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...
Wood is an option, but look for solid wood, I don't trust these bamboo ones that are made from laminated / glued slats. Bamboo "wood" will be the next major thing I'm sure, sold as co2-neutral and biodegradeable, but soaked in glues / resins to make it useful.
I have a Japanese electric fry pan, non-stick. I use a bamboo spatula for it. It was not originally intended for the purpose, but I took a rasp and file to it to give it a sharp edge. I usually don't need the spatula. I flip things with chopsticks. I mean that's why you use a non-stick pan! If you have to peel the food off it with a spatula, what good is the non-stick surface? I mostly use the bamboo spatula for lifting things that are delicate, like sunny side up eggs.
Do you have any sources for wood cooking implements being unhygienic? I recall one a few years ago finding that wooden cutting boards are _more_ hygienic than plastic as they pull bacteria into their pores and trap and kill them: https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/09/cutting-boards-food-safety/
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.
I use wooden spatulas, and gladly take the short-term biological risk over the long-term hormonal risk. In any case, in a modern kitchen where utensils are washed thoroughly and regularly I don't see an issue with wood.
It's a common thing in woodworking class at school. We have a spoon, butter knife and a cutting board made by our daughter. We also have a bunch of other wooden kitchen utencils since half the family works with wood on their free time... :-)
You can use a well made, smoothly polished metal one with round edges. Your eggs are not sticking to your non-stick pan, right? So you will never use any of the kind of force that will gouge the surface.
> you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware
Using metal spatulas with non-stick is a big no due to the scratching. Ideally, you should throw away any non-stick cookware that gets a scratch on it.
I am still not convinced that scratched non-stick stuff is a real danger. As far as I know, the whole point of PTFE (what the coating normally is made of) is that it’s chemically mostly inert. I don’t know the mechanism by which eating PTFE flakes would be harmful. I’m not a chemist though so I would be grateful for corrections.
It's the perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) that's the issue. It's mainly been phased out of cookware now, so if it's less than 10 years old then you should be okay.
This particular article seems to be referring to brominated flame retardants (BFRs) -- there's a single reference to "PBDEs" in the text, and the original cited research paper [0] talks about various BFRs. The purported issue is with plastics recycling, where both new and old products may contain previously banned compounds.
For what it's worth, the simulated cooking experiments involved cutting up the utensils into small pieces, grinding those into a powder, then vigorously combined with hexane (the terms "vortexing" and "ultrasonication" are used), then subsequently combined with sulfuric acid, and dried. Small samples were then immersed in olive oil maintained at 160 Celsius for 15 minutes. (I may have misinterpreted this section, but it described the first step as "pre-treatment of samples")
It's perhaps interesting to note that the only sample listed as "new" in Table 1 with substantial levels of bromine was a thermos cup lid (180 μg/g), and only a small number of other items had detectable levels in the 3-10 μg/g range. Meanwhile, many samples purchased to 2011 had levels well over 100μg/g. That said, I also don't know how representative this study is in the context of, say, a thermos lid if you're not storing any liquids substantially above 100 C.
But wasn’t that only used in production? Some bouillon is also made by using hydrochloric acid, but it is neutralized and only NaCl remains. Isn’t it the same here? The PFOA is basically used as a precursor for PTFE and doesn’t remain in the product?
I'm also not a chemist, but the coatings used to contain significant quantities of PFOAs that get released into food etc. from scratches. There's also doubts about how PFOA-free the newer "non-toxic" pans actually are. Also, there's the issue of over-heating (more than 260°C) pans as that will release toxic gases that can be lethal to birds and cause "teflon flu" in humans.
The big "no" with non-stick is using steel wool scrubbers for cleaning. That and using sharp instruments like forks.
A nice, smoothly polished stainless steel spatula with round corners and a slightly convex edge shouldn't do anything to your non-stick pan.
You have to deliberately be trying to damage the non-stick surface with such a spatula to do any harm.
If the non-stick surface actually working, you shouldn't be using any force to scrape anything off. And there's margin for that.
