Innovation Archives

Safe Ceramic Frying Pan Coating

After a quick search for a safe ceramic frying pan coating turned into days of research and frustration, I decided that it was time to just put up an article with my findings and keep it updated to save you, and myself, the trouble of starting over from square one the next time a pan wears out.

There have been acronyms and trademarks aplenty in this search, and unfortunately, they are more often used to obscure the truth than to enlighten. Let’s see if we can peel back the obfuscation like old Teflon and get to some truth. Our goals here are to find a frying pan coating that doesn’t release anything notably unhealthy into our food or air, does a good job of cooking food, and doesn’t wear out quickly, more or less in that order.

PTFE

Let’s start with the elephant in the room, Teflon. For preventing food from sticking, it can’t be beat. The problem arises when it gets hot. Teflon is a fluorocarbon thermoplastic polymer made of Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), which, above 392 °F, begins to releases all manner of harmful acronyms. When the temperature gets above 500 °F, it starts to really come apart to a point where the fumes alone can be lethal to birds and both acutely and chronically harmful to you. These temperatures aren’t even all that hot when it comes to cooking. Keep in mind that we aren’t talking about the average temperature of your food, but the high temperature of the surface of your pan. This is well below the smoke point of many cooking oils, so this could be occurring before the point where you’ve even burnt your food.

If you’re willing to risk low level acronym exposure, and are willing to have a frying pan that you use only for sticky low temperature foods, the best nonstick pan I’ve found is the ScanPan. They’ve done their best to minimize problems from scratching and overheating, but it is still made of PTFE.

Second guess yourself

When shopping through sites like amazon, keep in mind that the sellers and reviewers there are generally not the original manufacturers. This is important from a litigation perspective, since they can mislead you about the actual content of the product, and the manufacturer is unlikely to jump in to enlighten you that the product is actually not as good as a third party advertised.

While all of the other acronyms you will run into while looking into nonstick pans are likely real things of real concern, they are generally things that PTFE degrades to when heated, so stay focused. Don’t assume a pan is safe until you’ve been to the manufacturer website and seen them make the claim that it is PTFE free. The ScanPan above is a great example. To read the amazon sales page and reviews, you would think it’s PTFE free, but check their own website and you see that it is coated with “a specially formulated PTFE that works in conjunction with SCANPAN’s patented ceramic titanium surface technology. Details are proprietary to SCANPAN.”

Something else to note from the above quote is that we see the terms PTFE and ceramic thrown around in the same coating. Ceramic doesn’t mean safe. Ceramic doesn’t mean PTFE free. A ceramic is any nonmetallic solid that remains hard when heated, which is a term so vague that you could apply it to just about any frying pan coating. Conversely, nonstick doesn’t mean Teflon, it just means that things don’t stick to it. What the base pan is made of rarely matters beyond heat conduction or compatibility with induction cooktops. Aluminum is standard. I’ve yet to find a stainless, copper, or titanium nonstick pan that is convincingly non-PTFE, though there are some from Chinese companies with poorly documented claims of safe ceramic coatings.

Once you think you’ve found the pan of your dreams, please, take another moment to think about what assumptions you may be making. Go to the manufacturer’s website. Find where it’s made. Make sure they’ve explicitly stated whatever it is that you find important in their product.

Safe Ceramic Nonstick

Lets look at those frying pan coatings that go out of their way to advertise themselves as safe ceramic and PTFE free. So far I’ve found four ceramic coatings that are used by a variety of brands. They are Thermolon, Ecolon, Greblon, and Stonetec. These are all trademarks for various proprietary processes. They won’t tell us what’s in them, but they assure us they’re safe ceramic. You can click the category headers below to see a selection of the better frying pans made with each coating.

Ecolon

Ecolon is a ceramic-glass reinforced Nylon 6 coating applied with a sol-gel process. Glass reinforced nylon 6 is sometimes used for flame resistance. I wouldn’t say that nylon is especially scary as plastics go. Your toothbrush is probably made of it. It’s got good abrasion resistance, and doesn’t seem to be made with anything especially nasty. It does release hydrogen cyanide when burned, which, while deadly, is more of an acute risk than chronic. I’m still not sure I’m on board with cooking in a nylon frying pan.

