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Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

theatlantic.com

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Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t very toxic to humans either.

Overheat your Teflon pan, take a good huff, wait a few hours and post that comment again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever ”When PTFE is heated above 450 °C the pyrolysis products are different and inhalation may cause acute lung injury. Symptoms are flu-like (chills, headaches and fevers) with chest tightness and mild cough. Onset occurs about 4 to 8 hours after exposure to the pyrolysis products of…

Who is really heating teflon pans to 850 F on the stovetop?

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#722
post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wait a few hours Indeed. When was the last time you left your nonstick pan sitting on a cooktop with nothing in it, for hours? If you're the kind of person to leave empty pans burning for that long, I'd be more worried about cognitive decline and/or the risk you'll die in a fire of your own making.

Pretty much any heating element setting will take a pan to 450 degrees. Do people do it? - I doubt the parent commenter is lying about their bird.

Yeah, see...I just deleted the 450 degree part (right before I saw your response), because somehow I knew someone would pick at it.

The temperature is the least relevant part of what I wrote.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#723
post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wait a few hours Indeed. When was the last time you left your nonstick pan sitting on a cooktop with nothing in it, for hours? If you're the kind of person to leave empty pans burning for that long, I'd be more worried about cognitive decline and/or the risk you'll die in a fire of your own making.

Pretty much any heating element setting will take a pan to 450 degrees. Do people do it? - I doubt the parent commenter is lying about their bird.

Just keep in mind gp is talking celcius. A good sear on a steak will happen around 200-250°c

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just started cooking in an iron pan, and I love it. It's actually not significantly more difficult to clean once you learn to leave the seasoning on and get over the cultural conditioning of what clean is essentially. The cooking process it also far better, with the whole pan being uniformly hot and staying that way.

The fear of using soap was real back 100 years ago when soap contained lye, which would destroy the seasoning on your pan. Today is this no longer true, so clean away!

I suppose that depends on the type of soap. Do you have a source that I could read? Thank you!

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#725
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

I get your point, but what I am saying is that if you are not careful, you can easily overheat empty teflon-coated pan on an induction stove and create toxic fumes, no oil required. And you don't even have to forget about the pan. Just setting the stove to high temperature when the pan is cold can quickly create superheated spots due to the way induction works (the temperature sensor is hidden and so it "lags" a bit)…

It's completely unnecessary to heat as cautiously as you describe. Even the worst performing induction burner is not going to heat the pan hot enough unless you do it deliberately, or just completely forget it.

Also, maybe you do it differently, but I put the oil in before heating - so if I had stainless, with oil, heated in your "unsafe" manner I would have toxic smoke in the air long before I would have fumes from Teflon. Meaning avoiding Teflon isn't helping you in any way at all.

Of course in actuality there's simply no issue, induction does not perform as badly as you describe. Go ahead and heat at full power and simply cook, it will work fine and not overheat.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#726
post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much any heating element setting will take a pan to 450 degrees. Do people do it? - I doubt the parent commenter is lying about their bird.

Yeah, see...I just deleted the 450 degree part (right before I saw your response), because somehow I knew someone would pick at it. The temperature is the least relevant part of what I wrote.

A pan left on the stove will turn red, and it is an accident that happens with some regularity. This issue is a lot like ground fault protectors: a rare accident that could be avoided by never interacting with a product in a certain way nonetheless occurs, and can only be eliminated through technical means. Just imagine that you're at your parent's house, and you look over at a glowing pan. Oops, you have a headache...

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#727
post #533

I imagine most of us here likely follow well-known conventional kitchen wisdom: don’t use metal utensils on non-stick pans, wash your hands after handling raw meat, etc. And I suppose I can add, generally avoid black plastic kitchen gear to my list. However, how much does it even matter at this point? Does the kitchen of the restaurant I’m eating at care about that? Am I still going to drink 2 whiskeys tonight? Anyon…

The difference for me is that this can easily be something I'm using every day, so it's believable that there might be a cumulative effect. The replacement cost is trivial, and I need to do it approximately once per decade, so I might as well chuck out and replace my battered plastic spoons and spatulas now while it's fresh in my mind then not think about it again. But the rest of your list... I don't think of myself as particularly healthy, or particularly observant in this regard, but I ran through it and honestly most of the answers are "no":

> Does the kitchen of the restaurant I’m eating at care about that?