I use one of those 5-in-1 painter's tools to remove grime from just about any surface without damaging it. I would cheerfully use it to take a dried paint splatter off a $100K Steinway. :)
This entire discussion points me towards a conclusion that metal-on-metal is the conservative way to go. So what is the problem with this as a solution ? Do we have to worry about microbits of metal disrupting physiology ?
Raw metal like cast iron is pretty terrible for red sauces due to tomato sauce acidity. You will get tremendous amount of iron oxide (rust) into the food to the point when you can taste it, with no idea if you don't cross safety thresholds.
Plus stickiness affects quite a few foods - eggs, pancakes, but also ie low burn simmer. There are cca inert linings like porcelain enamel on La creuset and similar, but in convenience its still subpar to non-stick and prices are high.
The whole point of why people go for non-stick is that you don't become a bit a slave to such an insignificant stuff like freakin' pans. Maintaining them, redoing the 'non-stick' surface... that's not direction we generally call quality of life, in fact it goes directly against it (have less things, free up yourself to have more time for yourself and our closest ones and not just continuously maintain gazillion stupid little or bigger things).
It is perfectly alright to cook tomato sauces in cast iron, especially a well-seasoned one which should defend against the acidity attacking the metal fairly well. Another way is to neutralise the acid with some sodium bicarbonate. Oh, and
> You will get tremendous amount of iron oxide (rust) into the food to the point when you can taste it
is generally not a problem. In fact, cereals are fortified directly by adding iron oxide—enough that if a magnet is run over it, it will pick up a substantial quantity of iron filings.
If you're especially concerned about your food tasting iron-y, a good substitute is stainless steel. Bring it up to 200°C, add in a small touch of high smoke point oil, add your proteins, and cook. No sticking.
All my cookware is metal including my spatulas, spoons, pots, and pans etc which are stainless steel, aluminium, or enamelled cast iron. Metal is infinitely more durable and flexible (in terms of where and how it can be used, not literal flexibility à la Young's modulus) than any silicone/plastic/non-stick cookware. You can pop a stainless steel pan directly from the stove into an industrial oven. You can put metal (even cast iron, really) in a dishwasher. You can violently scrub at any metal with steel wool and Cif/Gif to attack stubborn stains. The likelihood of something sticking to it is a small price to pay for the sheer peace of mind and flexibility.
Oh, final point. If scrubbing stuff off is such a pain, get a dishwasher.
I really disagree on the tomato sauce being okay in cast iron. Cooking high acidity food will absolutely strip all the seasoning off your pan if done for long enough. It has nothing to do with rust.
> Cooking high acidity food will absolutely strip all the seasoning off your pan if done for long enough
That statement doesn't seem compatible with the chemistry. The seasoning on a cast-iron is a (plastic) polymer that is fairly resistant to acid attack—especially the weak acids in food. It's why the strongest and most concentrated acids are stored in plastic and not glass beakers.
Try it. 60 minutes boiling tomatoes takes the seasoning right off. its recommended as a way to restart seasoning from nothing. vinegar is also an alternative.
You generally wouldn't fry burgers in the same cast iron container in which you make sauce, because of their different shape that determines their purpose. Only cast iron used for frying needs the varnish.
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.
There are a lot of old misconceptions around about cast iron seasoning. It's a layer of bioplastic formed by the polymerization when heating a thin layer of oil on the pan to high temperature - It's not about leaving your pan dirty or 'flavored'. You can clean it with regular dish soap just fine, that isn't strong enough to take the layer off.
Yes, correct. I'll add, though, that this takes skill to develop. Even the soap just left on the sponge from washing other utensils is too much. So I'll often just foregoe the soap unless there is an egregious bit of food stuck on it - which is rare as the heat is so well distributed on cast iron that I don't burn food anymore using it.
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!
No, that's not me. In any case, in our language we don't use the same word for the pan coating that we use for food flavouring. There is no smell on these pans! But yes, if people are treating their cookware as referenced in that page, then I understand why you are appalled.
