No, this isn’t a cast iron thing. Using stainless pans, you can get nonstick effects that, in my experience, far outperform Teflon anyway. The process is called “spot seasoning.” I have cooked crispy, cheesy rice noodles with eggs with zero sticking.
I love my cast iron pans, but stainless is my daily go-to. Added bonus: use 100% copper wool to clean your stainless pan. The copper-coated wool at most grocery stores is problematic; you might get a few uses out of the coated garbage and then it starts shedding metal bits.
I find that stuck-on stuff comes off my stainless steel pans very easily: just get the pan very hot and add enough water to cover the black residue. Let it boil and bubble for like half a minute. The gunk will now come off easily if you dump out the water and scrub with the rough side of a wet scotch-brite sponge and a little Dawn dish soap.
Don’t properly nonstick pans mostly not use teflon anymore anyway?
They still use a chemical that’s part of the PFAS family, teflon is just one of those chemicals under the PFAS umbrella. Unless you mean ceramic cookware.
For some info into this chemical PFAS
Can someone link to the actual fucking article describing how to do the spot seasoning method?
Isn’t teflon a cancer-causing “forever chemical”?
Yes
oooohhh I was just in Nosy Be, I ordered a ravitoto once, unfortunately they didn’t have the ingredients on that day. It’s still a mystery to me. Mais j’adore le nom il me fait rigoler, j’imagine un mélange de Toto et du Ravi de la crèche
ah et je vois
1 ginger
je suis plutôt châtain j’espère que ça fout pas la recette en l’air
Haha oui, en malgache ça se prononce presque comme raftoute !
Tu peux customiser la recette comme tu veux, l’important c’est le saka saka, je suis même en train de réfléchir à l’adapter en version vegan pour les gens qui ne mangent pas de viande!
Saka saka c’est le feliki ? le manioc ?
Oui c’est ça, feuilles de manioc pilées, ça se trouve sous forme de boule surgelée
Veritasium made an interesting video about this. The teflon on pans shouldn’t be dangerous (unless heated above 350°C), but in the process of making teflon dangerous “forever chemicals” do get released
https://lemmy.world/post/29654949
Something like that.
Veritasium did a video on this topic a few days ago. I highly recommend it. There’s a bit of nuance here, from what I understand, regarding PTFE which is the chemical composition that Chemours markets as Teflon. The video talks about PTFE being rather inert, passing through our bodies if we ingest it. The real issue is heating the substance above 350° C (662° in freedom units).
I’m not an expert but I think it’s worth reading up on the subject. If there’s anyone else more read up on the subject please let me know if I’m wrong here.
Hey, did you hear veritasium made a video?
No I didn’t, you have a url for me? /s
Veritasium just made a great video about the history of Teflon and related chemicals. I got claude to help me put here:
Teflon and PFAS Health Concerns
Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE) and related compounds have several health concerns:
Teflon itself
- The intact, long-chain PTFE polymer generally passes through the body without being absorbed, as you noted
- Not considered directly toxic when ingested in its stable form
Related harmful compounds
PFOA (C8) and PFOS:
- Used historically in Teflon manufacturing (not present in final product)
- Extremely persistent “forever chemicals” that bioaccumulate
- Associated with:
- Various cancers (kidney, testicular)
- Immune system impairment
- Thyroid disruption
- Reproductive issues
- Developmental problems
Shorter-chain PFAS (including C6):
- Introduced as “safer” replacements for C8 compounds
- Still very persistent in environment and bodies
- Growing evidence suggests similar health concerns to longer chains
- May be more mobile in environment
Heating concerns
Teflon breakdown:
- At normal cooking temperatures (below 500°F/260°C): minimal risk
- At high temperatures (above 500°F/260°C): Teflon begins to degrade
- At very high temperatures (above 660°F/350°C): releases toxic gases including:
- Fluorinated compounds
- Particulate matter
- Can cause “polymer fume fever” in humans (flu-like symptoms)
- Fatal to birds due to sensitive respiratory systems
Recommendations:
- Don’t preheat empty pans
- Avoid high-heat cooking with Teflon
- Replace scratched or damaged Teflon cookware
- Consider alternatives like cast iron, stainless steel, or ceramic
I have never has success with stainless steel but I will definitely try the heat/wipe/fresh technique if I get a chance.
