The "soap and solvent" is sodium hydroxide (lye) and DMSO at 120 degC. Those are... fairly... well behaved chemicals, but lye is stout stuff and DMSO attacks nitrile gloves.
You could imagine a remediation process that uses this process but the combo ain't exactly Dawn dish soap. I'd almost prefer pyroprocessing over it.
About 40 years ago I boarded my horse with an old cowboy who used DMSO as a horse liniment. He had been using it for years any time one of his mounts was worked pretty hard or when someone brought a lame horse to him. He would rub the joints, calves, and thighs of the horse down good with DMSO for a few days and then they were good to go again.
He also used it on his wife. He told me that she had type I diabetes and neuropathy as a result. Her feet were always cold from poor circulation. That was true until he happened to rub her feet one day after treating a horse. Her feet warmed up in minutes and became normal pink again. After that, he used it on her feet and legs since it improved circulation.
You can say what you will about it being reactive and possibly not good for you but she was able to dance again and get back on her horse so it definitely does have some benefit. They did this for at least 30 years and both of them were past 75 years old when they passed away.
Like another poster said, it is used as a carrier for some medications since it pulls them straight into the bloodstream. I don't think it's magic but I also don't think you'll suffer much using it even with bare hands.
As far as lye is concerned, the sodium hydroxide in this paper, you can easily make that yourself with wood ash and water. It is pretty handy if you are tanning hides since the treatment of a raw hide with lye causes the hair to slip right off leaving a smooth skin ready for the next step.
Are you certain it was DMSO and not DMSO2? I ask because quite a few ointments for horses have DMSO2/MSM. I use it on horses with horse specific formulas and on myself in a cream designed for humans called Penetrex.
DMSO also makes your breath smell like garlic after you’ve had it on your skin. I wouldn’t want to be around a horse that’s had a healthy dose, and I certainly wouldn’t love if my wife had to use it every day.
DMSO is not well-behaved. It easily penetrates human skin, and carries solutes with it. Don't touch!
"DMSO can cause contaminants, toxins, and medicines to be absorbed through the skin, which may cause unexpected effects.
"Because DMSO easily penetrates the skin, substances dissolved in DMSO may be quickly absorbed. Glove selection is important when working with DMSO. Butyl rubber, fluoroelastomer, neoprene, or thick (15 mil / 0.4 mm) latex gloves are recommended. Nitrile gloves, which are very commonly used in chemical laboratories, may protect from brief contact but have been found to degrade rapidly with exposure to DMSO."
To be fair to the op - in chemistry well behaved means - it is more stable than nitroglycerin, less reactive than fluorine and less toxic than dimethylmercury.
Aka - won't kill you outright if you are just properly careful.
I think they meant well behaved in the sense that it isn't highly reactive - e.g. doesn't explode in contact with air. Not so much what it does to humans.
We're talking about fluorine chemistry here, so things get kind of extreme.
DMSO is used in pain relief in other countries (eg Mexico). It's also excellent for burns as it allows the body to repair a tiny amount of nerve damage or prevents it. Hard to say. This is demonstrable by burning yourself, I guess. My family and I have used it for burns for over 20 years. Granted, we don't get burned/encounter people who have been burned at home that often. I had a close friend with a rare disease (McCune Albright's Syndrome) who used it for pain relief, after I treated a burn she received.
It has been reported that it use has repaired massive nerve damage, which is probably coincidental. It is sold in healthfood stores in the US, but you want to dilute it 1/100 parts water. While it is primarily used as an industrial lubricant, on contact, it immediately travels through the skin to the nervous system. Most people get the strange reaction of the taste of oysters, when it's absorbed. There is a small percentage of people with various allergic reactions, like with many chemicals.
I would never mix it with soap, for any reason. It's like mixing shoe polish or granola with soap, you just end up with a mess of concerns.
it was an expensive prescription med a few years back. I get dyspepsia from NSAIDs so I thought, "Could I make an ointment like that with ibuprofen?" and looked in the literature and found that ibuprofen is absorbed quickly with DMSO even more so than diclofenac. So I made a batch, but when I tried it I found I'd get dyspepsia very quickly after applying it to my skin so I guess the ibuprofen was being absorbed efficiently.
