511–520 of 886 posts
Oh dear my kettle is made from black plastic…
what bothers me is the black plastic handles on pots and pans when cooking with gas. they get way to hot and produce a strong odor that makes me worry about what kind of gasses are released there that i am breathing in.
This article is brief and uses big numbers to make a scary point but I'd be interested in if there is proof of causation of significant physiological effects at the exposure level from domestic cooking. Often media will say "people exposed to Y have increased Z" but fail to mention that in studies those people worked in industrial settings with Y and the exposure level is hundreds or thousands of times higher than in…
The precautionary principle plus what we know about heating plastic makes your reticence seem churlish. There are easy, safe alternatives in wood, metal and silicone. There’s no need to risk it.
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I recall hearing from somewhere that it's not so much the cleaning, but the drying that kills off the microbes.
There's no single important thing— It's a combination of killing as many pathogens as you can with heat or chemicals, removing as much material as you can that bacteria feed on, and drying. Drying isn't going to do any good if your spoon is contaminated with hepatitis a, for example, and drying is much less important if you're really taking down the bacteria count by sanitizing it and don't have much for bacteria to…
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The precautionary principle plus what we know about heating plastic makes your reticence seem churlish. There are easy, safe alternatives in wood, metal and silicone. There’s no need to risk it.
The problem is that even when there are easy, safe alternatives trying to avoid every little risk in your life will drive you crazy. This is a clear case where a regulator should step in and just ban these black plastic utensils in favor of their safe alternatives. That way you're not just protected from exposure in your own kitchen, but also when joining your friends for dinner.
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Indeed, panicking about everything little thing like this is a psychological nightmare— it leads to the same mental fatigue as the infinite list of item known to the State of California to cause cancer.
And yet the State of California helps drive regulation forward; e.g. the case of Red 3 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq9dhQIoDw8 ). CA may err too much on the cry wolf end of the scale, but it's serving a vital function.
I threw out all my pots and pans that have non stick surfaces and replaced them with stainless steel. Same with most kitchen cooking implements. Stainless steel pots and pans are much cheaper, last longer, you can scrub and scrape them and the big upside is you don’t have to consume DuPont non stick chemical coating nor feed it to your children. Despite all the celebrity chefs in the world attempting to sell you thei…
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People use non-stick pans because it's easier and they are bad at cooking.
If you don't understand why a stainless steel spatula would be preferable to a plastic one, maybe you're just not paying attention much to the world.
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They only scratch nonstick pans. Just use stainless steel, it's not that hard to clean.
It's not about cleaning. It's about the increased amount of oil needed to prevent delicate foods like eggs and fish from sticking. That adds cost and calories.
What a lot of people don't realize is -- in non-stick, virtually all the oil winds up in the food. Since it doesn't stick to the pan. With steel/iron, most of the cooking oil stays in the pan.
So yes you will end up using 3x or more oil. But you're not consuming 3x oil calories. It probably isn't any extra calories at all.
Just cook with stainless steel, it's not that hard. Add and warm fat before adding your other ingredients to prevent sticking or if you don't want additional fat, then add liquid to reduce at the end (the same way you do a wine reduction you can just use a bit of water) if your food sticks and you need to scrape it off the bottom.
I want to but my eggs stick like crazy. I’ve even tried all the tips too like oil when droplets float, etc.
I really wish OXO would put out a statement here. A lot of people use it's black plastic tools like this one [1] -- like a lot of brands, OXO calls its black plastic tools "nylon" to differentiate from "silicone" -- and it would be really, really good to know if OXO has always rigorously made sure never to use recycled plastics, or if testing shows that its own products contain flame retardants. In other words, when…
Oxo claims they use Eastman Tritan Renew recycled plastics [1] which are FDA and EFSA certified for food use[2]. That said, I’ve personally been to multiple cookware factories in China and Taiwan and saw bags of Dow thermoplastic resins next to various cheaper-by-half China brands. The reason name brands go with Dow is the consistency in Pantone color matching colored parts. For black, it would be trivial for the con…
Aren't these contradictory statements? If it's "trivial" to spot check their product that is otherwise indistinguishable from the competition using mass spectrometry, why wouldn't QA do that? It -doesn't- sound like it's trivial for the supplier to rip off Oxo if it's "trivial" to use an industrial tool for quality control.
What am I missing here? Do you somehow have internal knowledge that Oxo does not do that "trivial" QC step?