Carbon steel or cast iron all the way.
Stainless steel! Neither of those is something you want to use to simmer a tomato sauce.
Why’s that? I’ve never owned any of the 3, all pans have been some form of nonstick.
Carbon steel and cast iron cookware have reactive metal surfaces that will rust if left exposed to moisture and air, especially when heated. To use these materials of cookware you need to season them which involves washing the surface clean and applying a very thin layer of oil which you then heat up to a high temperature (usually past the smoke point, but not strictly necessary).
The heating of oil in contact with the metal causes the oil molecules to polymerize and bond to the metal surface. Done properly, this gives your cast iron and carbon steel cookware a smooth, glassy, slightly brown protective polymer layer which prevents rust and helps foods release (though not as well as nonstick pans). The seasoning process can be repeated as many times as you like and it builds up more and more layers which darken over time. A well seasoned piece of cast iron or carbon steel cookware will look shiny and jet black, though this is not necessary for cooking.
The downside of these materials is that acidic or basic foods can damage the polymer layer and dissolve it right off the pan with enough heat and cooking time. Tomato sauce is a classic example of an acidic food that will eat away at the seasoning of a cast iron or carbon steel pan. A well seasoned pan can still be used to cook a tomato sauce, but not one you plan to be simmering for hours and hours (like some Sunday meat sauce like you’d see in Goodfellas).
Stainless steel (as well as enameled or porcelain coated) cookware is nonreactive so you can use it to cook acidic or basic foods no problem!
Ohh right, I didn’t think about how acidic tomatoes are. I love tomatoes, but some of the people around me get absolutely horrible stomach pains apparently.
Anyway, we make tomato based sauces at home, but never have we simmered anything for several hours like that cooking scene in Goodfellas. Should I? Would it be significantly better?
Oh you’ve got no idea how good tomato sauce can get then! It’s also great for making huge batches so you freeze most of it for later.
Hmmmm I have some bad ideas now, thanks!
I thought there, who on earth makes tomato sauce in a non-stick pan 😅
Nice writeup btw!
So my stainless steel/inox Lagostina pan is non reactive? What would be the benefit from having a carbon steel one (I have used cast iron a lot but it’s so heavy)?
Any community you’d recommend?
Exactly that: weight. Some people will give you other reasons why they like carbon steel but the most important is that it works like cast iron only lighter
A well seasoned carbon steel is pretty much non-stick while in a stainless you usually want some sticking to have something to deglaze for sauces.
Mine sticks enough for a nice sauce :-) !
I don’t want to cause a panic, but acids like tomato juice, ascorbic, citric and vinegar can attack stainless steel and dissolved chrome in the process.
But don’t think of it as extra chrome in your diet. After all, we get iron rich water from our cast iron pipes and fittings. Nah, think of it as that extra cancer you’re gonna be getting! Iron never gave you cancer, that’s a lousy metal. But chrome is pretty good!
TLDR: the tomato sauce (and other acidic fruits) reacts with the iron. Although properly seasoning (fat treating) your pan will ameliorate it, and humanity has used it for time immemorial. It does eat away some of the seasoning, leading to having to te season it, which can be annoying.
Sure, or enamelled cast iron.
Available at a thrift store near you, with no carbon cost!
Used cast iron is usually better than a lot of new stuff. Back in the day, it was common for the pitted surfaces to be ground smooth.
Now you can only get that with some “premium brands” that are willing to take a grinder to a pan before throwing it in the box.
Enameled cast iron is also great
Is this the ceramic coated ones?
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You really should read the rest of the article
GenX was basically told that “Teflon is inert, it can’t hurt you.”
Well fuck me.
It is chemically inert. It just becomes a problem when you physically abrade it into billions of microparticles that become embedded in your tissues…
So, asbestos 2.0?
Likely, if we’re being honest.
Health agencies haven’t done that much investigation (wheeeee regulatory capture) into wtf microplastics do in nuance to all of our various biological systems, but we do know that microplastics basically pervade everything at every level of the food chain at this point. So it’s more about answering the question of “how much did we fuck ourselves” now.
Has there been any evidence to point out that PFTE is not inert?
This article seems to be about the production of PFTE, which is well-known to be quite harmful, but the end product is as far as I know not unsafe to use.
