Some notes on…nonstick pans?

Over the last few years, there have been some loud warnings about three things related to cooking indoors:

• Cooking with gas (which makes NOx) can lead to asthma and respiratory problems
• Worries about nonstick pans (PFAS “forever chemicals” like teflon) causing cancer
• Some internet worries about PUFAs (“seed oils”) and what happens to them, though this is only at high temperature

I guess if you are sort of an indoor air quality nerd, you have to think of these things together because they affect each other, all things about cooking that might affect your health.

I got a portable induction burner a few years ago and found it quite fun, mainly because I didn’t feel obligated to run the loud range hood as much while using it, so it became the main burner in our house. This is notable because we would use it next to a luxury gas stove, so most people would think it wasn’t much of an upgrade.

As we found out later, the cheap induction burner was not very kind to our stainless steel pans. It puts all its heat out from the middle, and it warped basically all of our 3-layer All Clad pans. It was kind of an expensive lesson. During these few years, we kind of moved to using nonstick on the induction burner rather than stainless steel like we used before. Interestingly, this lets you cook at lower temperature and not worry as much about the uneven heating.

The upcoming PFAS ban

Recently, I read that several states (Minnesota, New York, Maine) had made urgent plans to ban PFAS (including most “nonstick”), and California had considered it but put it off a few years. As one does, I started reading about how to cook all your food on stainless steel, and how careful you have to be about temperature to…fry an egg. They do this on restaurant griddles all the time, but those are more like a carbon steel or cast-iron pan. Stainless is a bit more difficult. (Home griddles often have nonstick, and so does your favorite air fryer.)

Here’s where the story gets weird, because I think if you put yourself in the quadrant of “induction heating, stainless steel” you have made things very hard for yourself.

I got some expensive, 5–7 ply stainless steel pans, which spread out the heat better and didn’t warp. From the start, those are out of budget for most people. I upgraded the portable induction burner to a model with a “larger” burner, but well short of the $1500 “Control Freak” or Impulse Labs $6000 range-top.

Now how do you cook an egg on stainless steel? What makes a stainless steel pan nonstick? To do it, you need a particular temperature range. Some mention the “Leidenfrost Effect” as a measure of it, where water “dances” on the surface — this is up around 200C (400F) or near the smoke point of a lot of cooking oils. Most people manage to cook eggs somewhere lower (around 300F) with fats without too much trouble. But any lower and everything sticks.

Simple induction burners have a temperature sensor under the glass, so they try to hit a certain temperature. Only models like the Control Freak and the Impulse Labs burners do this well, because their sensor goes through the surface and touches the pan, or they add a wired thermometer to help. A lot of the basic models will overshoot the target temperature by quite a bit. So the conundrum about trying to hit “Leidenfrost” temperatures (or below) on most pans is that most of the controllers will go quite a ways past, and just a 20% overshoot will basically turn your favorite cooking oil into smoke that you have to vent the house to get rid of. To fix this, you wind up having a magic number for each pan, like using level 45 for your 10" skillet, waiting a couple minutes. You are the feedback loop, because the technology isn’t very good.

Okay, one more thing, the recent furor about PUFAs (aka seed oils) usually omits one thing, which is that the supposedly-harmful state only happens when you heat them to high temperatures. High temperature cooking has some risks, and you will hit all of them with an excitable induction burner. PFAS (“Teflon”) also is pretty safe at low temperatures.

The direct alternatives to PFAS nonstick are not so great yet. People are reporting ceramic nonstick lasts mere months before sticking, not years as the PFAS based ones do. And the titanium stuff is fine, but it’s more like stainless.

So let’s sum up. Here are some options for the average home cook:

1. Use PFAS or use “moist heat” and cook at lower temperatures, and you’ll have less indoor air pollution and less burned food and oil
2. Use stainless, but you have to get to this 300–400F temperature range (and not go over) to be in the sweet spot between “sticking” or atomizing your fats and having your house smell like a diner. Even if you do this perfectly, my PM2.5 meter says this is making a lot more particulates than #1
3. Use cast iron or carbon steel to avoid sticking, which works. But at higher temperatures, these “seasoned” surfaces smoke even more, and if you cook a tomato sauce you will tend to lose the nonstick “seasoning” you’ve built up

In the end, this means you still need good ventilation to cook, and venting out 1000CFM of air has all kinds of building science implications (like where does that makeup air come from?)

It’s not exactly a reach to say this whole system needs some “technology” right now. That’s in two areas:

First, can we make a better nonstick? The ceramic pans don’t last, and there are lots of experimental titanium combinations that seem to get close, but nothing in the range of PFAS, which lasts several years for most people before degrading.

Second, can we control temperature? The Control Freak and Impulse Labs work here is interesting, but there is nothing cheap for the normal person to buy that doesn’t overshoot by 100F or more.

Making these kinds of sensor-based systems work at a price for regular kitchens seems like a necessary step if we really care about making residential kitchens a little better for our health. We should have solutions like this before we ban nonstick. $1500 for a single burner is way too much.

It’s been fun as a personal challenge to figure out how to get rid of PFAS. I’ve done it in our kitchen, but I think the tradeoffs are not as clear as when I started. At least a couple times a week, I burn something and the whole house smells for a while, and the air quality meters go berserk.

But it’s also kind of fun to learn about. Real tradeoffs, and real opportunities for technology to make a difference.