It sure makes for a nice looking pan though. Yes, it’s faceted, inside and out. This is the NeoFlam Carat, lined with Greblon ceramic. It states on the manufacturer website that it doesn’t contain PTFE, which is great so long as you don’t mind cooking in nylon. Made in Korea.

Thermolon

The people who make the Thermolon coating took to the web to combat some misinformation about their coating composition and stated that, “Thermolon has an elemental composition of oxygen(O), silicon(Si), carbon(C), aluminum(Al) and titanium(Ti). ” If that is truly all that is in it, then it should be pretty safe. Ceramic could still conceivably be unsafe within that boundary, but not likely. Thermolon also has a pdf that goes to great lengths to tell us very little about their coating, but does confirm that it is PTFE free, and a list of some test results, though they don’t specify which of their many formulations was tested. Their website says all of the Thermolon coatings are PTFE-free.

The GreenPan line seems to be the most popular of the Thermolon coated pans. They’ve got a really nice looking pan made for Sur La Table that is 18/10 stainless with an aluminum core for even heating, and the newest Thermolon formulation, a diamond impregnated PTFE-free ceramic coating. They haven’t updated their documentation for the diamond coating, but I have found info on how diamond can be added to such a coating, so it’s credible. Here’s their video sales pitch. Made in China.

Stonetec

WaxonWare has developed a coating they’re calling Stonetec. Their site says it’s PTFE free, and made “overseas”, so assume your least favorite nation of origin. The above pan has a Stonetec coated aluminum core. I’m posting it because it’s a reasonably major brand stating clearly that it’s PTFE free, but they aren’t giving us much more to go on.

Greblon

I’ve gone through my share of Greblon pans over the years, having owned 5 Green Earth frying pans. They wear out eventually, and now that I’m looking at things with eyes hardened by skepticism and betrayal, I notice that the Ozeri Green Earth website is terrible, and it’s just secondary sellers making claims about the composition of these Chinese made pans. Looking into the Greblon coating specifically, I see that there are six different Greblon formulations, four of which have PTFE. I can’t find much info on what is in the two non-PTFE formulations, so at this point we still know slightly more than nothing about them.

I’ve noticed a subset of Greblon pans that pretend they are made of granite. So far, every one I’ve looked into is just speckled PTFE Greblon, labeled as things like STONEHENGE.

At this point, I can’t even recommend a Greblon pan. I’m only finding one pan that specifies that it uses one of the non-PTFE formulations, and It’s just a claim by the amazon seller. I can’t find any sign of it on the parent company’s site. They appear to be sold by a German company, but made in China. Until we as consumers demand some transparency and accountability, sellers will continue to find deception more profitable than telling us what’s in their assuredly safe ceramic coatings.

Cast Iron

After reading about all these supposedly safe ceramic nonstick coatings, you’re probably about ready to try your hand at cast iron seasoning. Reading up on the subject left we with the impression that it is more superstition than science. My question here was the same as for finding a safe ceramic coating, what is the seasoned coating made of, and how safe is it? After reading several forums on the same question, and the wikipedia article, I’d say the answer is: We don’t know, but it’s probably a lacquer, soap, or plastic by the time it’s done polymerizing. Sure, that’s better than PTFE or hydrogen cyanide, but it’s also a very fragile coating, and you’re likely to end up eating it in quantity.

Add to that, the iron from the pan ends up in the food in surprisingly massive quantities. That’s great if you’re anemic, but do a bit of research and you’ll find excessive iron buildup in the body being blamed for all sorts of problems in older men and post-menopausal women, from inflammation, to blood thickening/clotting, to accelerated aging from the free-radicals. Personally, I get more than I should already from meat and green vegetables.

Hard Anodized Coatings

One other coating of interest is hardcoat. A ManPan, from Lloyd’s Pans. PTFE free, oven safe, heat safe to 700°F, metal utensils encouraged, and made in the USA. They state all of this clearly on the manufacturer’s website. The pan is coated with hard anodized aluminum.

