and what is genuinely healthy looks extreme to the majority.
Maybe the real reason Americans are fat is instead of taking responsibility of their own health they prefer to blame it on le marketing departments instead. Shrug.
Also at the end of the day it is ultimately largely down to fate/probability/deity of your choice.
You have control over some parameters, but you're just tweaking inputs to a huge RNG that is spinning 24/7 365 days a year and there's always a chance your numbers will come up
PTFE itself is about as inert as you can get, assuming it's not overheated. If you use PTFE cookwear, I recommend getting an IR thermometer so you can learn how your cooking setup responds and control the temperature properly.
restaurants also love high-heat and that's a no-no for teflon
* You should preheat until you get a leidenfrost effect - get some water on your fingers and flick it onto the skillet, it should form droplets that bounce around without boiling off.
* Once this happens, immediately turn the heat to the lowest setting so the skillet doesn't get too hot (most instructions are missing this step and I didn't really expect the skillet would get too hot - stainless steel just keeps getting hotter at a temperature the teflon nonstick would maintain heat). Depending on your stove, the lowest might be a little too low and heat is slowly lost, this is something you'll eventually get a feel for.
* After getting the leidenfrost effect (maybe? not sure how important it is to wait until after), you have to add something (butter or vegetable oil, for example) to coat the surface and not only get a nonstick effect but also sort of buffer the heat. It's kind of like cast-iron seasoning, but extremely low-effort and you do it / clean it off every usage. Some of the things I'd read before buying said the leidenfrost effect was the important part for getting a nonstick surface without mentioning this stage, which led to a pancake that was black and stuck to the skillet on one side and still liquid batter on the other.
And when cleaning:
* I'd mentioned sausage and bacon above, these leave gunk that sounds kind of like what you described except a lot more of it. For some reason getting a wet paper towel and rubbing down the skillet (instead of putting water on the skillet directly) works really well getting almost all of it off, though it will take several of them.
* If there's still residue not coming off, something I got from reddit worked even where grease-removing dish soap didn't: Lightly boil baking soda in water in the skillet for about 20 minutes. Don't let the water boil off or you'll be left with baking soda gunk stuck to the skillet, you want it to dissolve and soak in the hot water for a while before emptying it and wiping it down.
* And lastly one of the side reasons I like it over nonstick while cleaning: The surface is actually smooth. When using a scrunge to wipe it down you can feel where there's still something stuck to the surface, while nonstick is rough even when clean.