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Cooking and bird safety

teflon.com

161–170 of 231 posts

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#161
post #68

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.

Eggs aren't hard to beat if you've got a good whisk.

Haha, I see how I wrote that weird. I mean “hard to beat” like “it’s so good at being non stick to eggs compared to anything else”

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#162
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Straight from the 2015 USDA guidelines: Previously, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended that cholesterol intake be limited to no more than 300 milligrams per day. The 2015 DGAC will not bring forward this recommendation because available evidence shows no appreciable relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol, consistent with the conclusions of the AHA/ACC report. Chole…

Straight from the actual current guidelines: "A note on trans fats and dietary cholesterol: The National Academies recommends that trans fat and dietary cholesterol consumption to be as low as possible without compromising the nutritional adequacy of the diet. The USDA Dietary Patterns are limited in trans fats and low in dietary cholesterol. Cholesterol and a small amount of trans fat occur naturally in some animal…

And you got downvoted. I guess the guideline only matter to people when it doesn't comes to their favorite foods.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#163
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…

>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.

I have an impaired sense of smell, as do 20% of the adult population. Most foods are utterly bland or actively repulsive to me. Sweet tastes are mildly pleasant, but otherwise I do not enjoy eating, I just do it to avoid hunger. I maintain a BMI of 19, but only because I actively monitor my food intake to avoid becoming clinically underweight.

Cooking is a chore that I will perform in the most perfunctory way possible in order to keep myself alive, but it is also something I will avoid wherever possible. Any effort I might put into making a delicious meal is wasted on me, because I don't have the sensory apparatus to perceive deliciousness.

From my perspective, the world seems almost pathologically obsessed with food. People often struggle to understand my complete indifference to food ("surely there must be some foods you enjoy"), but I struggle to understand how vast numbers of people eat so much that they become disabled and die prematurely. I can only make sense of it through the lens of addiction, which would raise all sorts of questions about the way in which we think talk about food versus other addictive substances.

My experience is obviously atypical (although not as uncommon as you might imagine), but I can't help thinking that the rest of you would be better off if you took a slightly more functional and utilitarian approach to eating. Obviously you can't just all pretend that you don't enjoy eating, but maybe you could all spend a bit less time talking and thinking about food?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15064632/

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#164
That's a clickbait title, the article implies that a lot of kitchen fumes are toxic to birds and that can include fumes released when a skillet is left on the stove with nothing in it. It could me that teflon is worse than everything else, but there is not enough information to reach this conclusion. Would a plastic handle melting and burning on the stove be better? Chili fumes of strengths that make humans cough and eyes water? I don't yet see evidence that if one gets rid of teflon, it's Ok to cook around birds without same precautions.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#165
post #121
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I didn’t downvote but

5) we’re talking about pans, not diet. I am well aware that eggs aren’t health food and it comes off as condescending.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#166
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…

“An early use was in the Manhattan Project as a material to coat valves and seals in the pipes holding highly reactive uranium hexafluoride” Considering the applications, I’ll pass :)

Just wait until you hear what stainless steal gets used for!

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#167
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.

I use non-stick pans so that I don't ever have to care about things like that.

"should have put a little wine in there" - well, I should not have to! I expect that after I sear some meat, there will be nothing that will require scrubbing the pan with a Scotch-brite pad and that I don't even have to check if there's any little stuck-on stuff.

I don't care if fixing this is easy, because I can live in a world where it isn't something that needs fixing in the first place - and apparently moving to a cast-iron skillet would make me have to fix them. Also, why would I want to spend time (and, more importantly, attention) on 'seasoning the pan'? I expect the tool to be functional with minimal maintenance, a good tool is one that reduces the amount of care and attention that needs to be done, and a tool that requires extra attention itself isn't worth it if there are alternatives that don't require that. It makes sense to spend an hour preparing or maintaining an expensive tool, but it doesn't make sense to do that for something like pan, where you can get a new functional one for less than an hour of pay.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#168
post #13
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?

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…

I care about cooking. I have a bunch of pans I experimented with in my kitchen, including cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel.

None are as non-stick as the non-stick ones. Sometimes I can cook eggs in them without it sticking, but the results are inconsistent and underwhelming. Of course, when the cooking fails and it sticks, I need to re-do the non-stick layer of oil.

I also need to use way more oil when cooking than when using non-stick. I care about this because I'm trying to cut and I'm calorie counting.

And my wife is unhappy whenever I pull out the "wierd" pans, since she can't use them and they're heavy as hell for her.

So, overall, the non-stick sees the most usage.

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#169
post #112
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use seasoned cast iron for eggs with very few issues. We used to use butter which led to some sticking, however recently we've been using olive oil and it's much better, with little to no sticking depending on what style we're cooking the eggs.

Wow I've had the opposite experience with my lodge cast iron pan. Butter is the only thing that allows my eggs to not stick. Olive oil and vegetable oils in general cause more sticking. Maybe we preheat our pans differently? Do you use very low heat but preheat for a longer time?

Thanks for the replies everyone. I've loved and cooked on my cast iron and carbon steel pans for years but recently life got busy and I went back to non stick for some things (like scrambled eggs or salmon skin).

I think we just forget how low maintenance a non stick pan is for normal people who don't care about cooking. To normal folks, the idea of preheating a pan slowly, or wiping some oil on with a piece of paper and reheating the pan to dry it (after cooking!) are extra steps that take time out of your busy day. I do notice I use fewer paper towels once switching back to nonstick. I probably also use less oil in my cooking too!

Re: Cooking and bird safety

#170

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.

Huh. Stainless steel is like the perfect cooking surface for searing chicken and salmon. Cleanup is super easy, ten seconds with a steel wool and/or, unique among pans, you can put it in the dishwasher with zero worries.
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