Veritasium just released a video about teflon and it’s impacts yesterday https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY tldw they say that it’s fine for non-stick pans at lower temperatures but the smoke it creates at high temperatures is where the danger is. Especially for pet birds.
Teflon itself is perfectly safe. It’s far too large for your body to absorb.
But many of the byproducts involved in the production of teflon are much less safe.
In other words, if you already own a teflon pan, you’re fine. Keep using it. But if you’re considering buying a new pan, there are good reasons to avoid teflon.
It’s also important to note that Teflon (PTFE) is used in a multitude of stuff, and there’s no easy replacement. Got a 3D printer? The tube connecting the extruder motor to the hotend is probably PTFE.
The PTFE industry isn’t going to collapse just because we all switch to different cooking pans.
I have heard that coats are often covered with PTFE as well, as it makes the rain roll off rather than soak in
Lots of food machinery is Teflon coated, for example mozzarella machines
They are used to produce teflon and will be released if the coating is damaged.
In a good non stick pan you can fry an egg without any oil at all, so no, adding a bunch of oil is not a replacement for that
Some people, like me, can’t possibly keep non-stick pans safe. I live on a sailboat, and the effort to keep non-stick pans (even ceramic) safe from damage is disproportionate to the advantages.
There are other cases, such as people who own birds. Overheating Teflon pans can result in PTFE toxicity in birds.
Non stick doesn’t have to be Teflon. Fuck Teflon!
Recipe:
1 egg 3/4 cup of your favorite oil 1 medium banana 1 pinch lemon zest
Put oil in pan over medium high heat until oil just smokes, allow to smoke for 15 seconds, then reduce temperature to “egg making temperature”. Add egg. Burn the shit out of that innocent bastard and push it around while repeating “egg slide freely!”. Remove your egg with a crispy, brown bottom and wet, runny whites from the skillet. Reserve oil.
Into one large coffee mug, pour your oil, add lemon zest.
Last, throw all this in the trash with your Teflon skillet, and eat the banana.
Howtobasic is that you?
My cast iron pans tend to get sticky, the sides, the handle, I’m not sure what to do about it. Any ideas? What am I doing wrong?
are you washing it? Like with soap, hot water? and scrubbing it with something like a scrubbing sponge?
Have to ask, due to the prevalence of people buying into the whole “you cant wash cast iron!” myth.
Cause, with the sides and even the handle being sticky and nasty, it sounds ALOT like just spattered grease never getting cleaned off.
Definitely this, but also if you are washing it and re-seasoning it after if you use too much oil it can cause it to get sticky.
Thats not really “re-seasoning” when you oil it after washing, its just rust prevention if you don’t have a good cure on the entire pan… I would only oil a pan down if I’m putting it into storage for a good long while… and that oil gets washed off before I use it, cause even the best cured pan always seems to develop some rust in long storage otherwise, and that oil will have inevitably collected dust and other unpleasantness.
My regular everyday cast iron pan just get washed, then put on a burner for a couple minutes to dry off any of the remaining water (after i towel it off), then pushed to the back of the rangetop for tomorrow.
Obviously don’t take your hot pan, immediately wash it in cold water, and put it back on a hot burner, cause… you know… thermal shock will turn it into a fragmentation grenade*
*(comedic hyperbole, for those that will inevitably take this too seriously)
edit
and on the topic of seasoning the pan… I prefer doing it on a grill, I give my pan a good, thin coating of lard, throw it on a scorching hot grill, and basically just leave it until it stops smoking. Then I’ll take it out, let it sit to cool off a bit (just a bit, don’t want it getting cold, just want it to not burn through your oven mitt and flash off the reapplied lard) before adding another layer of lard, and throwing it back on the grill, again, until it stops smoking.
