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Waterless Cookware: Cookware Hype or the Real Thing
If you're shopping for cookware because your synthetic nonstick pots and pans are wearing thin on the inside, you're not alone. Nonstick coatings (Teflon for example) have a very brief useful life—3 to 5 years generally. Good for businesses; a needless expense for families.
Maybe it's time to replace those Teflon wonders with something better. Consider the many qualities of Stainless Steel, including durability warranted for your lifetime as a measure of cookware value (under $250 generally). Doing so will save the green in your bank account over the years; it also helps save a lot of other greens too. Consider these three important environments before replacing your Teflon with more Teflon:
1) It isn't good for the planet
2) It isn't good for the body
3) It isn't good for cooking
If not Teflon, then what? How is one to choose from all the variety, the dazzling and confusing array of brands, styles, compositions, prices, commercial claims, celebrity endorsements and testimonials? More personally, what kind of cookware is ideal for you, your cooking, your kitchen, your health and the well being of your family?
The Three Environments
This article helps you consider these three environments and the attributes of cookware ideally designed to better serve them. My name is Steve Denning. I wear two cooking hats: one as chief family cook for over 30 years and the other as owner of ChoiceCookery. My acquired personal preference and now business specialty is Stainless Steel Waterless cookware. I mention these two hats so you can fairly judge the following:
Quality Stainless Steel cookware is the most durable, hygienic, responsive, food friendly and cook friendly pot or pan in the marketplace; the only utensil capable of Waterless Cooking. This isn't a claim or commercial hype or opinion; it's pure fact.
When replacing your cookware, it's helpful to consider the fundamental purpose of pots and pans before considering composition and performance characteristics desired. Seasoned home cooks, chefs and culinary experts agree on this purpose:
A pot or pan is actually a moment of truth, a culmination of nature's food cycle, a moment when the vital cache of earth's nutrient goodness is tastefully enhanced or sadly wasted. A simple pot or pan is more than an appliance to heat processed food material. Real food deserves better. There is simply more to the enriching soils of organically grown vegetables and range free meats, more to engage the palate, the nose, the eyes, more to savor and certainly more to revitalize and re-energize. We are, after all, only as healthy as the health of that which we eat. To that end, pots and pans are a huge contributor to the nutritional and savory fate of foods. Much can be gained or lost in the simple act of cooking.
There are naysayers who would have you believe there's no such thing as Waterless cooking. I beg to differ. There's ample water in just about every raw food one cooks, richly endowed with nature's nutrients. No need to add additional water; serve the whole goodness at the kitchen table instead of steaming it away or pouring it down the drain. Processed foods, pasta for example, obviously require boiling. Waterless cookware can boil too, and fry without sticking. It can even bake stove top. Naysayers can be so silly sometimes. But back to our three shared environments.
The Planet
Teflon never degrades, in a landfill or in one's body. When recycled, the smelt-down releases Teflon's toxins in the form of highly carcinogenic gasses. These are the same gasses that fume above the stove at high heat when using Teflon. New PFOA/PTFE-free synthetics are claimed to be toxin free. But to me, ‘toxin-free' synthetic-coated cookware rings as true as ‘clean coal'. I'm not convinced. Are you? Stainless steel, on the other hand, is 100% bio-degradable. The manufacturing of stainless steel emits carbon dioxide, a common gas we exhale as well, but a gas we desperately need to reduce as a bi-product of burning fossil fuel. Manufacturing emissions from synthetics like Teflon emit toxic gasses harmful to people and the people's planet. These gases never go away. They're here, invisibly salting the air we breathe.
The Body
We're surrounded by toxins; we breathe them, we swallow them, we absorb them through the most porous organ of the body, our skin. Of the 80,000 chemicals created and in use since 1950, less than 3,000 have ever been independently tested for toxicity. And of these, less than 5% are considered safe. There is little oversight or protection from governmental agencies. Corporations are powerful lobbyists with little ethical restraint. But that's a note for another day. It's just wise to pay attention to product labels and be informed about what these labels grudgingly tell you.
Fresh foods don't come with a label, but we have a choice. Most of today's fresh produce is designed to look good, unblemished, but mere ghosts of their former selves. Today's fresh vegetables have a much lower concentration of vitamins, minerals, enzymes and antioxidants than those grown in the early 1900's. Too, our bodies can't absorb vitamins without a variety of minerals to begin the digestive process. These minerals come from healthy soils, not fertilizers. Provided a fresh diet of organic nutrients, the body will naturally cleanse toxins from its cells, naturally re-energize and revitalize, physically and mentally. Honor nature's precious nutrients when you cook.
