Can I dunk my teflon coated pan into a sink of water?

Factual Questions
1

I was cooking something the other day with a teflon coated pan, and when I was done, I moved in the direction of the sink, when my friend promptly stopped me.

“Hey, you’re not supposed to put cold water in a hot teflon coated pan!”

Well, the pan wasn’t really mine, so I did (or rather, didn’t do) as she asked, but I was wondering - I’ve done it many times before, and my trusty IKEA teflon coated pan is still rocking, after a few years of dunking on cold water while hot.

My question is, is there any real reason why I can’t do that? Will the teflon coating slough off or something?

2

As you say, the teflon is a coating. It has different thermal expansion properties than the metal of the pan. Forcing it to conform to the rapidly shinking metal could cause a loss of cohesion. That said, with any well made pan the likelihood of repeated dunking causing you grief is right up there with the likelyhood of a lifetime of eating eggs benedict causing you to die of heart failure.

3
      • I doubt this has much of anything to do with the type of coating so much as running the risk of warping the pan itself. The plastic teflon coating is far more flexible than the metal is, and the metal’s expansion is very small. An aluminum pan would have more risk of warping than a steel one would.
  • Someplace used to make some pans that were cold-dunk-safe, but they were glass, quartz or something, pretty darned expensive. They looked like clear glass anyway, but it wasn’t the normal cheap Corning stuff…? And it was specifically said that heating them to frying-temperatures and then dunking them into ice water did not hurt them, because that was the big assumption at the time (that rapid temperature changes would shatter glass cookware).
    ~