Previous formulations were also claimed to be inert and non-toxic, but were later found not to be. Current ptfe seems to be safe so far but at this point I’m really cynical about safety of these chemicals, industry willingness to inflict them on us and ineffectiveness of governments safety regulations. They’re forever chemicals. Even if they are safe, they will be in the environment, in ever increasing doses, forever. They are accumulating in you, your food, everything you ingest, forever. That doesn’t seem prudent.
What are you going to do if a toxic pattern emerges, but you’ve already incorporated ptfe into your body? even if the the end product is safe, manufacturing chemicals are not: do you accept your part in these toxic forever chemicals?
There’s not much an individual can do, but I can replace non-stick with other materials as they grow older. I have cast iron, stainless, glass, or ceramic as appropriate, that we know lasts longer and will not have a problem.
Capitalists furious at suggestion they value human life over money
ftfy
What a ridiculous world we live in. The board members should be facing prison sentences, the company’s liquidated and the money back to the people.
The money should be put into a cancer fund to pay for research and people’s medical bills from the cancer all this shit causes.
Just use cast iron and stainless steel. I don’t own anything else.
Don’t forget carbon steel!
And enamel cookware. It’s lasting forever.
I got some Belgium made enamel cast iron. It’s fantastic.
What is the enamel? Same as ceramic? I’ve got ceramic pans that now stick like crazy and I went back to steel
How about the suggestions that they are selling a product that should last for several lifetimes but instead lasts for 5 years if you treat it very well?
I moved to using cast iron and steel pans, I found even hand washing non-stick pans they eventually just get scuffed up after years.
I’d rather just use a few more drops of oil on a regular pan.
I’ve got a few dishes that want a non stick surface and have a dinner in a tomato sauce. I keep the non stick for those, and for house guests who don’t understand carbon steel.
I also keep a couple non-stick skillets around for guests.
However it’s incredible (in a bad way) just how ubiquitous these coatings have become. It’s going to take years to get through them all. I just got stainless cookie sheets but all my bakeware is non-stick (blind spot: I used to use a baking sheet for the broiler without connecting the dots on excessive heat vs teflon).
Next step (by frequency of use) really needs to be my rice cooker
I don’t. The flat iron skillet (comal) is nonstick enough at this point that even my kids never complain about making eggs on it, they release well. Tomato sauce does fine in stainless steel. Though I also haven’t made guests cook for themselves yet. Had one nonstick pan in the early 1990s and that was enough to sour me on them.
I make tomato sauces on both my cast iron and carbon steel. Sure, they get a bit bad afterwards, but oil+heat fixes that.
I have an enamel coated cast iron Dutch oven which does tomato dishes just fine as well.
Personally I don’t give a damn about a pan whose entire life is spent slowly scraping away the carciogen on it and ingesting it with every meal you make. I am however not going to be scammed by the teflon pan manufacturers into buying a new overpriced pan every few years. Every other non non-stick pan outlasts multible generations of humans. A non stick in a professional kitchen won’t even make it to 1 year old.
If we didn’t live in capitalist plutocracies masquerading as “democracy”, every non-stick pan ever sold would be blatant false advertising and they wouldn’t be profitable to sell anymore.
Lifetime guarantee my ass. None last more than a couple years of daily use regardless of how meticulously they’re cared for.
You’ll find that lifetime guarantee almost always means for production errors. Not wear and tear.
I hate how we allowed these ghouls to make the word “nonstick” synonymous with teflon/PFAS. It makes it sound like if you use a regular pan, you constantly have to scrape off burnt food or something. That’s just not true, a well-seasoned regular pan can be just as “nonstick” as one with a PFAS coating. It’s a fake non-problem that was invented to sell this garbage that poisons us and the environment. If it was up to me, the executives at dupont and anyone else responsible for this psyop would be sent off to labor camps (with humane working conditions of course)
Can’t really cook this way oil-free though. I roast my food in a toaster oven, on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Took some getting used to, but I find it more convenient too.
Why would you want to cook without any oil?
Heart disease and diabetes are very prevalent in my family, so I generally try to keep my diet in the direction of the Esselstyn guidelines. I’m currently not entirely strict about it, it’s a work in progress.