DMSO was purportedly involved in the case of the “Toxic Lady”[1], who apparently used it as a pain relief agent and ended up intoxicating the hospital workers assisting her.
> Computer calculations by colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, revealed DMSO knocks off the carboxylic acid group. “Once that happens it causes the entire molecule to fall apart in a cascade of reactions,” Dichtel says.
Big if true. I'm slightly skeptical that just decarboxylating PFAS causes the rest of the backbone to "fall apart" - I would expect it to form CF3[CF2]· (carbon radical) which would readily react with water to form -H or -OH, which is basically back to square one. But maybe it can eliminate HF in the presence of UV, forming CF3[CH2]CF=CFOH, which gets hydrolyzed, oxidized, then cleaved, but boy is that an unfavorable process.
(edit: skimmed the paper, I was pretty close. Forms CF3[CF2]- which goes to CF3[CH2]CF=CF2 which then gets hydrolyzed, but...DMSO/NaOH at 80-120°C ...yikes. This is the ochem equivalent of "nuke the site from orbit", very few compounds survive these conditions)
I've been out of the chemistry game for a few years now so I'm a bit rusty but gut instinct is that this is far from a slam dunk. But anything to reduce FC's is a boon to the world, so I'm hopeful this is a breakthrough.
Edit2:
> This high fluoride recovery indicates that most of the perfluoroalkyl fluorines were defluorinated and mineralized rather than being transformed to smaller-chain PFAS or being lost as volatile fluorocarbons.
So the surprising thing isn't the decarboxylation, it's that NaOH encourages the perflourylalkenes to cleave at sites away from the alpha (splitting, rather than carbon-by-carbon), which is neat. Still doesn't touch PFOS, unfortunately.
Headline is a lie: as we finally find out halfway through the article, it's not soap but lye, sodium hydroxide. The solvent is the fairly nontoxic dimethyl sulfoxide, so both of these are safe to release into the environment. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515659 sbierwagen reports that the reaction requires 120-degree temperatures so this isn't suitable for in-situ remediation.
The reaction doesn't "require" 120C, that was simply the first experiment they described. They began by confirming that this reaction actually takes place and discovering which PFAs were neutralized by it. To that end they boiled a mixture of the stuff for 24 hours.
The reaction can occur at more moderate temperatures. There is more analysis (with experimental results) further down in the paper:
> Substantial defluorination still occurred when the isolated PFOA degradation product (perfluoro-1H-heptane 2) was subjected to degradation conditions but heated to only 40°C (table S3).
Okay, but you can't, for example, heat up large masses of contaminated dirt to 40° without killing everything in them. And you probably can't even saturate them with DMSO, both because even though it's relatively nontoxic it's not that nontoxic, and because it's expensive.
Ummm... What?
120C NaOH does *not* sound safe "to release". I've worked with similar solutions. That stuff eats through so much and it's a pretty scary solution, if at high concentration.
As with everything, It very much depends on the concentration.
NaOH is only unsafe because it's highly alkaline, but it doesn't stay highly alkaline after it encounters buffers like bicarbonate or hydrogenphosphate, which are abundant in the natural environment. After it's been neutralized in this way, it's just sodium ions, and while enough of those will indeed cause environmental damage (witness salinization-induced desertification in much of the Middle East) it takes truly massive quantities.
That's honestly one of the things I wish we could get a handle on.
Company gets sued for using and hiding the danger of a compound they learned fairly quickly was toxic. Goes and invents another compound and switches to it without having to prove its safety. After it becoming public that they were intentionally hiding dangers for a half century, I feel we should take away their ability to be given the benefit of the doubt.
All I think they learn from these lawsuits is that they need to get better at identifying and removing people who will call them out on their bullshit.
Edit - I know the whole thing with DuPont was using PFOAs in the manufacturing process and leaking (intentionally dumping) them into the environment, but it's not like the final product (Teflon) is safe to ingest either, which as a cooking surface, you most definitely will in some quantity.
> but it's not like the final product (Teflon) is safe to ingest either
Sure it is. I don't think a less toxic material than Teflon even exists. It's toxicity is comparable to water.
The LD50 of Teflon is > 11,280 mg/kg. Water by comparison is 90,000 mg/kg. They were not able to measure the exact toxicity because it's impossible to eat so much.
