Teflon pans are cheap, and you don't have to care for them at all. Just throw it in the dishwasher and after a year or so get a new one.
Having said that, I'm really liking the two nonstick ceramic pans I bought a few months ago, and I'm not sure if I'll need to toss them next year, yet.
The T-Fal one I have has been going strong for a few years now (maybe 3?). The trick is to NEVER put it in the dishwasher. Hand wash only. It's the easiest thing ever to hand wash, since nothing sticks, and most of the water drips off before I grab the towel.
"Teflon pans are cheap ... after a year or so get a new one."
Really? "Real" nonstick pans (not walmart) sell for something like $40 to $100+ a piece, but cast iron (Lodge Inc, etc) sells for something like $20. So CI works better, last forever, is cheaper, and its less toxic.
Its true that you can buy a pan shaped object from walmart for $5 that doesn't really work, but in all fairness the CI equivalent is the "free to a good home" pile of CI at an estate sale, so CI is still cheaper.
I will say there is one, exactly one use for teflon pans and thats burned cheese or burned eggs. Just something about it chemically that makes it stick to cast iron. Yet meats don't stick, very strange.
Crack? Like fall apart? What are you doing man?! It's freaking iron!!!! I'm using my great-great grandmothers pan all the time and it's amazing despite being from the 1800's
There are many reasons why a cast iron skillet inexplicably cracks.
Poor quality control in manufacturing, natural crystalline formation defects, excessive impacts in handling, extreme thermal stresses, etc.
Cast iron, being a non-ductile material, in the daily thermal cycling of cooking, any minute microscopic fissure will start to propagate through a process known as metal fatigue, and eventually fail catastrophically.
To some degree, cast iron can be annealed or hardened, depending on your cooking habits. Something I do which I would not recommend to anyone else: I buy cheap cast iron cookware, heat it up red hot and pour cold water in it. If it didn't crack, them I heat it up again in an oven and let it cool down as slowly as possible to anneal any internal stress.
In any case, if the skillet is of great value to you, there are places that actually can repair it for you.
As a last tip, stop practicing skillet abuse and trying to be an iron chef. :-)
I looked it up and the truth is in between. You get "ferritizing" annealing starting at 1300F. Microscopic amounts of that will happen at 500F but nothing significant. Thank you, now I will stop wasting my time with this piece of folklore...
You can buy an original Tefal pan for like $15-20, if it lasts a year that's ok with me. I wouldn't trust the no-brand $5 stuff either, but I would think that Tefal pans should be ok?
That stuff is just more toxicity. The non stick vaporizes at high temperatures (the Teflon website will warn against small birds in the kitchen... And that's the Teflon website!!!), and all those knicks and scratched are material coming off and into your food.
There's no need for toxic cookware. Get high quality cast iron and you can give it to your future generations like my grandmother did for me. And if that flakes into your food, it's just iron which your body needs!
Having a bird in the kitchen is just a bad idea (unless you are going to eat it). If you overheat oil, that becomes toxic as well and will kill a small bird the same as overheating teflon.
You might have a house with a kitchen next to the living room and no door in between, and if you've got everything closed up in winter you can kill a bird in a nearby room with Teflon toxicity. Overheating oil will not kill a small bird, and even some quick smoke inhalation won't necessarily kill a bird.
> Abstract: Japanese quail and parakeets were exposed to the pyrolysis products of: (1) commercial fry pans coated with Teflon® finish, (2) plastic fry pan handles, (3) corn oil, and (4) butter. Other materials used in the test were commercial aluminum fry pans and cast iron fry pans. A four-hour Approximate Lethal Temperature (ALT) was determined for each test material for each specie. All products tested were lethal to Japanese quail with ALT's ranging from 260° C for butter in cast iron to 370 °C for a plastic handle in a glass container. The ALT for a fry pan coated with Teflon® finish was 330°C. All products were also lethal to parakeets with ALT's of 260°C for both the pan coated with Teflon® finish plus butter and the cast iron pan plus butter. The ALT for a fry pan coated with Teflon® finish was 280°C.
If you're doing wok cooking, you can get to 900 degrees, although most of us who did not have the gas company adjust the stove for optimal Chinese cooking don't get quite that high. 600 F isn't crazy in wok cooking on a stovetop, though, and Teflon is not guaranteed to retain its properties above 400F. [1,2] Here's a PSA: Teflon-coated woks suck anyway!
Remember that Teflon and related products aren't only for stovetop use. There are many non-stick baking sheets and muffin pans as well, and it's not that unusual to cook muffins, scones, cakes, or pizza (esp pizza [3]) at temperatures above 400. Moreover, using the broiler can quickly get you to a high temperature.
Interestingly, there are a lot of documented cases of bird death in conjunction with Teflon usage [4]. Birds are very sensitive -- hence "canary in coal mine" -- but it is interesting to see that bird death can happen during normal use of Teflon and related products, certainly at temperatures below 400F.
You keep saying this. You've said it many times in this thread. 1) there are lots of different kinds of oils each with their own distinct flash points and toxicities. Olive oil has one of the lowest flashpoints and has very little toxicity when burned. 2) Not all cooking is done with oils. 3) even if oil is toxic, it seems to be something that is a required part of cooking - we assume the risk. Teflon, not so much. 3) Teflon does get that hot in the course of regular cooking. And it releases toxic fumes under those conditions. Saying oil is bad too does not negate what teflon is doing. Especially when there are choices for pans/cookware that do NOT release fluorocarbons at high temperatures.
Having said that, I'm really liking the two nonstick ceramic pans I bought a few months ago, and I'm not sure if I'll need to toss them next year, yet.