• boonhet@lemm.ee
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        26 days ago

        Why’s that? I’ve never owned any of the 3, all pans have been some form of nonstick.

        • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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          26 days ago

          Carbon steel and cast iron cookware have reactive metal surfaces that will rust if left exposed to moisture and air, especially when heated. To use these materials of cookware you need to season them which involves washing the surface clean and applying a very thin layer of oil which you then heat up to a high temperature (usually past the smoke point, but not strictly necessary).

          The heating of oil in contact with the metal causes the oil molecules to polymerize and bond to the metal surface. Done properly, this gives your cast iron and carbon steel cookware a smooth, glassy, slightly brown protective polymer layer which prevents rust and helps foods release (though not as well as nonstick pans). The seasoning process can be repeated as many times as you like and it builds up more and more layers which darken over time. A well seasoned piece of cast iron or carbon steel cookware will look shiny and jet black, though this is not necessary for cooking.

          The downside of these materials is that acidic or basic foods can damage the polymer layer and dissolve it right off the pan with enough heat and cooking time. Tomato sauce is a classic example of an acidic food that will eat away at the seasoning of a cast iron or carbon steel pan. A well seasoned pan can still be used to cook a tomato sauce, but not one you plan to be simmering for hours and hours (like some Sunday meat sauce like you’d see in Goodfellas).

          Stainless steel (as well as enameled or porcelain coated) cookware is nonreactive so you can use it to cook acidic or basic foods no problem!

          • boonhet@lemm.ee
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            26 days ago

            Ohh right, I didn’t think about how acidic tomatoes are. I love tomatoes, but some of the people around me get absolutely horrible stomach pains apparently.

            Anyway, we make tomato based sauces at home, but never have we simmered anything for several hours like that cooking scene in Goodfellas. Should I? Would it be significantly better?

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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              26 days ago

              Oh you’ve got no idea how good tomato sauce can get then! It’s also great for making huge batches so you freeze most of it for later.

            • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              24 days ago

              It depends what you’re going for. There are a lot of classic long simmered tomato sauces, they are a different thing than fast cooked ones though. Long cooked ones tend to be more mellow and complex, but lose some of the acidic zing, adding a bit of vinegar or wine at the end can bring that back though.

              Just don’t make them in a cast iron, not only will the strip the seasoning, they will also absorb some iron, great if you have an iron deficiency, but it can make the sauce taste a bit metal-y.

          • Valmond@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            I thought there, who on earth makes tomato sauce in a non-stick pan 😅

            Nice writeup btw!

            So my stainless steel/inox Lagostina pan is non reactive? What would be the benefit from having a carbon steel one (I have used cast iron a lot but it’s so heavy)?

            Any community you’d recommend?

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              25 days ago

              Exactly that: weight. Some people will give you other reasons why they like carbon steel but the most important is that it works like cast iron only lighter

            • Onsotumenh@discuss.tchncs.de
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              26 days ago

              A well seasoned carbon steel is pretty much non-stick while in a stainless you usually want some sticking to have something to deglaze for sauces.

            • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              24 days ago

              Carbon steel is lighter but this also has less thermal mass, so it heats up and cools down faster, also tends to have less even heating.

              So, searing something quickly on a preheated pan is a bit harder since the pan will cool off faster as the food leaches the heat out. Important for stuff like stir fry’s or steaks where you want short periods of intense heat for good searing at the surface but not over cooking in the interior.

          • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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            26 days ago

            I don’t want to cause a panic, but acids like tomato juice, ascorbic, citric and vinegar can attack stainless steel and dissolved chrome in the process.

            But don’t think of it as extra chrome in your diet. After all, we get iron rich water from our cast iron pipes and fittings. Nah, think of it as that extra cancer you’re gonna be getting! Iron never gave you cancer, that’s a lousy metal. But chrome is pretty good!

              • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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                25 days ago

                Basically go to goodwill and have a look at their used stainless pans and then compare that to what you see at the store. Its not magic material. You put some tomatoes paste or salty beans or vinegar on it and you’ll be getting some chrome dissolved on to your food. Great! Its just a little right? Wrong! What else do you see? Scratches! Every time you use a metal spoon or steel wool to grab food or clean the pan, you create brand new unreacted leachable metal chrome…pans are probably grade 18 or 316 stainless steel, so 18% of whatever shavings you made becomes happy trivalent Cr-3 ions floating around with your tasty Na and CL lol. Look at pans that got overheated or pans where you accidentally left a spoon before going on vacation for a week…they’re black where some food was left on the surface due to oxygen depletion. Stainless steel is by no means the savior. Its the magic bullet, along with plastic in the food processing business! Processed foods pass thru churning mechanisms…metal rubbing and shedding stuff on to the food.

                This is why I sleep at night. I’m basically a walking FEMA disaster zone, yet, I still somehow get to my 8hr enslavement work and then back to my rest of the day 2-3 hours worth of family disfunctions just fine.

        • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
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          23 days ago

          TLDR: the tomato sauce (and other acidic fruits) reacts with the iron. Although properly seasoning (fat treating) your pan will ameliorate it, and humanity has used it for time immemorial. It does eat away some of the seasoning, leading to having to te season it, which can be annoying.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        25 days ago

        I just use a aluminum pan. It doesn’t really matter if it heats evenly since you are making a liquid.

            • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              24 days ago

              If there is exposed aluminum, it will dissolve readily in to acidic food, polishing or not, and unlike dissolved iron which tastes off but might actually be good if you don’t get enough iron in your diet, aluminum has some toxicity to it, not a huge worry but something to be aware of.

      • Jesus@lemmy.world
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        26 days ago

        Used cast iron is usually better than a lot of new stuff. Back in the day, it was common for the pitted surfaces to be ground smooth.

        Now you can only get that with some “premium brands” that are willing to take a grinder to a pan before throwing it in the box.

        • stoy@lemmy.zip
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          26 days ago

          SO THAT IS WHY MY FRYING PAN IS ANNOYING!

          I just thought it was going to be naturally ground down over time…

          Damn it, now I gotta find a thrift store.

          • Yondoza@sh.itjust.works
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            26 days ago

            Or you can season the shit out of it. That will also smooth out the surface. Seasoning basically makes non-stick layers on your pan using burned oil.

            Preferably outdoors wipe a thin film of cooking oil on the pan and heat it up till it smokes, leaves smokey for a bit, cool down and repeat.

            It’d probably be smart to read real instructions somewhere else, but that’s the jist of it.

          • Jesus@lemmy.world
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            26 days ago

            You can still get vintage Wagner cast iron for a decent price on eBay or FB marketplace, but over the past 15 years people have started to catch on to what I just mentioned. So it’s not as dirt cheap as it once was.

            These days I generally know how to cook on a pitted lodge without it sticking, but smooth cast iron is more forgiving.

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              25 days ago

              The difference is what part is more forgiving

              • a smooth well seasoned surface is most forgiving for your food not sticking
              • a rough sandcast surface is most forgiving of poor cleaning habits. The seasoning is usually good enough and it is more likely to remain adhered
            • archemist@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              25 days ago

              My experience with flaxseed oil was less than stellar. It works real nice at first, you get a good strong non stick seasoning, but after a few uses it starts flaking off. My guess is that it forms too hard of a coating, so when the pan expands and contracts through use, it starts to separate from the seasoning. Avocado oil works pretty well, and so does normal vegetable or canola oil. The surface isn’t as nice as a fresh flaxseed oil coating, but it’s a lot more forgiving through use.

        • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          24 days ago

          Got a few inherited from my grand and great grand parents, they’re amazing and perfect. Even got a cast iron muffin tin which is great for making Yorkshire puddings.

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              25 days ago

              I have my browser configured to default to reader mode, and it seems readable

              • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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                25 days ago

                Safeguarding Your Website 🕵️

                We’re checking if you’re a real person and not an automated bad bot. Usually, the captcha below will complete itself. If it doesn’t, simply click the checkbox in the captcha to verify. Once verified, you’ll be taken to the page you wanted to visit. Human verification is in progress ✨ Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue

                If for some reason after verifying the captcha above, you are constantly being redirected to this exact same page to re-verify the captcha again, then please click on the button below to get in touch with the support team.

                • AA5B@lemmy.world
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                  25 days ago

                  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

    • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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      25 days ago

      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.

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      26 days ago

      It is chemically inert. It just becomes a problem when you physically abrade it into billions of microparticles that become embedded in your tissues…

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          25 days ago

          Likely, if we’re being honest.

          Health agencies haven’t done that much investigation (wheeeee regulatory capture) into wtf microplastics do in nuance to all of our various biological systems, but we do know that microplastics basically pervade everything at every level of the food chain at this point. So it’s more about answering the question of “how much did we fuck ourselves” now.

    • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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      26 days ago

      Has there been any evidence to point out that PFTE is not inert?

      This article seems to be about the production of PFTE, which is well-known to be quite harmful, but the end product is as far as I know not unsafe to use.

        • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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          26 days ago

          That article basically confirms my understanding of the safety implications of PTFE. Don’t overheat, and discard once flaking, but ingesting flakes is unlikely to be harmful.

          I’ve started favouring other types of cookware as well - my personal favourite is enameled cast iron - but I’m really not keen on using neither cast iron nor carbon steel. I feel like proponents downplay the increased maintenance that comes with that type of cookware.

          I do have one ceramic non-stick pan that is pretty good, but once it goes bad I’m probably going to try to find an enameled cast iron replacement for it.

          • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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            25 days ago

            I love my cast iron specifically because it requires extremely little maintenance. The only inconveniece compared to stainless steel pans is that after I wash it, I have to dry it by hand or toss it on the stove until it dries to avoid rust.

            Other than that, I never manually season it (just cooking with it does that for me), I only use metal or wood utensils (I scrape foods vigorously, especially smashburgers, and the seasoning is totally fine).

