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Cooking and bird safety

teflon.com

121–130 of 231 posts

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#121
post #40

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 really love eggs, but they’re really high in cholesterol. It’s better to skip them, sadly. I wouldn’t normally offer unsolicited advice like this, but this is a thread about optimizing for health/safety. If you’re going to avoid teflon, you should probably avoid eggs too.

A few points to demonstrate why your comment might be seen as unpopular:

1) Dietary (exogenous) cholesterol has been shown to have a lesser affect to the total cholesterol levels in the blood (70-80% of all the cholesterol in your body is produced by your body endogenously by your liver and other tissues).

2) Eggs are an affordable source of various fats and proteins that are essential to metabolic health.

3) There are a group of people who assert that correcting hypercholesterolemia is best done by understanding the root cause of the overproduction of endogenous cholesterol.

4) We are beginning to understand that not all cholesterol is the same, and that high total cholesterol alone isn't a sufficient biomarker for predicting heart disease. Advanced lipoprotein fractionation tests looking for the ratio of small dense LDL to normal LDL, and HDL cholesterol is a better test; small dense LDL is bad and is a biomarker for inflammation and artery calcification, which can lead to heart disease.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#122
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you sear with a non stick? Searing requires preheating the pan hot, which isn’t recommended with Teflon I think

Asking the biochemists here… Is all searing associsted with carcinogens regardless of how it is done — eg toaster, grill in open flame, in a pan? I tend to really like the seared pieces on bread, steaks, and especially slices of Schwarma / Gyro / Doner

AFAIK almost all charred compounds contain some amount of carcinogens of some kind. The question is just whether it’s worth it to you.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#124
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…

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.

The best frying pan I've ever owned is the cheapest-possible cast iron one I got when I moved out of my parents' house 30 years ago or so. Very rarely does anything stick and when it does I fill the pan half way with water, put it back on the stove, let it boil for a couple of minutes while I do something else and then wipe it clean.

I have parrots so I theoretically have a strict "no Teflon in my house" rule but with a Japanese wife I've had to grudgingly tolerate a Teflon-coated rice cooker.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#125
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…

Those ready meals are full of salts to preserve them. And not very nutritional.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#126
post #42

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…

Idk to me this sounds like: I hate washing myself or I hate going to the bathroom. Maybe it’s a cultural thing but adults just need to be able to cook in my society. No place for hefty emotions. Just a fact of life. It might be nice to live in a society where not cooking is possible. Probably less healthy though, you have different incentives than people making your food. (Taste [salt levels] and “adictiveness” vs he…

I don't agree. I lived in Thailand where it's common to just buy a plastic bag of food from a street vendor. Most houses apparently don't even have full kitchens.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#127
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…

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…

It seems some people have misconception that excessive oil and overcooking are causes for sticking, while opposite of that is how to completely eliminate sticking. When they can't accept the latter, they might resort to Teflon and steel wool sponges.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#128

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 switched to stainless last year after getting fed up of going through so many teflon pans, and decided I wanted to stop ingesting teflon flakes (I know PFOA is not technically in the end result and it's supposed to be inert, but I'd rather not ingest it all the same).

Cooking on stainless is not as bad as I expected in terms of sticking, it does require better care over temperature control, but that also seems to have resulted in me cooking better. Also when stuff does get a little stuck or burnt, it comes off without deteriorating the pan unlike non-stick.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#129
post #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.

They work just fine. If anything, the high heat capacity makes the heating more even if your heat source is unstable.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its teflon burning in your pan…

The list of things that become toxic once you burn them is a very long one

Not any of the other common materials for pans. Steel, cast iron, ceramic, none of these become toxic even at 500 C
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