Depending on the pan, if its old one I’ve had to go at with sandpaper/steel wool, I will do more coats to build up a good base… for an established pan that I’m just laying down a fresh coat on, I may only do it once, or maybe twice.
Don’t need to put 100+ coats on it and make it a mirror finish, lol.
You’re right, wrong choice of wording on my part.
For the majority of cooking? Yes, you don’t need a non-stick pan. A properly used steel (or even aluminum) pan will work. Cast Iron is obviously loved but Carbon Steel is actually what most people want and has almost all of the same properties. But properly oiling your pan (and I actually love cooking sprays for dishes where I am using a neutral oil. Glug of “real” oil, get it up to temp, and then give a quick spritz just to make sure EVERYTHING is coated) and cooking at a high enough heat that your proteins can properly react and not “stick” to the pan will get you almost the entire way.
That said? Eggs and fish. Eggs very much are in that “nobody ever complained about too much butter” category but there is a lot to be said about a quick egg without any additional fats. And if you are cooking eggs these days, you can afford a 20 dollar specialty pan… And fish in particular is the kind of food where it is very easy to overcook it while waiting for all the appropriate reactions to occur so you can cleanly flip it.
If I were to downsize my kitchen (which I hopefully will be doing in a few months…)? That shit goes in the appropriate bin. But if you have the space? A 20-ish dollar restaurant supply store non-stick pan is AMAZING. And cheap enough that you can afford to get rid of it the moment you see any scratching.
You seem to be experienced with pans of different materials and you opened a topic I have no-one to ask about, so I’ll try here. I don’t use much oil and I like cooking on lower heat to avoid the carcinogens that are created when oil and other substances get too hot. Is it possible to do that with non-teflon pans? What material and technique?
Different oils have different temperature ranges with the “smoke point” what is commonly considered. As long as you are under that temperature, you are fine according to everyone that isn’t facebook.
Yep, I’m trying to use lower heat to not go over the smoke point. Canola oil has pretty good properties, so I use it. It is possible to overheat not just the oil, but also the other ingredients, so it’s good to limit the heat. That’s why I’m interested in the lower heat use possibilities of pans different materials.
Quick google puts Canola Oil’s smoke point at 450-ish Fahrenheit. You can do the real good stir frying with that. Even the “get a pan ridiculously hot to sear some meat” is in the 300s and MAYBE capping around 500 which isn’t great with canola but is still doable since the food will lower the pan temperature pretty quick anyway.
So if your pan is getting that hot then you are doing it wrong or are specifically trying to do restaraunt style sous vide and don’t realize they use (char)broilers for that.
I’m not doing that. As I said, I use lower temperatures.
ive been doing low fat eggs and frying fish just fine on a stainlless pan. Once throughoutly preheated, you can lower the heat and let the pan cool down a bit. Rolling oil around the pan in every direction ensures all the pores have been properly hit with oil.
My eggs stick less to my stainless than to my 3 year old very expensive teflon plan that has been treated properly and still fails cause teflon a shit.
I never used teflon because I read somewhere that you mustn’t heat it up to a certain point. I just used stainless steel all my life until I got a cast iron skillet.
Still use the stainless steel pan for 97% of cooking
I keep seeing people urging to go back to cast iron or stainless steel, but when I left the nest 5 years ago, I picked up ceramic pans, and you can use them the same way as teflons and I have yet to lose the nonstick.
Don’t use bar keepers friend to clean them. That fucked up ours.
Could be cheaper enamel. Le Cruset specifically mentions it in their cleaning instructions
Bar Keeper’s Friend, or a paste of baking soda and water, also comes in handy for cleaning tough stains, oil residue and marks on your Dutch oven as well
I use it on my enameled dutch oven all the time and I’ve never had an issue.
Le Creuset enameled cast iron isn’t the same kind of thing as the ceramic nonstick the person upthread was talking about.
Don’t those use very similar coatings as Teflon?
It’s the simplest thing in the world with a stainless pan. Bring up the heat, add in some oil, wait for it to smoke, wipe it out with a cloth, in with cold oil, add in your food. It won’t stick.
