J00 want friez w/dat?

[ornoth]

I started cooking stir-fry at home last fall. I’ve always been very skittish about Chinese food after a horrible food poisoning in New York’s Chinatown back in the 80s. After a few headachey incidents, I got the idea that I was sensitive to soy sauce and other soy derivatives, and possibly sodium.

However, I became really fond of this black pepper chicken entrée by— I hesitate to admit it—Panda Express. I always thought it’d be nice to know how to make it at home.

Then last year I worked at a client site with a great cafeteria that cooked stir-fry to order. I tried it and never had a negative reaction. And when I left BI, I finally decided to learn how to do my own damn stir-fry. After all, everybody else seems to have learned how to do it in college, right?

So the first thing I did was get some low-sodium soy sauce and mimick Panda Express’ black pepper chicken. It wasn’t quite the same, but it was definitely pretty good. I branched out and did a few other dishes. And I discovered my natural aptitude at the sauté flippage manoeuvre.

However, about every third or fourth time I cooked it up, I’d get really sick the next day: pretty bad headaches, nausea, dizziness, and alternating fever and chills. Was this my Chinese food sensitivity coming back? I tried to isolate the cause, but the symptoms persisted— intermittently—irrespective of the ingredients I used.

Then, somehow, I stumbled across something on teh Intarwebs: Teflon Flu. Apparently, if you heat Teflon up to even moderate frying temperatures, it starts to release toxic fumes. Symptoms appear 4-8 hours after exposure, and present like the flu, including headaches, fever, and chills. Needless to say, I had been stir-frying—which requires very high heat—in a Teflon saucepan.

I’m usually not a big believer in these kinds of popular “syndromes”. Typically, I would expect consumer products to have gone through pretty rigorous testing procedures. I find it difficult to believe that the manufacturer or the government would not have detected toxic fumes from a cooking surface that is brought up to typical and expected cooking temperatures. On the other hand, Dupont admits the problem exists, and the medical literature appears fairly authoritative to me. So it doesn’t seem to be a figment of some hypochondriac’s imagination: Teflon Flu does seem to exist. And it’s not just Teflon; ALL non-stick coatings have a PTFE base, which is where the problem comes from.

So Saturday I replaced my fry pan with an untreated carbon steel wok. It seemed to work reasonably well last night, and I didn’t get sick today, although one meal isn’t a particularly authoritative test. We’ll see, but I do think the PTFE stuff is very probably the cause of my issues. On verra!

Comments

[lothie.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's real. Birds are really sensitive to the fumes produced. When I got a bird I had to be careful about cooking. I hadn't heard about it before then, either.

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Most of the citations I looked at specifically mentioned toxicity to birds, as they apparently have really sensitive respiratory systems.

[iniren.livejournal.com]

Yea, I've heard about non-stick being really back for you for years, but haven't really done much about it... Ok - so what are other good options? I mean - the beauty of non-stick, is that you have to use hardly any oil or butter at all, your food doesn't stick, and it's easy to clean up. But, then again, it makes you sick. Sigh.

So - you got carbon steel - how's that for food sticking / cleanup? What are some other things that are good? I vaguely recall hearing about some surface that was also relatively non-stick, but can't recall what it was. I know cookware gets super expensive, but it may be worth it to invest in something good and healthy.

[hyzathra.livejournal.com]

I have a couple of T-Fal pans, which their website purports to be safe (http://www.t-falusa.com/tefal/nonstick_safety.asp). I haven't noticed any odd symptoms after cooking with them, but then again I don't think I've ever heated them up to any serious heat. Will be watching out now, though!

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Their web site is very strident in their defense of their cookware, but if their stuff was really different, then one would think they'd admit that other manufacturers' products do have a problem. T-Fal does use PTFE, but hey imply that the real problem is PFOA, which I find a bit dubious.

Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the sensitivity to Teflon was an acquired thing, or varied quite a bit from person to person. You, and probably many other folks, probably don't have the issues with it that I do. Or you may, and T-Fal may be good stuff. Who knows? I can only report my experiences.

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Well, a lot of people use cast iron or carbon steel. With those, the pans kinda "cure" and build up this layer of stuff that eventually becomes non-sticky, but I think that takes more skill to do right.

But cleanup for me wasn't too bad. I'm just trying to figure how much patina to leave on the pan versus scrub off. The only other thing is you have to be rigorous about drying your dishes, and possibly putting a little oil in them for storage, to keep them from rusting. But if they rust, you just scrub that off and start over.

But don't fool yourself. There's virtually no nonstick cookware that isn't PTFE. Read the labels and be careful what you pick, if you want to avoid it.