You need to preheat the pan and not cook at a temperature where the oil polymerizes or the ingredients can burn. When you put something sticky in it, you need to wait a bit for the crust to form before moving it.
metal spatulas make scratches into the pan, which destroys any surface coating (so it goes into the food) or, if there is no coating, at least destroys the smooth surface which makes food stick even more.
maybe they have higher quality pans that are less easy to scratch, or they are learning how to use those tools without causing scratches, or they simply replace them more often.
in every pot or pan i have ever used, scratches were a problem. and only metal tools could have caused them.
Higher quality and generally made in free countries (https://www.restaurantsupply.com/saute-pans), versus the cheap stuff made in authoritarian countries with questionable coatings/materials that some consumers opt for. Vollrath stuff has always been good in my experience. Preventing sticking and scratching are mostly skill issues, but everybody burns something (during prep) every now and then. I never saw a new pan or a pan thrown away in any kitchen I worked in.
I thought we had found that all non stick pans were toxic? They said at first just to avoid teflon, but then the replacements were found bad too, or even worse. Are there actually safe ones now?
I am mostly worried about the stress of things sticking to that like glue. Stress has physiological consequences.
I see people worrying about this shit while walking on cliff edges, honking down cans of energy drinks and puffing away on vapes. There are probably larger health and risk considerations to make in your life.
Wood is not good if you want to handle raw meat, since it's fibrous it makes it pretty easy to eventually cross contaminate something you eat. It's the same reason wooden cutting boards are usually avoided if you're working with raw meat. Every single time, the risk is small, but over time, the dice rolls add up.
Actually wooden cutting boards are safer than plastic ones because the plastic ones not only result in lots of plastic particles being dislodged while cutting but also the cuts into the board are harder to clean and result in a higher likelihood of contamination.
Wooden boards need to be maintained, however, which with frequent use means occasionally sanding them down a bit in addition to the usual cleaning and oiling. The problem with wooden boards is mostly that they're not dishwasher-safe and people are too lazy to clean them properly by hand. A plastic cutting board you regularly put in the dishwasher is probably safer than a wooden one you only half-heartedly rinse, at least in terms of contamination.
I have a composite (???) cutting board, the surface kinda feels like it's papery / fibrous something when it's wet and some of the bits flake off. But it's dishwasher safe.
I’m in my late 30’s and have basically forever used wooden chopping boards and wooden utensils. I’ve not gotten sick from home cooking once. I think you might be overstating the potential harm here.
How do you know by what mechanism you’ve become sick? Do you cook that sparsely that you can positively say you’ve never become sick a few days after eating something you’ve cooked?
I cook all the time and come from a family that actually cooks meals, so yeah, the hygiene aspect is a non-issue so long as you just wash stuff properly.
Really? It's one thing to understand that whatever pathogen you were infected with is (also) foodborne. But tracking the infection to something particular which you ate is generally quite hard, and it is even harder to track accidental contamination.
And many people do not understand where actual danger comes from. For example it is a really bad idea to rinse raw chicken meat. Yet this practice is still widespread.
If you've only been sick with respiratory illnesses that were "going around", you can be about, oh, 100% sure it wasn't from your wooden cutting board.
This is as useful of an insight as saying that I'm in my late 30s and never gotten Covid, I think you might be overstating the potential harm here. A sample size of one is not much use when we talk about statistical probabilities.
COVID-19 has only been around for about five years, as the name indicates, so "I'm in my late 30s" says nothing about how many opportunities you've had to get it, whereas being in one's late 30s does say something about how many opportunities they've had to get (or give someone else) food poisoning.
I'm in my mid-50s. I use wooden cooking implements a lot. I clean them pretty carefully. So far as I know, no one has ever got sick from eating food I've cooked.
The sample size is one person cooking but it isn't only one opportunity to get food poisoning. Let's say 20 years, 300 days per year, one meal per day; that's 6000 food-poisoning opportunities, none of which has obviously resulted in food poisoning for anyone involved. That is in fact quite good evidence that the risk of serious food poisoning on any single occasion, if you use wooden implements but are reasonably careful with them, isn't high enough to be noticeable above the baseline rate of people getting sick.