            IMO if the seasoning isn’t good enough to handle my abuse, then it isn’t good enough to be on the pan.

            Been using 'em for years and they still look brand new. Also what they say about seasoning being non-stick is true. It’s crazy how I can grill chicken breast without any oil and it barely sticks at all. The sear you can get on a cast iron due to heat retention is also second to none.

            My problem with enameled cast iron is that once the enamel cracks or chips, that cookware is essentially garbage (similar to PTFE cookware in that eay). The enamel is essentially glass, and you don’t want to eat microshards of glass. You can’t put it through the kind of abuse that I like to put my cookware through.

            Enameled cookware is great for acidic sauces, though, as one comment mentioned above. My recommendation for enameled cookware is to only use wood utensils. I just cook tomato sauce in my regular cast iron, though, and so long as I clean it right after, I never have any issues, but if I want to cook a tomato sauce for hours, I’ll use a stainless steel pot.

            Stainless steel is just as durable, but doesn’t have the seasoning that makes it non-stick, and it doesn’t hold anywhere near as much heat as a cast iron (unless you get the really expensive ones with a fuckton of copper in it), meaning it’s harder to get a sear for foods that need it. Fantastic for basically anything that you don’t need a sear on, like sauces, pasta, etc. A good rule is the heavier the pan, the more heat it holds.

            • 0ops@lemm.ee
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              25 days ago

              IMO if the seasoning isn’t good enough to handle my abuse, then it isn’t good enough to be on the pan.

              This is true, and something that I discovered myself recently. I tried babying one of my cast iron pans for while, seasoning with flaxseed oil, avoiding metal utensils, and only cleaning with a damp sponge or paper towel. I built up a seasoning quickly, but it was incredibly brittle, and actually began flaking off into my food. I haven’t used that pan since, haven’t gotten around to stripping and reasoning it.

              Since then I’ve had the same mindset as you to great success: if this layer of seasoning can’t handle my abuse now, then it’s not fit to be the foundation for the next layer of seasoning. I almost exclusively use metal utensils now, clean with a copper scratch pad, and ditched the hard-but-brittle flax seed oil for whatever I happened to be cooking with. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not aggressive with the pan, I let the weight of the utensil or pad do all the work, but I’m not letting weak seasoning get seasoned over. If it’s weak enough that the copper pad takes it off, then it wasn’t a good seasoning anyway.

              • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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                25 days ago

                Hell, I scrape hard, scrub hard with a stainless steel scrubber and dish soap, stack cast irons for storage, etc.

                It’s a massive hunk of iron. I treat it as such.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            The problem with ceramic non-stick is it apparently has an even shorter lifetime than ptfe. Sure it’s an improvement on what you’re putting into your body, but every other type of cookware is also much more durable.

            I expect my current cast iron and stainless steel to be the last cookware I have to buy

        • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
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          26 days ago

          What’s “too hot” in this case?

          Edit: the news link actually works and doesn’t assail me with popups. Here’s the salient part:

          When these pans are heated above 260 degrees Celsius, their PTFE coating can begin to deteriorate. But the coating does not significantly degrade until temperatures reach 349C, Professor Jones says.

          "So, unless your oil starts smoking, you’re not getting to that temperature and even then, you need continued exposure to see any effects, which are usually minor in humans.

          “And that’s assuming you weren’t using an extractor fan or other form of ventilation while cooking.”

          I always use a ventilator fan, so this is apparently not a problem for me beyond the non-stick coating wearing to the point where shit sticks and I have to buy a new one.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        25 days ago

        Previous formulations were also claimed to be inert and non-toxic, but were later found not to be. Current ptfe seems to be safe so far but at this point I’m really cynical about safety of these chemicals, industry willingness to inflict them on us and ineffectiveness of governments safety regulations. They’re forever chemicals. Even if they are safe, they will be in the environment, in ever increasing doses, forever. They are accumulating in you, your food, everything you ingest, forever. That doesn’t seem prudent.

        What are you going to do if a toxic pattern emerges, but you’ve already incorporated ptfe into your body? even if the the end product is safe, manufacturing chemicals are not: do you accept your part in these toxic forever chemicals?

        There’s not much an individual can do, but I can replace non-stick with other materials as they grow older. I have cast iron, stainless, glass, or ceramic as appropriate, that we know lasts longer and will not have a problem.

  • pistonfish@feddit.org
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    26 days ago

    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.

    • Zacryon@feddit.org
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      25 days ago

      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.

      • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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        25 days ago

        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.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          25 days ago

          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.

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              25 days ago

              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.

              • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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                25 days ago

                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.

                • AA5B@lemmy.world
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                  25 days ago

                  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

        • TheOakTree@lemm.ee
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          25 days ago

          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.

        • Zink@programming.dev
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          25 days ago

          Spoken like somebody who did not marry a person that is even more careless and ADHD than themselves, lol.

            • Zink@programming.dev
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              25 days ago

              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.

          • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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            25 days ago

            Nice to meet you

            *pushes all the nonstick pans into a cupboard to keep them safe*