I think of myself as a bit of a safety-obsessive, so imagine my chagrin when I happened upon an article in a recent Good Housekeeping and learned that I didn’t know squat about how to safely use nonstick pans. I didn’t even know there was an unsafe way, outside of chipping off the coating with metal spoons.

If you’re as clueless as I was, here’s the dope: Nonstick cookware is safe, experts note, so long as they’re not overheated.

“There’s a whole chemistry set of compounds that will come off when Teflon is heated high enough to decompose,” says [chemistry professor and Teflon expert Robert L.] Wolke. “Many of these are fluorine-containing compounds, which as a class are generally toxic.” But fluoropolymers, the chemicals from which these toxic compounds come, are a big part of the coating formula — and the very reason that foods don’t stick to nonstick.

If the danger begins when pans overheat, then how hot is too hot? “At temperatures above 500ºF, the breakdown begins and smaller chemical fragments are released,” explains Kurunthachalam Kannan, Ph.D., an environmental toxicologist at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center. DuPont, inventor and manufacturer of Teflon, agrees that 500 degrees is the recommended maximum for cooking.

The problem is, it’s very easy to get your pans to the “too hot” state. In Good Housekeeping tests, a lightweight pan hit 514 degrees after 2 and 1/2 minutes of preheating two tablespoons of oil on high. And at very high temperatures, above 660 degrees, nonstick cookware can even start to give off fumes that can induce a flu-like illness in people (and can kill pet birds).

So how do you keep the chemicals out of your food and air? Some tips:

• Never preheat an empty pan (and even preheating a pan with oil in it can be risky).
• Don’t cook on high heat when using nonstick pans. Go no higher than medium.
• Ventilate your kitchen when cooking to clear fumes.
• Don’t broil or sear meats in nonstick cookware.
• When buying nonstick pans, choose heavier models, which are less likely to overheat.
• Don’t use metal utensils that can chip the nonstick surface.

I’m sticking (so to speak) with my Teflon pans for pancakes and bakeware, but I’ve decided to save up for some good quality uncoated pans for when sticking is more or less a non-issue. In the meantime, it took me about a week to break the habit of turning the burner to high when cooking with nonstick, but now I’ve got it down pretty much. It takes longer to cook on medium, but sacrificing a little convenience to keep my family safe is a no-brainer.

Happy - and safe - cooking!

Posted by MommaSteph.