If someone doesn't take any particular precautions and never gets COVID-19, that is evidence that COVID-19 is less of a threat than it's sometimes felt to be. But not very much evidence, and it can readily be outweighed by all the other people who have got COVID-19, including some who did take reasonable precautions. Similarly, my and iamacyborg's anecdotal evidence could absolutely be outweighed by statistics correlating food poisoning with type of cooking implements. If anyone has those, I'd be very interested to see them.
When cooking meat, I use two pairs of chopsticks: the raw chopsticks and the cooked chopsticks. The raw chopsticks are used to loaded into the pan and to flip it once. Once that batch is flipped I use the cooked chopsticks.
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 for?
Eggs and egg dishes (e.g. pancakes) mostly. No other pan works as well. Washing after cooking is also very quick and easy. Perhaps you've never used a non-stick pan that was maintained correctly, i.e. never overheated, stirred only with silicone utensils, and washed by hand using only non-scratching sponges. Most non-stick pans I've seen owned by other people have been in poor condition. If you think cast iron makes better food you probably use it for searing, which should never be done with non stick. And many people falsely believe wooden utensils are incapable of scratching non-stick pans.
That non-stick spray PAM is straight out, unless maybe you're huffing it. For eggs & pancakes I find that cast iron is responsive enough to temperature changes when used with induction, and that butter works to prevent sticking just fine.
You can make a case for eggs (although I don't like the way they come out this way) but this is a weird health argument for sweet pancakes which usually contain sugar and are drenched in syrup or chocolate spread. Also if you're making eggs and bacon, just use the bacon grease for the eggs?
I used to be like you until I lived with my mother then saw first-hand problems from her point of view.
Things like the weight of the cast iron means lifting it with wrist, cleaning it (in the sink). Other things like making it easy to cook proteins. Seasoning and maintenance.
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.
You really do not need to re-season them every time! Just using the pan with some oil is enough. If you clean it later with water, you can add a little oil afterwards and clean it with a paper towel, that's enough. Takes almost no time.
But I have to agree that non-stick pans are even more non-stick. That's why it took some convincing here to not buy new ones in my home.
That’s the kind of re-seasoning I mean: first I dry it (paper towel), then wipe with oil (more paper towel). It’s more work than cleaning a nonstick by hand and produces more waste.
Oh, okay! I see it as less work, since the whole part of using soap and rubbing the fat away properly doesn't happen. Plus it's just a drop of oil and two paper towels. You can use a cotton towel to dry it and move down to one paper towel.
But I just wanted to make sure you don't re-season it with the whole procedure, like oil, potato peels and salt fried for a long time. Because that would be definitely a lot of work each morning ;)
> You can use a cotton towel to dry it and move down to one paper towel.
You don't even need the entire paper towel. During the Hamas attacks last year I was unable to leave to the store for quite some time and began seriously reducing consumption in the house. Half or even a quarter paper towel is enough.
And even that doesn't need to be thrown away - the paper towel is still clean for purpose of reoiling the pan the next day if you absolutely need.
Nice. Also, adding oil each time after cleaning is also not necessary, especially after cooking with enough of it and if that went well (though I do it most of the time as well).
Cleaning cast iron is quick and (so to speak) dirty. Use a dish brush and running water to remove food waste, and scrape it with a metal spatula if there's sticky bits, then a quick wipe with paper towel to block rust. Hey, presto! Ready for the next round. No muss no fuss.
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.
Erm, sure? Cast iron takes a little while longer to heat up because it's heavier, but it retains heat well once hot. It's even better on induction. I cook mostly in cast-iron and carbon steel and haven't ever had a gas stove. (Like a lot of kitchen wonks, I keep a cheap non-stick pan around for eggs and pancakes, and basically nothing else.)
You can heat it with anything.
Remember. It is just steel!
Almost indestructible, can use anything to clean it, and if you mess up, you can heat it, wash it, and re oil again.
Of course, you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware, but they are, so...