Thanks for giving a simple summary so I didn’t have to click and watch.
Except the easiest thing in the world is just as the youtube guy said. If you use a cast iron or carbon steel, the seasoning doesnt really wash off as much, so you don’t have to re-season the thing every time you want to use it. My cast iron pans stay seasoned, even if I wash them with soap. SS doesn’t really have any benefit over carbon steel, and only a benefit over cast iron in that it’s lighter. If you want a lighter pan/wok, there’s little benefit over getting carbon steel.
Does this work with cast irons too?
Update: just made eggs sunny side up this way on my moderately unwell seasoned cast iron pan. Worked amazingly well. Who knew I was putting too much oil… I brought the temp down a little after cracking the eggs in.
belive it or not with enough heat you can cook eggs in a cast iron skillet without any oil ~(Some char may remain in the pan, restrictions apply. Please see your local pedantry department for all complaints about this advice.)~.
Hell yeah buddy
Been using the same set of pans for about 30 years. Just cold oil and a hot pan, get my food in immediately and same thing. I can slap pork chops in there no problem. I just have a feeling if I tried this instead of your method on a new pan, I’d be screwed.
I’m pretty sure the pan is just seasoned after that amount of time and they definitely get used daily, if not multiple times a day.
A stainless or carbon steel pan will take to the cold oil method first time. Cast iron will depend on the quality; some come preseasoned, but the quality of that varies a lot too.
I got my first nice CI skillet about five years ago and daily driving it. I talk a good game about steel pans but I just don’t enjoy them as much. You build their seasoning, it works perfectly once, then it’s gone. There’s no relationship, no satisfaction in getting a fried egg to slide freely about the pan.
“wipe it out with a cloth” I’m curious about the cloth you use and what you do it? Sounds really messy an oil soaked cloth… But you do say it’s the simplest thing…
Sometimes I forget others haven’t accepted tea towels into their heart. I’ve got a dozen or more cloth towels around the house for mopping up. It all comes out in the wash. Cotton ones won’t burn readily, so they’ll dry out a hot oily pan no problem.
Paper towels work fine. Just make sure they’re pure paper and not mixed with synthetics or weird scents or whatever.
I add oil, just enough to barely coat the pan, and then tap a teeny drop of tap water from my finger onto the pan. Once the drop pops (if it got touched by the oil) or simply boils away, I can start cooking.
Additionally: butter. Butter somehow doesn’t stick for whatever reason, even if the pan isn’t fully heated up yet.
Same here, but with a different order.
- Turn the heat on.
- Wait.
- Test with water. If it doesn’t sizzle, wait and test again. If it does sizzle…
- Add oil
mmmm… butter
Thanks for this but I will stay say teflon is simpler (not better!)
The most annoying thing for me with Teflon was that in two years or so it is no longer nonstick, so your pans have essentially an expiration date.
Not to mention that it will be scratched and danger to you and all around you long before that.
I preach the gospel of our lord and savior stainless steel pans!
A soft (e.g. silicone) spatula is all you really need to avoid damaging a non-stick pan. And they are incredibly useful for other uses (a rubber flipper is awesome if you are perpetually impatient when it comes to flipping meat and don’t want to damage the skin).
But yeah. They are inherently a consumable which is why nobody should ever spend more than 20-ish (pre-trump) USD on one. It is up to an individual to decide if they would use it enough to justify that.
Id recommend going for carbon steel instead of teflon if all clad or stainless steel is too much work.
For like $40-100, they heat up insanely well, are very light and will last your lifetime. They form an excellent non stick coating after several uses just like cast iron.
I bought two a couple of months ago and I am never going back to anything else.
+1 on the carbon steel pan. Eggs slide right off mine.
Sometimes the food can do it too – I scratched my last nonstick pan with a silicone spatula because I ground black pepper on my eggs and caught a craggy piece just right while flipping. After being super careful for months! So irritated.
Fresh teflon is. Then you start throwing it away in a year or two since your teflon coating has FLAKED off despite using only wood-plastic-silicone and handwashing it carefully.