The new chemical is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX and while I'm not a chemist as best I can tell, it also contains a carboxylic acid group, so this method would work on it.
KOH is not soap, it is used in the production of soap and KOH will make your skin to soap. Destroying anything organic by cooking it in strong lye at 120 °C with quite polar solvent is not something unexpected. It might be optimised with crown ethers or other phase-transfer catalysts, but I cannot see how this is a milder treatment than simple heating it until decomposition. To make this reaction affordable one has to extract/purify these forever-chemicals first. Otherwise, mostly other stuff will be destroyed. Lime (Ca(OH)₂) is somewhat cheaper in this quantities, maybe this reaction can be done with it. This will also bind any fluoride ions, which would make this way less toxic.
I was excited for a moment but PFOS (Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, a PFAS) doesn't have a carboxyl group so I guess Minnesota's (US state) 3M polluted waters won't get any respite.
Same 3M contamination of groundwater happened in Belgium (Zwijndrecht plant) and the Netherlands (Dordrecht plant), with very little international coverage.
The fact that they refuse to get certified / conduct any independent rigorous testing (like in NSF/ANSI certification) should have clued you in.
"We also cut open a pair of Black Berkey filters to see how they are constructed and to look for evidence that, as Berkey marketing claims, they contain “at least” six different filtering elements. We found that though the Berkey filters are larger and denser than filters from Brita and 3M Filtrete, they appear to share their filtration mechanisms: activated charcoal impregnated with an ion-exchange resin.
"
I wouldn't count on any of this to filter chemicals, much less PFAS.
Slightly off topic, I’m keen to dispose of our Teflon frying pan. Does anyone have a good recommendation for an alternative, ideally one that doesn’t take too much “maintenance”?
We also have a Teflon milk pan but that is never used at a high tempriture so I’m less concerned about that.
Nothing beats cast iron. They aren't hard to take care of.(In spite of the rhetoric.) Actually easier, once you get a good surface on them. Pots, frying pans, woks, etc. They work very well. The most important thing is to give them time to heat up. Once they are, they hold the heat very well, so can cook at any temperature.
Do you have recommendations for seasoning them without a thermostat or a suitable thermometer? I successfully burned my new cast-iron skillet clean, but even after four thin coats of poppyseed and flaxseed oil, each heated up for an hour or so to a temperature that chars garlic skin after a few minutes, eggs still stick if I try to cook them on it without oil.
(I'm a fan of teflon but I like cast iron even more.)
It depends on what you're worried about and what you want out of a pan. If you use wooden cooking utensils (spatula, chopsticks etc.), then just keep using the Teflon pan. It's fine as is and you won't scratch the coating.
If you want to use metal cookware, go for cast iron (heavy) or carbon steel (light). There's a lot online about how to season or maintain them -- you can safely ignore all of this advice. These are pans you can abuse. They're not as nonstick as Teflon so you still want to use some cooking oil, but that's about it. Both kinds may rust if there's humidity, but that's fine -- just wash before (instead of after) cooking and a bit of leftover rust is just a tad extra iron in your diet ;)
I bought a couple of SolidTeknics[1] wrought iron pans, and I love them.
You have to season them first, which essentially involves blackening them by burning good cooking oils onto them. I used rice bran oil for that. It's a bit of a mission, but you only do it once.
They are great because you can get them really hot and they have excellent heat inertia. You can put them in the oven if needed. And cleanup is simple: just hot water & a brush. No chemicals. I've often got the pan clean and back in the cupboard while my protein is resting.
But if it's not protein that your cooking on your pan, but instead perhaps its an acidic sauce, then I would recommend a stainless steel pan for that.
For pots I would go with stainless also. Or copper if you can afford it.
Cast iron really doesn't require much maintenance. You can season it and never wash it and be delicate with it like a fancy chef, or you can abuse the hell out of it and it doesn't matter because it's basically indestructible. The only thing you can't do is let it sit in water or run it through the dishwasher. I mean, you can, but it rusts… which also isn't that difficult to clean if it happens.