The Cooking
With respect to cooking, experts who know far more than I about food and cooking recognize Harold McGee as the authority, the master if you will of food science and chemistry. McGee is a knowledgeable resource who, with humor and breadth, simplifies the wondrous marriage between natural foods and home cooking. In 2004, Scribner published a revised edition of McGee's On Food and Cooking : the Science and Lore of the Kitchen (originally published in 1984). This new edition added twenty more years of McGee's generous insights about the properties of foods and the ideal conditions for cooking them.
McGee is not one to represent a commercial claim or company or product. So it was with surprise I read the following in his new section on Stainless Steel cookware: "…these hybrids are the closest thing we have to the ideal chemically inert but thermally responsive pan" (page 791). The hybrid McGee speaks of is a cooking utensil with the unique performance characteristics of today's Stainless Steel Waterless Cookware.
The Ideal Cookware
To appreciate what McGee means by an ‘ideal chemically inert but thermally responsive' pot or pan, consider the fact that there IS such a thing, the closest thing we have to an ideal cooking utensil.
Is Chemically Inert
Unlike copper, aluminum, cast iron and other metal cooking surfaces, (or synthetic and ceramic nonstick coatings), stainless steel does not chip, flake, erode, leach or fume into foods. It's chemically inert. Stainless steel is unique in its ability to re-oxidize, to heal itself of scratching or pitting on the cooking surface. There's no need to cure or season the surface of stainless steel or encrust a hard layer of fat or oil to appease the pan's performance or to manage rust. Nonstick, non-toxic performance is a natural condition of stainless steel cookery. But not all stainless steel cookware is created equal.
High-grade #304 surgical stainless steel (basic 18/10 chromium/nickel blend) reflects a beautifully durable, hard-mirror finish outside and a polished satin finish inside. The sheen of these quality cooking utensils however, goes far beyond the skin. Enameled exteriors have found a consumer niche and tend to fit kitchen décor, but such beauty is cosmetic with scant functional value. It's common to find lesser grades of steel in many lines of cookery where enameled coatings outside and/or synthetic coatings inside are applied. Coatings are more a cover-up than a meaningful advancement.
The natural uncoated cooking surface of surgical stainless steel is the most hygienic cookware surface available: ‘chemically inert' and surgically hygienic, easily cleaned and cared for, dishwasher safe. There's no place for bacteria to hide, no surface disruptions or failings or rivetes for contamination to fester and multiply.
Is Thermally Responsive
Stainless steel (on its own) isn't a great conductor of heat, so users tend to turn the burners up. High heat cooking damages foods, destroys much of the nutrient value and creates unnecessary carcinogens (acrylamides for example). Ironically, low grades of stainless steel may have been responsible for the proliferation of coated cooking surfaces in order to alleviate high-heat sticking, scorching, charring and burnt-on foods. But these pots and pans are not the ideal McGee speaks of.
The ‘chemically inert' and ‘thermally responsive' cookware McGee speaks of is high grade stainless steel married to elements (layers of efficient heat conductors, copper, aluminum for example) compressed between multi-plies (5, 7, or 9 plies) of stainless steel. Up to 12 encapsulated elements or layers can be forged into a waterless utensil, including a carbon element for induction/magnetic stove tops. With this composition, what you have now is a substantial nonstick, non-toxic cooking utensil, not heavy but noticeably and satisfyingly different from the cheap bargain stuff.
Copper, aluminum and other conductive metals do not retain heat well. Stainless steel does, which is why waterless cookware requires no more than medium heat to quickly achieve a vapor seal. Once a seal is formed (the vent knob on the lid will whistle), heat can be reduced to low to complete the cooking cycle for meats, vegetables or any foods. At low heat, a vapor seal maintains cooking temperature through the cooking cycle while it retains nearly all the robust flavors and nutrients of foods, basting in their own savory juices, bathing in their own wholesome goodness. Cooking actually takes less time in this ideal cooking environment.
This then is McGee's ideal hybrid, "…the closest thing we have to the ideal chemically inert but thermally responsive pan." Stainless Steel Waterless Cookware.
But no matter McGee, or my personal choice, the truth remains: "…the proof is in the pudding." There is the ‘Joy of Cooking' (for family, friends, for one's self), perhaps less embraced today not because cooking seems a chore or we're so busy sometimes, but because we've lost our way. We've lost the purpose. We've lost the true nutrient-rich aromas and flavors of foods. We've lost the how of nature's goodness, how to simply yet ideally cook. This is the true failing of Teflon.
If you're replacing your current cookware, consider stainless steel waterless cookware. Consider choosing quality pots and pans deserving of a lifetime warranty and a green label. More importantly, choose an investment that naturally fulfills the ideal purpose of cookware—to cook in the service of nature's goodness.
About the Author
Retired national and international healthcare facility management professional who found his most prized calling and joyous challenge as a stay-at-home dad: chief cook & bottle washer, mender of socks & childhood bumps, engaged steward of God's creation & husband to one of life's most precious spirits--my beautiful wife, Lorie
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