And then you read TEFLON FLAKES cause cancer.
And then you start putting two and two together.
right? six steps and having to deal with hot oil every time or use teflon and have a slightly higher risk of cancer and zero extra steps to cooking. I’ll stick with teflon and hope for a global war to wipe us all out before I have to worry about cancer.
I want to shun you but it seems like you’re struggling enough 😑
I have so many uses for this sentence in my life.
If you’re lazy just say that
Extremely weird thing to be elitist and off-putting about.
i am lazy but i’m not even saying doing less steps is worth the cancer it gets you. I’m just pointing out that simplicity isn’t really a strong side of stainless steel when comparing it to teflon since simplicity is basically the only thing teflon has going for it.
Afaik Teflon isn’t carcinogenic. Veritasium recently made a video about teflon and more importantly PFOA used to produce teflon.
Here if interested https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
I just let it go until leidenfrost, add oil and roll oil around and its good to go. If you are making eggs, reduce the heat and wait a bit. Only difference vs teflon is that you put the pan on heat while you are prepping to ensure thorough preheat. Havent used teflon in years. Havent missed it either, I make pancakes (local ones are thin, not quite crepe like but thin) with only one knob of butter at the beginning just fine. No oil in pancake batter either.
No oil in your batter? I wanna know more. Doesn’t that make the pancakes too chewy?
eggs, flour, milk, baking soda, bit of salt, bit of sugar. Thats the common batter. Ratios were like 1-2-3 or something for the main ingredients. Idunno, nobody has ever told me the recepie.
What’s the consensus on ceramic pots? They seem to be easier for nonstick and I don’t think they have the same issues as Teflon.
I have started to hate my ceramic skillets. They started sticking a couple of years after we bought them, and it’s a pain to lose half of an egg to the pan…
I need my pans that need to be treated like a princess and then fail anyway in a few years and need to be thrown and replaced. I need to keep doing it cause those poor people at teflon plants cant have a job creating one of the most polluting chemicals out there
I appreciate that people have found solutions for avoiding materials that can become dangerous when overheated. I, too, have gone on PFOA-free journeys.
But oh my god, that egg is swimming in oil! I don’t want that many calories, and I don’t want to feel a greasy egg in my mouth.
I understand this solution is great for many people, and they should be proud and happy that they have reached their Teflon-free goals.
But as a person who can’t digest high amounts of fats without consequences and watches their calories, this is only a solution for people who love bathing their food in oil. I also avoid saturated fats, which are superior for their non-stick properties. I want to use olive oil, nothing else.
But fine, I will try it on my stainless pan and see what happens. Olive oil, heat to smoke, wipe, then a small amount of olive oil again for normal cooking.
If it works I’ll be thrilled. If not, back to my trusty teflons that never fail me. Wish me luck! Got any more tips?
Don’t know who needs to hear this but you don’t need to season stainless steel. You just need to pre-heat it correctly for it to gain non-stick properties.
You have to pre-heat to around 400 degrees Fahrenheit before you put anything in the pan - including oil. You know its good when you drop some water in and it immediately beads up and glides across the entire surface. If it boils and evaporates, the pan is still too cold. If it beads up and starts to glide but freaks out in a certain spot, you have a cold spot in your pan. You’re trying to achieve the leidenfrost effect
Keep in mind that in a lot of dishes you actually want some of the food to stick to the pan and become [frond].(https://www.thespruceeats.com/all-about-fond-995681) Then you deglaze it later with some kind of wine or stock.
Stainless steel is perfect for this kind of cooking. I’ve been using it exclusively for years. Its versatility and low maintenance is why all the best kitchens in the world use it.
Thanks for the tip about preheating! I bought a set of Allclad mostly so I could go from stove to oven to finish, but haven’t bothered to learn how to correctly cook eggs in them (have a carbon steel crepe pan that is the designated egg pan, highly recommend). The rest of the reason for them is that they are nigh on unfuck-up-able.
Fond. Fronds are parts of a tree.