Cast iron and a green scotchbrite pad or a stainless steel scouring pad and you are good. You can use hot water and soap to clean it. It will deteriorate any "seasoning" but so what. Clean after use, dry and store away. Takes maybe two minutes. If you want to get it seasoned so it has some non-stick to it you can, but you don't have to.
If you simmer a half inch of water in a cast iron or enameled cast iron pan, you can scrape almost anything away with a soft spatula. Like new in no time. No soap needed.
Much faster than scrubbing.
There are a few thing that are still a pain though, like eggs and fish.
Demeyere brand skillets are fantastic. They're fairly nonstick - I can scramble eggs with only a little sticking, hamburgers or sausages will leave residue, but it's easily cleanable. They aren't super cheap, but they won't break the bank and they're a lot of value for the money.
An aluminum skillet from a restaurant supply store is cheap and low-maintenance. I use this one [0] for omelets and scrambled eggs, and it's probably my favorite pan. The thickness means that the heat is incredibly even, and there's enough mass that it won't cool down much when adding food to a preheated pan.
Depends on what worries you. Stainless steel is the least reactive, but higher maintenance. Cast iron, carbon steel and aluminum are all reactive with acidic foods and will leech metals -- plus the acidic food will strip all the seasoning off. I cook with lots of tomatoes, so that rules out all of these for me. Cast iron and carbon steel (to a lesser extent) need to be seasoned to not stick like crazy and to not rust, which involves polymerizing cooking oil onto the surface. The health effects of this polymerized oil is unknown and the oil smoke is not great for indoor air quality. Digesting regular amounts of rust is also another unknown health effect, though iron can accumulate in people with certain genetic disorders.
I think the safest option is stainless steel, and funny enough, Teflon. They are both inert and Teflon is only toxic if you cook on high heat. I keep a Teflon around solely for scrambled eggs and fish on low heat, but they are very doable in a well oiled stainless fry pan as well.
I switched to stainless steel, it is more to maintain, but it's not horrible. I also use a ceramic pan on very low temperatures to cook really stick stuff like scrambled eggs.
I bought a cast iron thinking it would be a pain. its really not. they have came a long way. you can treat it like any other pan (besides being heavy) - you can use soap to clean it. - Dont get me wrong. treating it correctly will make it last a life time. i just store mine in the oven when ive finished washing it.
High temperatures do not bother Teflon, there's no reason to dispose of it because of that.
According to the EPA Teflon frying pans do not leech any PFOA into food, that's not where people are exposed.
I've noticed that for some reason a ton of people think they get exposure to PFOA from cookware, and that's simply not true. PFOA exposure mainly comes from waterproofing coatings, slippery coatings (like the bottom of skis), and firefighting foam.
Paper dishes (plates, straws, etc) are a big source of exposure because they need to make them waterproof. Make sure to ask for plastic.
I don't know what's released from Teflon pans at high heat, but Teflon kills birds. I know this because I killed two birds by forgetting about a pan I was warming up. Wasn't enough to make the pan look any different; was enough to instantly kill the birds.
Cast iron is low maintenance, just don't over think the seasoning thing and don't cook overly acidic things. Cook with oil, clean with soap and hot water (use a plastic scraper if you need to...), dry on the stove and once dry wipe with a paper towel you put a little drop of oil on. Wait until the oil just smokes and turn it off. Done. Takes 1min tops. You can use steel utensils, just don't go scratching at it when cleaning with a wire brush.
Just get used to the imperfect surface, its not going to be perfect, it may get to be smooth and black one day, but even my nearly hundred year old skillet I've gotten through my family sometimes gets a scratch or a flake off. Its self correcting the more you use it.
If that's still too much "maintenance" try a nice enameled cast iron skillet or pot from le creuset. Don't cheap out. These are fantastic, aren't bothered by acidic foods, and still have the same nice heat holding properties of seasoned iron. Really love these. Don't use steel utensils or bang them around the edges with sticks and they last forever, or at least long enough you feel the cost was well worth it. My mother in law had hers, used, for nearly 25 years before the enamel flaked, and she didn't bother treating it nice (scrubbed, used metal utensils, etc).
I scrape the heck out of my cast iron pan using a bit of chain mail I keep by the sink in order to clean it. I do reapply oil and heat as you suggest. Do you reckon I'm missing out on some benefits of cast iron because I scrape it so relentlessly?
