Live data from Hacker News

Cooking and bird safety

teflon.com

81–90 of 231 posts

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. My cast-iron skillet I've used for 20 years doesn't stick. Ever. If there's a little stuck-on stuff on the bottom after use (should have put a little wine in there, gotten that flavor back into the dish, oh well) then a Scotch-brite bad and 30 seconds fixes it.

FYI scotch-brite pads are plastic and shed microplastics into your pan. As a replacement, there are coconut fiber based pads that work better actually.

For cast iron, the best scrubbers are steel chainmail, IME.

Last forever, too.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#82
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. My cast-iron skillet I've used for 20 years doesn't stick. Ever. If there's a little stuck-on stuff on the bottom after use (should have put a little wine in there, gotten that flavor back into the dish, oh well) then a Scotch-brite bad and 30 seconds fixes it.

My cast iron is 4 years old and every time I use scotch-brite on it, I have to spend hours stinking up my house with flaxseed oil to reseason the pan because scotch-brite makes little dots of shiny iron show up.

Put oil in the skillet next time you use it (every time you use it). No problem.

Hell, I scrub the hell out of it sometimes. Use oil the next time - no problem.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#83
post #4

Since a few years, I do own only iron pans. Teflon for home use as pans was a ridiculous idea: you need to take care of it and it will wear out after some time and needs to be replaced. Iron pans need very little care and get better with age. What is the point?

Iron pans are heavy and work horribly on anything but gas, which is even worse for the lungs.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#84
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's super non-stick. I know you're going to rebut with saying that iron pans are too, and I'm sure they are, but most people don't want to put in any level of the effort needed to make iron pans as non-stick as teflon. A lot of people care only a mild amount about cooking, and don't want to invest the time to know how to properly use a cast iron or a carbon steel (which I have and only seldom use). They'd rather get…

This. I absolutely hate cooking. With a passion. I don't want to spend time on it. I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :( We can outsource pretty much everything else that's a chore. I drop my washing in a bag to be ready for a tenner tomorrow. Groceries can be delivered for cheap. But delivered or takeaway food is generally very expensive and not very healthy. It's still viewed…

I would say paying a tenner to wash a bag of clothes is luxury pricing, it's far more expensive than sticking it in the washing machine. It wouldn't surprise me if it was the same factor more expensive as takeaway vs cooking, and cooking is more laborious.

I do agree that it's annoying cooking as a single person though. Batch cooking and freezing can help.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#85
post #64

Ha - I had a line cook show me to get a pan fuming hot, no oil, before throwing mushrooms in, the moisture from the mushrooms create a ledenfrost effect and you get as close as you can to having some browning on the mushrooms (while keeping a lot if moisture in). Can't burn em! I'm unhappy that I've done this exclusively with t-fal non stick pans over the years. Going to get myself a nice 3 ply stainless pan today! E…

Another good method for getting mushrooms to brown and crisp without getting them oil-logged is to cook them in some water to break down their structure. The end of this video details the technique, although I usually use more than 1/4 cup of water. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XLPLCmwBLBY&pp=ygUOZGFuIG11c2h...

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#86
post #37

Stainless steel with some basic seasoning every once in a while (oil, high heat, it’s easy to do) has done me well for a long time. I do keep a non stick around just for eggs though, hard to beat.

I’m not sure you can really season stainless steel? It’s not porous

I have gotten an amazing season on stainless steel by slowly cooking oil onto it. It crosslinke into a super hard super smooth almost ceramic surface.

You can also use a drill attachment polish one stainless steel pan to a mirror chrome finish, then heat it up, add oil and add the rgg to thr cold oil. For me that guarantees teflon level performance of nonstick. However, the mirror finish has lower emissivity so its a bit weird at first when a hot pan doesnt seem to transfer heat to the food at nearly the rate that it “should”.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing can beat Teflon on non-stickiness, for sure. But really, it’s actually fairly rare that it is a useful property when cooking: mostly for eggs. I mostly use stainless steel and have no problem of food sticking. It asks for a bit of technique, but it’s just technique needed to make good food anyway (preheating pan, using fat, deglazing, managing heat) I wouldn’t recommend cast iron either, it’s just too much fa…

I usually use stainless and cast iron but with green chef meals I’m often tasked with searing chicken or fish in a pan and cleaning those types of pan after a cook like that gets mighty old. So I bought a Tramontina non stick exclusively for those cooks. I suspect it may last a bit longer since it’s a secondary pan I only use for those cases so it feels less wasteful as a purchase.

you can deglaze that on the stove. heat a very shallow layer of water in the pan, the stuck layer will soften and dissolve. push a roux spoon gently around the bottom and then simply pour it out.

beyond that, if you are using stainless, go ahead and clean it with steel wool. a bundle of small chain is a good equivalent for cast iron.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The utility isn’t what’s in question, it’s the safety. There’s enough questions around the safety of teflon for consumption… is it really worth risking your or your family’s health to avoid some annoying cleanup?

Lots of things about cooking are risky. If you ask one by one if that's really worth risking, it's tempting to say no every time, and then there's almost nothing left. It doesn't work to treat risk as a binary factor.

I think the Teflon question is different though. It is like lead in a sense, we know it is carcinogenic, just like we know lead is a neuro-poison. The only question is whether we are doing good enough job at preventing it from leaking into our bodies.

With lead, a lot of people thought so, but still they put it in our gasoline, in solder for our water pipes, etc. and a lot of people got some pretty bad neuro-developmental disorders as a result. I certainly hope we are not repeating the same story with teflon, though I, personally am not willing to risk my and my families bodies to it.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#89
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I absolutely hate cooking. With a passion. I don't want to spend time on it. I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :( We can outsource pretty much everything else that's a chore. I drop my washing in a bag to be ready for a tenner tomorrow. Groceries can be delivered for cheap. But delivered or takeaway food is generally very expensive and not very healthy. It's still viewed…

> I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :( I mean that’s pretty much what supermarkets sell right? Ready meals that can be heated, which are effectively cooked the same way as at the home but just on an industrial scale. Or pasta that’s pre-made and pre-filled and you just have to heat and add some sauce that’s already pre-made. Im in the UK where we have services like Cook that a…

There is still a trade off here. Typically pre-made at industrial scale is looking for 'cheats' they can use to increase transportability and shelf life of food before it's served. It is not common it means the quality of 'decent home cooked' food.

There are made at store foods like you're talking about, but quite often they are 2-3x the cost of the ingredients.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#90
post #4

Since a few years, I do own only iron pans. Teflon for home use as pans was a ridiculous idea: you need to take care of it and it will wear out after some time and needs to be replaced. Iron pans need very little care and get better with age. What is the point?

Cast iron wares are heavy.

I had a lovely fight with my wife many years ago, because she threw away my cast irons; in her words it was “dirty” and “sticky” and she replaced them with teflon.

Years later she is a convert—from small, personal pans to dutch ovens that heat retention makes a difference—but I’m called to move them around but she’ll ensure that it gets oiled and seasoned after every use.

We also have high quality multi-ply stainless steel pots and pans but lightweight or not those are used less frequently.

If you only want non-stick without the fuss and don’t care about the health implications, it’s hard to beat teflon.

Post reply on HN