Aluminum gets a bit of a bad rap in the alternative health communities, but that doesn’t make sense to me. Aluminum is the most abundant metallic element on earth at 8.3% by mass, and it’s concentrated in the crust (where we live). We’ve evolved in a high aluminum environment, and it’s excreted by our kidneys. People eat aluminum hydroxide as an antacid. It’s in baking powder, beverage cans, and aluminum foil. Most of the pans above are made of aluminum under those coatings. Current guidelines say that you would need to eat something like 3 grams of aluminum a day to exceed your body’s ability to excrete it and have notable toxicity. The Alzheimer’s scare seems to have more to do with a breakdown in the brain’s cleaning system than with aluminum itself.

The hard anodized aluminum coating on the ManPan should be around the hardness of the hardest steels, and stable enough to not notably come off while cooking. I’ve been considering trying one, but I’m a bit concerned about their topcoat. They don’t say what’s in it. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s something similar to Tufram. I don’t know what’s in that either, except that it’s a topcoat for aluminum with the properties they describe, and is FDA approved for use in food processing and cooking.

Stainless Steel

Stainless gets good marks for safety. I’ve been using a good 18/10 stainless for my other pots for many years without complaint. Stainless doesn’t heat evenly, so an aluminum core is a big plus and also cuts down the weight. Sticking can be a problem. The general consensus is that you should preheat the pan on low heat, and then expect the food to stick a bit and then release when things get going. These pans are chemically durable, so cook what you want in them, but be careful not to scratch them up with utensils or cleaning. I’m not convinced that mirror finish is a plus, but scratches definitely hurt functionality.

This one from Cook’s standard looks like a good combination of features and price.

I wish I could claim to have found a sure thing, safe ceramic coating after all of this. The Thermolon probably has the best claim at this point of being a safe ceramic. I’ve already updated the post to reflect a couple new additions, and I’ll continue to update this post as new products arrive. If you’ve got information that you think would contribute to the post or readers in search of a better pan, please comment below. I’ll be moderating the comments to keep things productive and will add to the post as needed.

Kinetic Sculpture Race 2013 – Arcata – Ferndale

Humboldt County’s annual Kinetic Sculpture Race started off this year with unseasonably nice weather, with the throngs being shamed by the stigma of getting a sunburn in Humboldt County, a feat normally accomplished only by the most pallid of individuals.

The above entry may look familiar, but it is not a rework of last year’s entry, it was there in addition. They are both beautifully animated and controlled by the pilots. These things were definitely a favorite, especially of the children, and if they can continue to produce more, I think they could become an attraction all on their own.

The HMS Lady Luck is an interesting piece of engineering as well as sculpture and performance art. The mast seemed to be worked in as a steering system rather than a method of propulsion, and the many sideways people providing propulsion you may remember from previous incarnations like Gloryopolis and Classical Nudes.

The Post-Apocalyptic Cockroach won some awards for speed and engineering. I don’t know about the apocalypse, but it looks like the pilots could survive a massive hailstorm with nothing but hearing damage. I’ve seen those tires in an local outdoor store and they look huge on a bicycle, but I think they must be much more efficient on the road than the much bigger tires of most of the competition. I saw them at the bottom of Dead Man’s drop and they seem to have gotten through all the sand and cliff quickly, which I would have expected to be their biggest challenge.

I sometimes give the entrants a hard time for not changing their sculptures from year to year, but there are obvious exceptions. Duane Flatmo brought back his fire-breathing Snapdragon and won the Spectator’s Favorite award, a clear sign that the crowds are happy to see it again.

These guys crack me up. There’s nothing like coming over a hill to find a group of safari guys carrying a giant dead ant up a sand dune to make you feel like you’ve fallen into a parallel universe. I think it is also an odd case of something getting better as it was simplified. They started out with a fire engine, then stuck the ant on top of it, and now took away the fire engine to make what I think is the best of the three.

This puffer fish sculpture sponsored by Mr. Fish is a classic which keeps changing species each year.

I’m putting these guys up as an honorable mention. They’re a bit light on the sculpture, but they look ready to race in style and comfort. If I had to commute several miles a day over land and sea, I think this is how I’d want to travel.

Gear Design – Differential

Designing gears is often a matter of knowing what needs to be done, but having trouble imagining into existence the perfect set of gears for the job. The above video does a great job of showing how a simple concept was refined into the elegance of design that is the modern differential gear that allows a single drive to rotate multiple wheels on a vehicle at optimal speeds to prevent slipping.

