Like @tomatotomato I soak with Dawn, but I also use SOS. I believe Chicago Metallic pans are aluminized steel. This one has almost twenty years under its belt.
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Same on the Chicago Metallic sheet pans. I hadnāt thought about it, but mine are also 20-something years old. Still going strong.
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Ditto, plus bread pans and cake pans. The bread pans have become quite nonstick.
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I have 2 that are not very attractive. Instead of looking for ways to clean that pan like new, I opted for parchment paper as an under lament on the pans.
Life is better when the pan isnāt a dominant part of the meal planning
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Totally. Itās pretty much the same with oil spatter on a lot of SS cookware, even without lecithin. Fortunately, I have no problemāor hesitationābringing out the big guns (oven cleaner, Goo Gone, steel wool, etc.) whenever needed.
It would be nice if a food chemist like Harold McGee would describe what makes this orange-brown polymer so tenacious, and recommend a best solution.
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Send him a tweet 
I kid not. We were in the middle of a book club once and had a question, and the host sent the author a tweet. She replied while we were still there chatting.
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Half sheet pans remind me of the cafeteria trays we used in elementary school. I can never get it out of my mind ā¦ along with Mrs. Shipleyās cole slaw, which I absolutely lived for. Iāve tried to replicate it my entire life. Note to young āunās - school cafeterias used to actually prepare and cook stuff ā¦
Sled? I had a flexible flyerā¦
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I know Harold, but I donāt want to bother him too often. Let me think about it.
Ooh name dropper. No, thatās cool. You didnāt say you knew him.
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Out of curiousity I pulled my box of Kirkland parchmentā¦not a word about PTFE or siliconā¦mine says its made in France, which would make me question the presence of PTFE (and suggests that its papier sulfurisĆ©e)
Iāve got Reynolds unbleached and it says nothing about silicone either (on the package, I mean). It does say ānon-stickā. When I searched I got a hit on a spokesperson from Reynolds saying their non-stick parchment has a silicone coating on both sides. The coating serves as non-stick but also makes it more heat resistant and water resistant (although from roasting veggies, I can tell you itās not all that water resistant).
[Edit - Iāve also got their regular bleached āSmart Gridā type. Despite being white instead of tan, it claims it is free of āelementalā chlorine and therefore safe to compost. Both types also prominently state āMade in Franceā as if it is a selling point. I wonder if Costco, Reynolds and others are all sourcing from the same company in FR?]
Now Iām wondering if thereās plain parchment sold by anyone thatās not touted as ānon-stickā?
Regarding PTFE, I donāt think anyone would use that nowadays to coat parchment (if it was ever used), just given the environmental concerns.
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There is no legal requirement to disclose āindirect additivesā on product labels.
Hereās one sourceās reporting on the Costco parchment (as of 4/21): https://www.mamavation.com/food/kirkland-costco-parchment-paper-pfas-results.html
Note that another parchment tested 0 ppm.
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Thanks for posting this. Their reporting on the results seems solid but Iām not quite sure about their conclusions.
They list other food wrappers having over 1000 ppm of elemental fluorine and point out that high counts might mean PFAS used but under 100 ppm is a āvery good signā, and the lab they link to uses a simple over/under rule with under 100 being ābelow the screening levelā and unlikely to contain PFAS.
But then when the lab detects 12 ppm in Kirkland they (the Mamavation website) say they canāt recommend it. Seems to me that this is an example of making perfect the enemy of good. They report If You Care brand at 0 ppm, but I think this is actually 0-10 ppm elemental fluorine. They wrote ānon-detect meaning [the lab] tested up to 10 ppm fluorine and did not discover anyā. I havenāt found the labās exact test for that parchment, but I did find the labās testing of fast food wrappers (opens as Excel sheet, or see partial image below), and so it appears this labās lower detection limit is 10 ppm and anything under 10 ppm is reported ānon-detectedā.
If it is correct that the labās detection limit is 10 ppm, then the most one can say between the Kirkland and If You Care brands is that they might be 3 ppm (and maybe more) apart in the testing. And you canāt really even say that. With a LLD of 10, a difference of 3 (or 5, etc. ppm) is not likely to be meaningful, especially when (if you look at the whole spreadsheet) they get replicate test results of 74, 31, and <10 ppm on the same product, so itās clear thereās some variability in the testing.
All to say, I wouldnāt consider a 12 ppm result on Kirkland to indicate use of a PFAS. And Iām not even a fan of Costco!
More broadly speaking, I skimmed quickly several years of work by this lab and it seems theyāre seeing some pretty solid results in terms of getting the fast food industry to move away from PFAS coatings in their food papers. Now theyāre going after the āhealthy fastā type places.
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Mamavation is a nifty and useful site for many products.
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Well exactly. If it wasnt non stick thereād be no reason to use it.
PTFE has been illegal in Europe since 2008 so its highly unlikely theyāre using it.
And thanks for the logical references.
Heres a link to the webpage of the manufacturerā¦they specifically say they use silicone. They also specifically say its made fom eucalyptus pulp because its sustainable, and that the paper is compostable and recyclable.
So yeah, Im still not really too fussed about my Kirkland paper.
PFOA was banned in 2008.
PTFE is not banned in Europe.
Oh, Iām not saying Costco parchment is poisoning entire towns. I just want to minimize my intake of PFAS, and reward companies that eliminate them. Did you see in the article that one effect of these endocrine disruptors is to shrink your Johnson?
Test ranges give false impressions sometimes from seemingly small numbers. But when the thing being tested for has no positive and many negative effects on human health, and is biopersistant (thatās the āforeverā part), I take no comfort from a result not being as bad as some other result, when below-threshold is better.
Iām not doctrinaire about it, though. The best food-grade tin is 99.9996 pure, but there are some people who wonāt use tinned copper because that residual 0.0004% has some lead and cadmium. Thatās 4 ppm, low enough for me.
It used to be that the test threshold for TCA in wine was very much higher that the olfactory threshold, especially amoug professional wine tasters and viniculturists. Iām unsure if the olfactory bulb is still better than the chromatograph, though
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Agree overall. But what Iām thinking is that a paper product with a tested 12 ppm fluorine content (and again, this is elemental fluorine, which can include, e.g., inorganic salts containing fluorine vs organic alkyl/PFA compounds) likely does not have any PFAS. I could be wrong. But given the testing labās own presumptions (over/under on 100 ppm), this seems likely.
And I did indeed note with terror the implication that rampant PFAS exposure can, uh, shrinkie my winkie!
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Whatever you do, donāt put sheet pans in the dishwasher.