Admittedly the science of added oil vs no oil is very much an open question still, and much more studies need to be done to see if Esselstyn’s relatively extreme restrictions truly make a real difference. Still, it’s a safe diet, it’s designed by heart specialist specifically for treating heart disease, and from what I’ve seen it appears to be the most promising option out there. Also, if it ever does become proven that atherosclerosis can be reversed - particularly through lifestyle interventions - I think that’s really cool and exciting.
As a sidenote, for general populations, Harvard currently has the strongest evidence supporting the idea that a little oil is fine, as long as you’re choosing the right ones.
You might actually not be better off with parchment paper, it is nonadhesive thanks to fluorinated compounds (PFAS) or silicone in most cases
This is what I get:
Good to hear, those are silicone based as far as I know. Not totally risk free but much much better than the alternatives.
Issues with food sticking to either a stainless, carbon steel, or cast iron pan, largely come down to technique and maintenance.
So if you’re going out to buy a teflon pan you’re admitting that either you’re a bad cook, or you’re lazy…. Or both.
Cast iron ftw!
Carbon steel is lovely too.
Doesn’t work too well with induction stoves in my experience. Difficult to season, since it doesn’t get heated evenly. Fine if you have a gas stove tho!
Then season it in the oven.
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Medications
Sometimes worse side effects than the thing it’s trying to cure. Sometimes used to cure something that better diet and more exercise could take care of. Made by companies more concerned with money than your health outcomes. What’s to be afraid of?
GMO
Nothing wrong with GMO itself, but every company using GMO doesn’t use it to make food higher quality or taste better. They use it to engineer pesticides into your food, increase crop yields, and patent our seeds, for, you guessed it, money! Insecticides specifically can be neurotoxic to humans. What’s to be afraid of?
Maybe you should listen to your mom instead of badmouthing her to strangers on the Internet.
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Ha, probably not that advice.
All real nonstick cookware is Teflon or chemically related to it. I almost always use cast iron or carbon steel but they are not nonstick, you have to control heat and acidity for them to release well. You can even see in nonstick pans that liquids will tend to bead up and not spread out because of the surface, versus in any other pan you’ll only see water bead up when you hit certain temps. I can only achieve something like a French omelette in a nonstick pan, carbon steel has always been a disaster, because of that me and a lot of other people keep a nonstick around just for certain egg and crepe recipes.
you’ll only see water bead up when you hit certain temps.
Basically If you FIRST heat up your stainless steel cookware to the point that when you drip some water on it, it “beads up” instead of immediately boiling away, your cookware becomes temporarily non-stick. Just don’t want to go a lot hotter than that, or you’ll do things like burn butter (unless using Ghee butter or something with a higher “smoke point”)
Wikipedia makes it sound like not all Teflon pans require PFOA, which is the actual problem here (not that the article describes it clearly).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-stick_surface
PFOA/PFOS is in lots of other household shit though, like raincoats
hashtag not all pans
Just clean your cookware people
These non-stick pans are usually cheaper then stainless steel and cast iron, so people with lower income are more prone to buy it. Consequently, considering that low education is associated with poverty, poor people are buying more of this type of pans and not using it “properly” so getting exposed to possibly more harm and not knowing about it.
Also, " just discard the pan if flocking occurs", is everything that this industry wants: you’ll continue in an indefinitely loop of trowing away pans and buying new ones for the maximization of their profits. Thus is expected that flocking will occur more soon than ever.
I use Greenpan, a ceramic nonstick pan
I was shopping around for nonstick pans some months ago, and exhaustively looking to see if any of them were free of pfas and other toxins. By the end I was nearly pulling my hair out because they pretty much are all bad, including Greenpan. I no longer have the variety of sources I found back then, but here’s one source on them (mind you I wouldn’t necessarily trust this site’s recommendations either).
https://www.leafscore.com/eco-friendly-kitchen-products/why-we-no-longer-recommend-greenpan/
Good to know, thanks for the link. I’ll be sure to check out the top picks in the article
You’ll want to do more research from multiple sources. My memory of it is hazy, but I think I remember the enameled cast iron sets being relatively the best option (albeit expensive), but the biggest thing I remember is every time I would find one source saying brand [a] was the good one, it wasn’t long before I’d find another source saying that tests showed the same brands had toxins in them. It’s an exercise in frustration.
It really boils down to what are you’re willing to tolerate and how much do you want to spend. Unless you want to go copper/stainless/cast but even those probably leach something into the food, and can be difficult to cook with. We need to invent the Star Trek replicator
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