Self Stirring Pot

This is a self stirring pot. Why this hasn’t been put to market sometime in the past few thousands of years full of around a billion people cooking things, I don’t understand. Every one of us should be embarrassed for not coming up with this ourselves. It was created by a dentist in Japan who no doubt got sick of his noodles sticking to the bottom of his pot. He calls it Kuru-Kuru Nabe, the round and round pot.

This might even have some interesting new cooking possibilities. I wonder if you cracked an egg in there if you might end up with a doughnut shaped egg? This kind of elegant use of thermodynamics has some intriguing possibilities in other fields as well.

Carved Zucchini

I carved a zucchini for Halloween this year (click image to see full size). Going unconventional with my Jack o’ Lantern is typical for me, though I would usually carve a watermelon, but I couldn’t come up with anything that would top last years watermelon skull with brain, so I figured it was time on to move on to greener fruits…errr vegetables? Whatever they are. The zucchini alligator carving took a bit over an hour (it is all one piece, so carving away the area around the teeth took time). It’s almost two feet long.

I recommend the zucchini as a carving substrate. They don’t stink, they aren’t sticky or messy, and they have a ton of firm flesh and only a small center of seeds. They won’t handle a candle though, so use a LED or ultrasonic fog maker.

Camera Ball Omni-Directional Throwable Camera

Throwable Camera Ball

Throwable Cameras are an awesome concept, and this 3D printed ball with 36 cameras by Jonas Pfeil takes it to the next level. Just toss the ball in the air and when it reaches the vertex, all the cameras take a picture. The result is a stitched together panoramic image with a full 360° unobstructed view. I can think of all sorts of variations of this that could be useful, from adding infrared and using it for military and police actions, to using a launcher to get a shot of the whole neighborhood, to doubling the cameras for 3D shots. Video Below

The camera isn’t yet on the market, but I’m sure the first question they are going to get from the masses will be: Can I get it in purple?

Robotic Bull for the Military

War is about to change in a way not seen since the invention of the missile. DARPA (the defense Department’s advanced research wing) is showing off a scaled up version of Big Dog they are calling Alpha Dog, or Bull Dog. It resembles an actual bull more than any kind of dog, which reminds me of a recent story on adaptive camouflage in which researchers were attaching panels to mask most the infrared signature of tanks, and could project what would look like a walking cow onto the siede of the tank to further remove suspicion. In the case of Alpha dog, rather than projecting the cow on the tank, they seem to be putting the tank in the cow.

More interesting though, is what this says about the ever present arms race. The United States has been the dominant military power in the world, but has had troubles of late with small decentralized terrorist groups. Imagine if they were to convert an auto manufacturer to pump out tens of thousands of weaponized robotic mountain goats. It sounds a bit far fetched, but I don’t see what is stopping them really. Just with the tech they have shown the public, they already show themselves to have the tech not only to do this, but also to make them mostly autonomous. The toughest part at this point might just be giving them a power source that wouldn’t give us problems if it were captured.

It makes sense that the U.S. has cut funding for some of its largest budgeted fighter jets and other new tech. The next war will be lost to the people with the best drone offense and laser defense. What chance does a fighter pilot have against a drone immune to G forces, or a ground based laser system that shreds it from miles away at the speed of light?

In related news, there have been reports that the U.S. drones have contracted some kind of computer virus.

Advertising with Land Mines

Unicef Sticker - Front

The land mine sticker above is part of a land mine awareness campaign by Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund). The other side is sticky and camouflaged with a pattern to match flooring. When the camouflaged ad is stepped on, it sticks to the bottom of the shoe. The text on the front reads, “In many other countries you would now be mutilated! Help the victims of land mines!”

There is a beauty to this type of guerilla advertising. It allows for an organization without a lot of resources to spend a small amount of money on a clever advertising gimmick and then see their message spread multiply through the internet as sics like ours report the gimmick. Some of us even have enough shame to spread the message as well.