I'd worry less about one-offs than I would about long-term exposure here.

> Am I still going to drink 2 whiskeys tonight?

Possibly, and if I was going out tonight there might be wine. I'm not, I haven't been to a sit-down restaurant since September, and I don't have anything like that in the calendar for a few weeks.

> Anyone got any tiny individually wrapped shitty Halloween candy?

Nope. None in the house.

> How do those synthetic made-in-x-country gym clothes feel against your skin?

Levi's and a cotton shirt. Probably terrible for other reasons, but today isn't awful on the synthetic-fibres front. That's not true every day, but coincidentally I'm getting away with it right now.

> Wanna have a cigar?

I don't smoke.

> Are you breathing recycled air during an airline flight?

Haven't been on a plane in over a year, haven't flown long-haul in five.

> When was the last time you stretched your legs?

20 minutes ago. (purely by chance. Couple of hours before that, though).

> When’s the next time you’ll drink a plastic bottle of water?

This isn't something I regularly do. Might go months between them.

> Got a k-cup?

No.

> What’s the inner workings of that coffee machine do with the near boiling hot water?

The wonderful thing about pour-over coffee is that the inner workings are outer workings. It's slightly-less-than-boiling water on enamel into glass, and that's about it.

> When was the last time it was cleaned?

Lunchtime, when I gave it an extra rinse.

> What chemical was used on your toilet that your buttcheeks are now sitting on?

Mostly vinegar, as far as I can tell. Bleach for the ceramic, but I'm not sitting on that bit.

> Want some bacon? How bout a hot dog?

Yes. But sadly I do not have bacon. Or a hot dog. Nor can I exactly recall when the last time I had either was - over a month, certainly, probably more.

> Been outside recently without sun screen?

Yes, but given that I've been wearing a raincoat outside for the last month I don't think that's quite as relevant as it might be for others.

> I honestly think I just might forget and continue living in my blip of existence.

I'm not pointing any of this out as a superiority or a gotcha thing, but "continue living" pretty sums up my feelings about most of this stuff too. I'm not doing anything actively, really, to avoid pretty much all of the things you've brought up. Inevitably that's partially luck of the draw: I'm sure there are plenty of other examples you could give that I'd be equally at risk from, or worse. But it is striking just how alien that list of concerns is, from my point of view.

I think that says a lot more about differences in culture and choice architectures than it does about our personal preferences. You evidently do feel that there's an overbearing weight of attentiveness needed on avoiding more bad stuff, whereas I'm lucky enough to be in a situation where the mental effort to rule out Yet Another Thing just doesn't register. And I'm not sure what the right solution to that is.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try out carbon steel if you haven't. Season it once and it's essentially non-stick -- all I do is give mine a light rinse for a few seconds and then towel dry.

Carbon steel is not nonstick without adding oil. Also you can’t use it with acidic foods. I actually prefer stainless steel most of the time, the sticking is more of a feature for many foods since it promotes browning. (But I do use basically every type of pan for different things)

Oh interesting, that's a point I hadn't considered -- do people really cook in non-stick pans without any sort of oil? I've never owned one so genuinely didn't realize people did that. My Mediterranean family brought me up to use olive oil liberally!

And also true re: acidic foods -- I've got a couple stainless, but mainly use my enameled cast iron or clay (tagine) for tomato based dishes.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All non-stick frying pans die within a year or so. We recently took the plunge and invested in a stainless steel one. Yes, it takes some (very little) time to adjust your cooking style, but that thing comes with a lifetime guarantee and you don't have to worry about accidentally scratching the surface. Win-win.

> All non-stick frying pans die within a year or so. I'm very interested about how you can achieve this.

I could definitely picture achieving it with a metal spatula.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After careful research, it turns out this conspiracy was actually started as a sales promotion by Spatula City! I have just as much evidence of this as most other theories

Joke’s on you, the same chemical conglomerates manufacture Teflon _and_ the plastic used in plastic cookware!

And who do you think owns Spatula City?
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