Bunch of videos about PFAS because I can't bring myself to write the dozen of separate posts that these should all be posted as.
Watch one...take a break...come back and watch another. Don't run them all through at once.
It's not cheery stuff, folks.
My wife and I have been longtime purchasers and users of the Oxo Good Grips nonstick pans.
We would use the heck out of the 10" skillet and buy a new one when the surface got marred or started to stick - usually after a year and a half or two years. When we recently went looking, we found that it looks like Oxo is phasing out their nonstick skillet in favor of ceramic 'nonstick' skillets.
The reviews of the ceramic 'nonstick' skillets say that the ceramic layer is surprisingly close in performance to the teflon (or similar coating) that most nonstick skillets use but that the ceramic coating doesn't even last as long as the teflon coating meaning that we would have to buy replacement ceramic nonstick pans even more frequently than we're buying the teflon pans.
So we've gone looking for other nonstick replacements and have found that the list of possible replacements is fairly short: ceramic nonstick, cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel. Currently we're working on using our two fairly well seasons cast iron skillets more frequently. We'll see how that goes.
More links to reviews of various alternatives to PFAS nonstick...
Man-made polymers are bad for us.
Straight up, no qualifications to that statement from what I continue to read and learn.
PFAS and PFOS might just be the worst of them, and they are pretty well everywhere in the world around us, including inside most of us.
Just let the comedy wash over you.
They're all funny, but I really enjoy the third joke. I'm in the really small overlap area, apparently.
Opals are pretty.
Full stop
And they are incredibly rare and labor intensive to mine.
So why not just make them at home?
All it takes is seven or so months, a fume hood, some ethyl alcohol (purer is better), tetraethyl othosilicate, ammonium hydroxide, a stirrer, water bath, hot plate, resin, a vacuum chamber, and apparently infinite patience.
I looked into buying them, and even the synthetic ones aren't terribly cheap.
I can vouch for that Harold McGee book referenced toward the beginning. I have it on the shelf in my living room - though I'll admit that I've barely read more than a third of it. There's a LOT of science happening in there, and it's a dense read.
Adam explains the basics of heat conductivity, reactivity (leaching ions to make whipping egg whites easier), reactivity again (to pull sulfur out of the vapor distillate in alcohol distillation), malleability (peening the copper bowl), ductility (making copper whisks), reactivity another time (such as the health hazards of drinking acidic cocktails like mules from copper cups), and conductivity again (useful for making jams and candy).
And then he throws down the possibility of testing a pure silver pan...I want him to buy one, but I'm not going to support him to make that easier for him to do.