I finally made the switch to triple clad stainless and i couldn't be happier. Kinda like a cast iron but a little less heavy for the larger pans (still much heavier than a cheapo set of steel pots), fast to heat up too and cooks really evenly with the thickened walls. They only get things stuck to them if you screw up your technique. Just a sponge and dish soap is all it needs most of the time.
It should be obvious to anyone at this point that anything that promises to be a "healthy" alternative to teflon and is not stainless steel / cast-iron / carbon steel is most probably a scam.
Cast iron is fine once you get the hang of it, but I find myself just using my stainless steel pans exclusively. I also wonder how healthy the polymerized surface really is (would love to hear from anyone who knows).
You can effectively make stainless steel non-stick with correct use of a neutral oil and either cooking at a slightly lower heat and/or keeping the contents moving. Have to be ok with some oil though, for most foods it shouldn't be a problem.
It's not teflon, but I haven't come across anything that sticks to the pan in a consequential manner. Scrub with stainless steel scrubber to clean, done.
Readit News
The "soap and solvent" is sodium hydroxide (lye) and DMSO at 120 degC. Those are... fairly... well behaved chemicals, but lye is stout stuff and DMSO attacks nitrile gloves.
You could imagine a remediation process that uses this process but the combo ain't exactly Dawn dish soap. I'd almost prefer pyroprocessing over it.
He also used it on his wife. He told me that she had type I diabetes and neuropathy as a result. Her feet were always cold from poor circulation. That was true until he happened to rub her feet one day after treating a horse. Her feet warmed up in minutes and became normal pink again. After that, he used it on her feet and legs since it improved circulation.
You can say what you will about it being reactive and possibly not good for you but she was able to dance again and get back on her horse so it definitely does have some benefit. They did this for at least 30 years and both of them were past 75 years old when they passed away.
Like another poster said, it is used as a carrier for some medications since it pulls them straight into the bloodstream. I don't think it's magic but I also don't think you'll suffer much using it even with bare hands.
As far as lye is concerned, the sodium hydroxide in this paper, you can easily make that yourself with wood ash and water. It is pretty handy if you are tanning hides since the treatment of a raw hide with lye causes the hair to slip right off leaving a smooth skin ready for the next step.
"DMSO can cause contaminants, toxins, and medicines to be absorbed through the skin, which may cause unexpected effects.
"Because DMSO easily penetrates the skin, substances dissolved in DMSO may be quickly absorbed. Glove selection is important when working with DMSO. Butyl rubber, fluoroelastomer, neoprene, or thick (15 mil / 0.4 mm) latex gloves are recommended. Nitrile gloves, which are very commonly used in chemical laboratories, may protect from brief contact but have been found to degrade rapidly with exposure to DMSO."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide
If we were looking for a chemical to deploy at scale to clean up PFAS in existing environments, we could do much worse.
Aka - won't kill you outright if you are just properly careful.
We're talking about fluorine chemistry here, so things get kind of extreme.
Dead Comment
DMSO is used in pain relief in other countries (eg Mexico). It's also excellent for burns as it allows the body to repair a tiny amount of nerve damage or prevents it. Hard to say. This is demonstrable by burning yourself, I guess. My family and I have used it for burns for over 20 years. Granted, we don't get burned/encounter people who have been burned at home that often. I had a close friend with a rare disease (McCune Albright's Syndrome) who used it for pain relief, after I treated a burn she received.
It has been reported that it use has repaired massive nerve damage, which is probably coincidental. It is sold in healthfood stores in the US, but you want to dilute it 1/100 parts water. While it is primarily used as an industrial lubricant, on contact, it immediately travels through the skin to the nervous system. Most people get the strange reaction of the taste of oysters, when it's absorbed. There is a small percentage of people with various allergic reactions, like with many chemicals.
I would never mix it with soap, for any reason. It's like mixing shoe polish or granola with soap, you just end up with a mess of concerns.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19380203/
it was an expensive prescription med a few years back. I get dyspepsia from NSAIDs so I thought, "Could I make an ointment like that with ibuprofen?" and looked in the literature and found that ibuprofen is absorbed quickly with DMSO even more so than diclofenac. So I made a batch, but when I tried it I found I'd get dyspepsia very quickly after applying it to my skin so I guess the ibuprofen was being absorbed efficiently.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gloria_Ramirez
At ppt concentrations in seawater, it doesn't seem worth it. PFOS remediation is for contaminated soil or industrial wastewater.
