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Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

theatlantic.com

131–140 of 886 posts

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than the hygiene argument of bacteria build up what is wrong with just using wooden spatulas for example?

I don't think I've ever even seen a wooden spatula, and I don't see how you could make one thin enough to flip pancakes (or worse eggs) and it stay durable.

It's very common in Europe, I have several at home. If you properly wash them, there is no bacterial danger either.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#132
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, very regretfully, stopped using cast iron. Being a man, in a country where I can't easily donate blood, iron load is something that I want to be careful of. It is possible to cook with cast iron in a way that won't leech too much iron into food, just as it is possible to cook with nonstick in a way that won't leech Dupont chemicals. But I'd much rather just use foolproof stainless or ceramic cookware that doe…

What? Unless you have haemochromatosis this is really tinfoilery over the iron levels acquired through natural ingestion, especially the thought of leach levels from a pan. You get more iron from meat or a bowl of cereal than you could ever get from a pan without it being flat out dissolved in the process over the course of a handful of cooks.

Is the iron that leaches from pan even bio-available? Aren't supplements very specific compounds? I can admit that it might be toxic, but that toxicity is not due to something like over production of haemoglobin...

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem here is that many people use non-stick cookware, and metal spatulas will scratch them up badly. Plastic or rubber spatulas don't do that. Of course, you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware, but they are, so...

I honestly cannot understand the appeal of non stick. Cast iron is so much simpler and the food comes out better. And the pans are indestructible and cleaning is so much easier (just wipe usually). I have three cast iron pans with which I cook for large numbers of people regularly and I'm flabbergasted when I visit other people's homes and find endless stacks of speciality pans. What are people possibly using these f…

I love my cast iron, but usually choose a nonstick for eggs and crepes/pancakes in the morning.

- I tend to re-season my cast iron every time I use it and it’s a chore to do this for my early morning meals.

- Non-stick is just more non-stick, with cast iron I am constrained to using a certain heat and/or fat content to create the non-stick property which I might not want for a certain dish.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem here is that many people use non-stick cookware, and metal spatulas will scratch them up badly. Plastic or rubber spatulas don't do that. Of course, you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware, but they are, so...

I honestly cannot understand the appeal of non stick. Cast iron is so much simpler and the food comes out better. And the pans are indestructible and cleaning is so much easier (just wipe usually). I have three cast iron pans with which I cook for large numbers of people regularly and I'm flabbergasted when I visit other people's homes and find endless stacks of speciality pans. What are people possibly using these f…

Yep, I ditched my "non stick" and all plastic utensils over a decade ago. It's just never seemed right to me to cook with plastic and I don't understand how other people can do it.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#135

Oh dear my kettle is made from black plastic…

Does it count if the black plastic part is not in contact with the water/food? The inside of my kettle is stainless steel, but the lid is black plastic (not directly in contact with water)

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#136
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would GP suggest that spatula if it was the one they're saying is bad in the article?

in english in america, can't speak for other lanuguage/locales and too lazy to look, the word spatula is used for two different tools: one tool is for scraping food (generally solid) inside a hot frying pan the other tool is for scraping foods (generally liquidy generally cold) from the sides of a bowl or other container. in the first case you want to flip your pancake and it's sticking to the pan in the second case…

In British the former is sometimes called a fish slice. But of a silly name so most people now also use spatula for both.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#137
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This myth needs to die. Teflon is only an issue at temperatures you're just not going to encounter in a kitchen. And if you did encounter such temperature, and you had oil on the pan - well you've poisoned yourself more than the Teflon would!

Most consumer PTFE coatings are declared to be safe up to 450°F. It is trivially easy to heat a pan beyond that temperature on modern gas, electric, and induction ranges in less than ten minutes. The margin of safety is demonstrably nonexistent and it’s wild to me that we just accept this risk constantly, everywhere, anytime we eat food (whether at home or from a restaurant).

It's easy to learn how your cooking setup responds using a cheap IR thermometer. You can check it's working correctly by boiling water in the pan and confirming the temperature is close enough to the expected boiling point for your local air pressure. The risk depends greatly on both the construction of the pan (poor heat conductivity means hot spots from uneven heating) and cooking technique. Using high heat, heating empty pans, and neglecting stirring are all dangerous. Leaving heated pans unattended is especially dangerous, and anecdotally appears to be responsible for most severe overheating events. With correct technique I believe the risk is negligible and well worth the greater convenience of non-stick pans. But I don't trust third parties to use correct technique.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#138

The correlation-causation in this article is really rather screwed up. The way it really works for plastic is this: almost all bad plastic is black, but not all black plastic is bad. That's it. There is nothing wrong whatsoever with virgin black plastics. (Well, at least, nothing more than is wrong with plastics in general.) So there is no reason to fear black plastic from reputable sources. The trouble comes in when…

Are you sure there's absolutely nothing wrong with virgin plastics? Maybe it'd be safer and simpler to just avoid plastic in e.g. cooking since the growing amount of research about effects of plastics doesn't seem very positive.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#139
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you replace the Teflon with oil, and now your risk is even higher. What did you accomplish?

It’s not super clear what you’re getting at here. The choice isn’t teflon or oil. Everyone uses fat to sear food in a pan, whether or not it’s a nonstick pan. Cooking with a high-smoke-point oil which is low in saturated fat, such as avocado oil, with stainless steel, is strictly better than cooking with teflon pans by every measurable health metric.

Searing food in a PTFE pan almost certainly involves overheating it. Depending on what you're cooking you don't necessarily need oil (e.g. you don't need it for cooking eggs), although you might want to use some at moderate temperature for flavor. And for some foods oil is necessary to avoid overheating the pan, because it improves heat transfer from the pan to the food. Check with an IR thermometer every time you cook something new.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#140
post #104
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not the temperature if you forget the pan on the fire, the question is which is worse: High Temperature Teflon, or High Temperature Oil? The answer is that Teflon is safer.

Genuine question: why? I thought people in many long-living cultures often cook with high temperature oil, and not just the street food wok cooking. There is bad chemistry that can happen with other food components at high temperatures but what is the problem with oil itself?

At too high a temperature oil will smoke and burn, leaving toxic components in both the oil and in the air.

My point is that the temperature necessary to cause this oil toxicity, is lower than what you need to make Teflon toxic. Teflon becomes toxic at temperature FAR above any cooking process (unless you eat charcoal).

i.e. if you cook normally and don't burn things Teflon is obviously fine, if you do burn things you have bigger things to worry about than the Teflon, since the other stuff will kill you first.

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