The thing is - it's simply not as good. The worst case is probably frying frozen gyoza. They will get stuck when they get gelatinous on that 'ceramic' surface.
I ended up looking up some slightly offbrand stores to get the pan that I wanted.
I still like non-stick pans for eggs, but for almost everything else, I prefer stainless steel, cast iron, or enameled cast iron. You do have to pay a little more attention to technique (knowing what temperature to heat the pan to before you put food on, etc.), but the end result is just about as good as a non-stick pan with many advantages:
* You don't have to be obsessive about never letting a metal utensil scratch the pan. (I hope you aren't using a metal spatula or fork with your non-stick!)
* You can scrape the hell out of the pan while you cook and get all that delicious crispy fond into what you're making. If I'm doing a pan sauce, it's always in the Dutch oven so I can get that fond into the gravy.
* They last a lot longer. Even if you are careful, a non-stick pan will lose its coating and need to be replaced after a handful of years. I got my cast iron skillet for $15 at an antique store. It's older than me and will outlive me.
* You're not, you know, eating forever chemicals.
This ceramic pan I bought from IKEA lasted like 3-5 months until I was unhappy with it. Historically, the teflon pans I have bought from there have lasted 12-18 months easily.
* I don't know how old my cast iron skillet is because I literally bought it from an antique store but I've had it for over a decade and it's in better shape than ever.
* My $60 Lodge Dutch oven is over a decade old and has been used hundreds of times.
* My stainless steel All-Clad skillet is relatively new at 5-6 years but is no worse than the day I got it.
I think my main complaint is with e.g. IKEA changing their default frying pan coating dramatically without clear communication.
* Tables are fine if you like them
* Some readers won't like them
* But the ones who do will like your real writing style
:)
Teflon and it's relatives--so long as you don't expose them to enough heat to mess with the C-F bonds, they're probably safe. But Teflon only exists as a solid, it will decompose before melting, thus the problem becomes how to form it? You need a solvent--a solvent that dissolves that which is famous for being impervious. To date only one such solvent has ever been found: it's pretty close chemically but one bond doesn't have a F stuck on it so it will play nice with both Teflon (which is what most of the molecule looks like) and other things (the piece that isn't like Teflon.) Can you hope to recover all of the solvent from the finished product? No way. And that solvent will react in the body, it's not inert like the Teflon. Toxic down to the detection threshold.
They have played games, producing "different" solvents but they're all the same thing, the same reactive part connected to a chain of a different length that is fully fluorinated. The length of the inert chain doesn't change anything, the toxicity comes from the one reactive part.