"...The relatively high freezing point of DMSO, 18.5 °C (65.3 °F), means that at, or just below, room temperature it is a solid."
, per Wikipedia.
I guess, it could be powdered before use. Though the whole application proposition hardly fits into a common household let alone kitchen.
Big if true. I'm slightly skeptical that just decarboxylating PFAS causes the rest of the backbone to "fall apart" - I would expect it to form CF3[CF2]· (carbon radical) which would readily react with water to form -H or -OH, which is basically back to square one. But maybe it can eliminate HF in the presence of UV, forming CF3[CH2]CF=CFOH, which gets hydrolyzed, oxidized, then cleaved, but boy is that an unfavorable process.
(edit: skimmed the paper, I was pretty close. Forms CF3[CF2]- which goes to CF3[CH2]CF=CF2 which then gets hydrolyzed, but...DMSO/NaOH at 80-120°C ...yikes. This is the ochem equivalent of "nuke the site from orbit", very few compounds survive these conditions)
I've been out of the chemistry game for a few years now so I'm a bit rusty but gut instinct is that this is far from a slam dunk. But anything to reduce FC's is a boon to the world, so I'm hopeful this is a breakthrough.
Edit2:
> This high fluoride recovery indicates that most of the perfluoroalkyl fluorines were defluorinated and mineralized rather than being transformed to smaller-chain PFAS or being lost as volatile fluorocarbons.
So the surprising thing isn't the decarboxylation, it's that NaOH encourages the perflourylalkenes to cleave at sites away from the alpha (splitting, rather than carbon-by-carbon), which is neat. Still doesn't touch PFOS, unfortunately.
The reaction can occur at more moderate temperatures. There is more analysis (with experimental results) further down in the paper:
> Substantial defluorination still occurred when the isolated PFOA degradation product (perfluoro-1H-heptane 2) was subjected to degradation conditions but heated to only 40°C (table S3).
As with everything, It very much depends on the concentration.
Company gets sued for using and hiding the danger of a compound they learned fairly quickly was toxic. Goes and invents another compound and switches to it without having to prove its safety. After it becoming public that they were intentionally hiding dangers for a half century, I feel we should take away their ability to be given the benefit of the doubt.
All I think they learn from these lawsuits is that they need to get better at identifying and removing people who will call them out on their bullshit.
Edit - I know the whole thing with DuPont was using PFOAs in the manufacturing process and leaking (intentionally dumping) them into the environment, but it's not like the final product (Teflon) is safe to ingest either, which as a cooking surface, you most definitely will in some quantity.
Bold of you to assume they didn't already have those other fallback options patented ahead of time
Sure it is. I don't think a less toxic material than Teflon even exists. It's toxicity is comparable to water.
The LD50 of Teflon is > 11,280 mg/kg. Water by comparison is 90,000 mg/kg. They were not able to measure the exact toxicity because it's impossible to eat so much.
Is this based on insight or knowledge? Or simply wanting to bash Teflon (probably rightfully so)?
Same 3M contamination of groundwater happened in Belgium (Zwijndrecht plant) and the Netherlands (Dordrecht plant), with very little international coverage.
The fact that they refuse to get certified / conduct any independent rigorous testing (like in NSF/ANSI certification) should have clued you in.
"We also cut open a pair of Black Berkey filters to see how they are constructed and to look for evidence that, as Berkey marketing claims, they contain “at least” six different filtering elements. We found that though the Berkey filters are larger and denser than filters from Brita and 3M Filtrete, they appear to share their filtration mechanisms: activated charcoal impregnated with an ion-exchange resin. "
I wouldn't count on any of this to filter chemicals, much less PFAS.
We also have a Teflon milk pan but that is never used at a high tempriture so I’m less concerned about that.
But both works well enough.
They make some nice stainless and iron gear :) no joints either so nothing to break over time.
(I'm a fan of teflon but I like cast iron even more.)
