Tools Archives - Whyfore

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.

Plastic Molding

plastic molding

Liquid plastic casting resins tend to be expensive and have set properties that limit your flexibility. Mikey77 has come up with his own material out of materials so common, chances are you already have them. Best of all, you choose the color, viscosity, and set time yourself based on your needs.

He calls the stuff Oogoo, a name reminiscent of Sugru, an off the shelf product with very similar properties. In a nutshell, his recipe is very simple, just mix corn starch with silicone caulk.

The problem with silicone is that it takes a long time to dry from the outside in, the corn starch allows it to dry from the inside out, and very quickly. The ingredients are pretty safe and stable, so you can mix in your own dyes and other ingredients. Check out his full instructable here.

Thermochromic Pigment

I’ve been wondering ever since the Hypercolor days why no one sells a house paint that changes from black to white as it gets warm. The same goes for shingles, jackets, etc. I can only assume that the costs of production must still outweigh their value as an active thermal insulation, but now that I see this, I’m tempted to at least make myself a jacket. In the video below, there is a tutorial on how to make fabric that quickly changes from black to white as it gets hot.

(via Badass Nerd)

Worlds Smallest Dustpan?

Proving once again that the Post-It Note is one of man’s most versatile inventions. (via thereifixedit)

Tilt Shifting Paintings

Tilt shifting in photography is when you deliberately put your lens out of line with the sensor in such a way that it changes the focus on the sensor/film rather than just based on distance of objects and depth of field. The resulting photos and videos trick the eye into thinking it is seeing a tiny scale model rather than something miles away. A similar effect can be created through video/image editing. In the above pictures, artcyclopedia has added an effect similar to tilt shift via software to several of Van Gogh’s works (click the picture to see their full gallery and the originals). I love the effect.

I think the kind of visual cues we take from tilt shifted photography are to some extent a product of the photographic age. We are used to seeing two dimensional representations of three dimensional space as seen through the single eye of a camera. When you look at a real scene through two eyes, whatever you are looking at is in focus, while anything out of focus is blurry and doubled (and by definition, not what you are currently looking at). One of the flaws with the current round of 3D movies is that while things have depth cues based on sending a different signal to each eye, there is no adjustable depth of field based on what you are looking at. The focus of any given object is chosen by the camera, rather than the viewer, and the whole image is the same distance away, even if each eye sees a different angle.

I did a little experimenting on my own to get a better understanding of things. I think the choice of impressionism is a good one. Impressionists have a tendency to capture the soul of a thing crisply, but without much detail. This means that when you blur a background, it looks believable rather than smeared. Creating this effect in Photoshop can be pretty simple.

Part of what makes tilt shift photography make things look miniature is the difference distance makes to depth of field. In tilt shift, focus is much more independent of distance. In a large scale photo, once you are focused a ways out, it tends to focus to infinity. Painters tend to make their paintings fully focused at all distances, which improves clarity, but degrades the feeling of depth. With a tilt shift effect I wanted to choose a subject in the composition, bring the eye to them, and then create the illusion of depth in the rest of the image by virtue of knowing where the eye is already looking. This is counter to one of the usual goals of composition: To keep the eye moving. Below is a Monet I found with a quick image search that served my needs nicely for a very simplified test.

The alterations I made can be seen below. I don’t think it made the image nicer, but I think it accomplished my compositional goal of directing the eye and holding it on the subject.

I chose it because it covers a vast distance, contains a subject to draw the eye, and has a tree that exists within the plane of focus, but in front of an area that I planned to blur. The clarity of the tree is what makes the end result different from what you would see with a tilt shift lens. This only took a few minutes. Below are the steps I took. If you have a copy of Photoshop, give it a shot. It’s a good skill to have in your repertoire.

After opening the image, duplicate your background layer and work in the duplicate.
Select anything outside your intended focus area that needs to remain sharp. In this case, the tree and the canopy on the right.
Click on Select/Inverse.
Click the add layer mask button in your layers pallet.
Click select/Reselect.
Click on the gradient tool and make sure you have it set to a black to white reflected gradient.
Click on the part of your image that should remain focused and drag toward the edge of the picture perpendicular to the intended strip of focus and release.
Right Click on the layer mask and click on Apply Layer Mask.
Click on Filter/Blur/Gaussian blur, and drag the slider to create the blur.

I’m sure you can find a more long winded tutorial somewhere, but if you have a moderate knowledge of Photoshop, this should suffice as a bare bones process to get you started.

Leafy Zip Ties

Someone has come up with these fancy zip ties with leaves on the ends. They’ve got them in all sorts of colors for different application, from attaching plants to support rods, to making your iPod cord look like it’s sprouted white leaves. I like ’em. I hope they become a thing. And they sell them on Amazon!.

How to get Data off an old Hard Drive

When getting a new computer, there is always the issue of how to get your stuff off of the old one, which is often not even functional, like the time I knocked a full glass of water into my power supply (oops). This elegantly designed little product not only helps you with this problem, it also gives that old drive new purpose. It works on both IDE (old wide cables) and SATA (new little cables) drives, and lets you plug them into your USB port.

I always keep my old hard drives when I get a new machine, both for security reasons, and as backup, but then they changed the cables. This adapter not only lets you get your data off those old drives into your new computer, it also makes them into a better way to back up your data than DVDs, which I find unreliable, or the lesser capacity of flash drives. It supports the newer USB2 as well, so it works quickly (for USB).

Amazon has ’em for $18.

Or you can go straight to Buy.com:

Cables Unlimited USB 2.0 to IDE & SATA Adapter Cable w/ Power

DIY Guitar Tuner

DIY guitar tuner

HackaDay has a fun little project up for those of you who play the guitar and have a do-it-yourself mentality. This little device can be used like a guitar pick. Using the buttons to select your note will cause the LEDs to flash at that frequency. The light will only be visible on the string when it’s in tune.

Or, for around ten bucks, you can save yourself some time and buy one pre-made.

Self Sharpening Pencil

This mechanical pencil from Japan has an internal gear system that automatically rotates the lead as you go, keeping it sharp at the tip. I’m he kind of person who will just walk into a pen store and spend fifteen minutes trying them all out to find the best ones. I can’t stand writing with those gummy-inked bic pens. that always leak, fail, and skip. It’s about time the rest of us started to appreciate quality again. It’s one of the things that made this country great. What we purchase makes a difference to what is made, who succeeds, and who does not. Buy quality. Buy Innovation. It will lead to more of the same.

This Kuru Toga pencil can be found at amazon

Upside Down Spray Bottle

upside-down-spray-bottle

Duh. I feel like an idiot. That is always a sign of a good post around here. This is one of those inventions you could have come up with using some junk lying around in the garage in a few minutes, but you didn’t. Neither did I. You know that stiff plastic tube in the spray bottle? Why is it stiff?

…

Yeah, I don’t know why either. This manufacurer has made a spray botlle with a very flexible tube, weighted at the bottom, so no matter what the orientation of the bottle, the tube is always where the liquid is at. That means no more running out of spray when you are trying to spray the underside of your plants. Do people really do that? For me it is always a problem when I’m trying to clean the ceiling of my microwave.

You can get one through Lee Valley.

Amazon has something similar as well.

(Via BoingBoingGadgets)