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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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I've had two of the Lodge cast iron pans crack completely, and being able to dishwash the nonstick pans saves me a lot of time.

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. :-)

Can it really anneal at normal oven temperatures? Cast iron has a melting point of 2200F -- so how can 500F oven do anything?

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!

"the Teflon website will warn against small birds in the kitchen..."

But Big Bird is okay in the kitchen? ;-)

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.

Smoke inhalation and Teflon toxicity are really different death mechanisms -- if you're interested, a quick read of the abstracts of articles on mass bird deaths from PTFE toxicity at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10879927 or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3276392/ is illuminating.

Cooking oil fumes (not smoke) are toxic as well.

Butter in cast iron is toxic at 260 degrees. Teflon isn't toxic until 280 degrees.

Check out http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4723395

> 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.

The teflon on pans is inert and non toxic. It would not be digested if it was scratched off and in your food.

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