If you want to use metal cookware, go for cast iron (heavy) or carbon steel (light). There's a lot online about how to season or maintain them -- you can safely ignore all of this advice. These are pans you can abuse. They're not as nonstick as Teflon so you still want to use some cooking oil, but that's about it. Both kinds may rust if there's humidity, but that's fine -- just wash before (instead of after) cooking and a bit of leftover rust is just a tad extra iron in your diet ;)
They are great because you can get them really hot and they have excellent heat inertia. You can put them in the oven if needed. And cleanup is simple: just hot water & a brush. No chemicals. I've often got the pan clean and back in the cupboard while my protein is resting.
But if it's not protein that your cooking on your pan, but instead perhaps its an acidic sauce, then I would recommend a stainless steel pan for that.
For pots I would go with stainless also. Or copper if you can afford it.
[1] https://www.solidteknics.com/
Also geez flax seed oil for seasoning. It gives a near glass like finish.
Cast iron really doesn't require much maintenance. You can season it and never wash it and be delicate with it like a fancy chef, or you can abuse the hell out of it and it doesn't matter because it's basically indestructible. The only thing you can't do is let it sit in water or run it through the dishwasher. I mean, you can, but it rusts… which also isn't that difficult to clean if it happens.
Cast iron and a green scotchbrite pad or a stainless steel scouring pad and you are good. You can use hot water and soap to clean it. It will deteriorate any "seasoning" but so what. Clean after use, dry and store away. Takes maybe two minutes. If you want to get it seasoned so it has some non-stick to it you can, but you don't have to.
Much faster than scrubbing.
There are a few thing that are still a pain though, like eggs and fish.
An aluminum skillet from a restaurant supply store is cheap and low-maintenance. I use this one [0] for omelets and scrambled eggs, and it's probably my favorite pan. The thickness means that the heat is incredibly even, and there's enough mass that it won't cool down much when adding food to a preheated pan.
[0] https://www.foodservicedirect.com/alegacy-eagleware-the-poin...
I think the safest option is stainless steel, and funny enough, Teflon. They are both inert and Teflon is only toxic if you cook on high heat. I keep a Teflon around solely for scrambled eggs and fish on low heat, but they are very doable in a well oiled stainless fry pan as well.
According to the EPA Teflon frying pans do not leech any PFOA into food, that's not where people are exposed.
I've noticed that for some reason a ton of people think they get exposure to PFOA from cookware, and that's simply not true. PFOA exposure mainly comes from waterproofing coatings, slippery coatings (like the bottom of skis), and firefighting foam.
Paper dishes (plates, straws, etc) are a big source of exposure because they need to make them waterproof. Make sure to ask for plastic.
https://www.teflon.com/en/consumers/teflon-coatings-cookware...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever
Seems totally healthy to me!
Deleted Comment
Just get used to the imperfect surface, its not going to be perfect, it may get to be smooth and black one day, but even my nearly hundred year old skillet I've gotten through my family sometimes gets a scratch or a flake off. Its self correcting the more you use it.
If that's still too much "maintenance" try a nice enameled cast iron skillet or pot from le creuset. Don't cheap out. These are fantastic, aren't bothered by acidic foods, and still have the same nice heat holding properties of seasoned iron. Really love these. Don't use steel utensils or bang them around the edges with sticks and they last forever, or at least long enough you feel the cost was well worth it. My mother in law had hers, used, for nearly 25 years before the enamel flaked, and she didn't bother treating it nice (scrubbed, used metal utensils, etc).
It should be obvious to anyone at this point that anything that promises to be a "healthy" alternative to teflon and is not stainless steel / cast-iron / carbon steel is most probably a scam.
You can effectively make stainless steel non-stick with correct use of a neutral oil and either cooking at a slightly lower heat and/or keeping the contents moving. Have to be ok with some oil though, for most foods it shouldn't be a problem.
It's not teflon, but I haven't come across anything that sticks to the pan in a consequential manner. Scrub with stainless steel scrubber to clean, done.
For an overview of "real" ceramic pans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G21f_ny_lxs
Hopefully not in the bad ways? Is the "ceramic coating" proven to not be harmful?
[1]https://fromourplace.co.uk/
[2] https://www.carawayhome.com/