Where we live, if we fail to watch where we step, we end up with a smelly shoe. Other countries aren’t so lucky. For more on Unicef and land mines, see their page here:

http://www.unicef.org/emerg/index_landmines.html

Kinetic Sculpture Race 2011

It’s kinetic time once again in Humboldt County California, and this year there were even more challenges than usual for our brave contestants. The weather has thrown them the usual mix of sun, hail, and rainbows, but this year, in addition to slogging through sand dunes, the bay, and 42 miles of track, they also got to slog through months of politics.

Most of the entries this year seemed a bit sub-par. The bigger contestants like Calistoga and Yakima are no longer in it, and most of the rest are just new paint jobs on last year’s model, though I can see why. It all started with disputes over who was in charge, licensing problems, and threats of cancellation. Why would anyone put months of effort into building a sculpture for a race that may not even happen? On that note, I’ve got a message for those involved in the politics: nobody cares who you are, so either get your crap together or hand over the reigns to someone who will.

Tess and Sara Kraus

This year, the politics went too far. When officials barred Tess and Sara Kraus from piloting their tiger (below, made by local high school students) for failing to prove their age, these two responded in true Amazon style by getting up and rousing chanting supporters from the crowd with a speech that would make Xena proud. In the end, parents had to take the place of the devastated teens, and pedal the float past the officials, at which point they switched back, and continued on. They’ve been told they will not be treated as a part of the race, all in the name of some liability tyrant. Well, I hope someone feels safer now.

Lost Coast, Tiger, endeavor

There was certainly no lack of enthusiasm though, and turnout was good, considering. I was glad to see the Endeavor entry come in first on day one. NASA needs a victory under their belt after the gutting of our space program. The high ground and the best technology have won nearly every war and industrial race in history, and those of the future will be no exception.

Sheriff grills gorilla

This albino gorilla even seemed to be having some trouble with the law. I moved on after taking this shot, but I expect the gorilla is in Guantanamo by now.

Above is this year’s entry from Duane Flatmo, a man who puts out so much awesome every year that I’m tempted to put him in the site navigation. I’m not that impressed with the conversion this year after seeing his last several entries, but taken on its own merit against the rest of the field, it is still a contender for number one.

And it breathes fire!

This one gets my vote for most questionable engineering. Maybe I was missing something, but these guys were pedaling like mad and going at a slow walking pace. The guy next to them even felt the need to put his foot on the ground to keep his bike from falling over, and it sounded like they were using their pedaling to tumble rocks in their pontoons rather than for propulsion. It looks heavy, but it was apparently blown over by the winds at the dunes.

Gloryopolis, above, is another great entry. You may remember them from last year’s Classical Nudes sculpture. They reused a well engineered base, but did a complete overhaul of the art. This is what it’s all about, and they pulled off the superhero theme better than I’ve seen done before.

Kinetic Dog, fish

There are some interesting regulars in the race that don’t get a lot of notice, like the dog above. I’ve posted pictures of this cycle/dog pair before, and now I’m curious. Has this dog been in the race since it was a pup? I’m going to have to go through my old pictures. The salmon on the right was entirely scaled with compact discs.

There are hundreds of people in single person contraptions and bicycles as well. I don’t know if it is home made or off the shelf, but I want the cycle below. It looked comfortable, efficient, and she could turn it 360° in place.

Three wheeled reclining cycle

If you would like to see more coverage from Kinetic Sculpture Races past, check out my coverage from past years at the links below:

2010

2009

SmartBird – Festo Robotic Flapping Bird

SmartBird - Festo

Not a year goes by lately without Festo coming out with some awesome new biomimetic toys, well, industrial automation really, but you can bet these will be in toy stores in some form within a year or two.

This time, they’ve created a bionic seagull, fully autonomous from takeoff to landing. It uses the same kind of active torsion to take advantage of vortices that flying animals use to get that extra edge in flight that has previously been hard to duplicate in man made devices. Turning is accomplished wit a tilt of the tail.

Rather than using lighter than air materials like in their past projects,the SmartBird frame is constructed from carbon fiber, polyeurathane foam and other lightweight but strong materials, yet they’ve still managed to keep it aloft even with the weight of the brains, batteries, motors, and even a radio transmitter. Video below.

For more technical specs, check out their pdf

Festo Robotic Penguins

Festo Air Jelly

Lighter than air posts

Robotics posts