My niece has graduated college and is setting up housekeeping (do people still say that??) so I got her a starter set of Calphalon. Which she very sweetly thanked me for and said that she was sure I could use more pots and pans, and she would prefer I take them.
The problem, according to her mother, is the handle rivets or screws or whatever you call them. The “things” that hold the handles on. Her mother told her that the pans will be germ and bacteria laden as that area inside and around the “screws” collects dirt and cannot be cleaned.
I’ve never thought of this, I mean it would never cross my mind. I said OK, and had her ship the pans back, and sent her a check. Her mother says cast iron has no “screws” and that’s what she needs to be using.
I adore her mother BTW, she’s my sister’s partner of almost 40 years, and a nurse, but now, well, shit, is this something to worry about?
Who says you can’t clean Calphalon?
She’s talking about the area “inside” the “screws,” that bacteria collects there. I don’t think I have the terminology to make it more clear, it’s just so weird to me.
Yeah, she’s insane. Cast iron certainly has it’s uses, but everyone uses pans with screws holding the handles on with no issues. You certainly can clean it, it doesn’t really get dirty anyway since you don’t actually cook on that surface, and even if it does, it’s not going to make you sick, since you don’t eat the food that somehow got in there anyway. If you’re really super paranoid, you can always take the handle off and clean the whole thing separately.
Many people today are obsessed with hyper-sterility.
This is sort of ironic, seeing that a culture (sorry) has built up around not using soap on, or even not cleaning a cast iron pan between uses for fear of damaging the “seasoning”.
I find it hard to believe that flush bolts on a Calphalon-type pan could harbor the Deadly Bacteria unless one is unbelievably compulsive about super-cleaning them.
No. If you have a scratch in a plastic container, it will harbor more bacteria than where the plastic is scratch free. That doesn’t mean it’s unsafe to store food in. Same with rivets on a pan. Yeah, more bacteria will be there. But it’s not going to get one sick if it’s cleaned just as normally as everything else.
They’re called the threads. The corkscrew area that screws go into. While it’s never occurred to me that even the messiest of overflows/ spills/ sloppy pours could actually result in bacteria growing in the thread area, it’s surely a possibility. You make a pot of X. There’s spillage into the handle, screws and threaded hole in the pot into which the handle screws go.
You wash it off. Now, you’d have to take some very serious precautions to insure that the screw and hole were 100% bacteria-free. You’d have to remove the handles, pour either a hot water/ soap mixture into the hole and use a small pipe-cleaner type of brush to vigorously cleanse the threads, then re-assemble, or pour bleach or peroxide INTO those threaded holes and allow it to sit long enough to kill all bacteria before re-assembling.
Alternately, you could not be a stark raving lunatic and just wash the fucking pot as we all do. Remember, this isn’t science fiction. The bacteria that could grow in those small threaded areas cannot leap out and infiltrate your beef stew. It doesn’t work that way.
Now, if the handles are slightly loose and/ or you smell some funk when taking it off of the shelf to use and it sort of seems that there’s something organic going on, then yeah. Remove the screws, pull the handles and go to town. Otherwise, assume that the incredible heat used to COOK food will also kill the bacteria in the threads.
As a retired E.M.T. and son of a nurse, I have to add this. This business of being irrationally forceful in ones area of expertise is just so very irritating. Yeah. So she’s a nurse. Big freakin’ deal. It doesn’t mean she comprehends the bacterial levels on the handles of the pots and pans you gave as a gift. When’s the last time she did a full swab on her OWN 25 year-old cookware, cultured it and ran a bacterial report? 
If she’s a nurse, she must appreciate that claims about health- related practices should be based on evidence. Ask her for the evidence supporting what she’s saying. Do it in a nice way. “Wow. I’ve never thought about that before. You’ve got me wondering. I’d like to learn more. Where did you hear about that.”. But don’t settle for something like " So-and-so told me." Keep gently asking until you get to the ‘base’. I postulate none such exists, and this rivet-handle impugnation is just yet another permutation of germ paranoia.
Plus, won’t the areas where the screws are located–joining the handle to the body–get hot enough to kill (most) bacteria?
On the OTHER hand, I have to admit that for decades, people have been giving wooden salad bowl sets as gifts and for years it’s been a very bad idea. Enough things with very bad bacteria get into those salad bowls ( sometimes unwashed vegetables, meats, cheeses, dressings with cheese/ bacteria ) and then people poke with forks and sometimes use knives.
Here’s a pretty good article on the plastic v.s. wooden cutting boards discussion., which in my mind relates to the wooden salad bowls issue.
Is she going to be using her cooking pots for something other than cooking? Because if she is using them for cooking, then any bacteria which might be in the pans is going to be completely irrelevant, because she’s cooking.
You could share this with her. But that would probably be a wee bit confrontational, yah?
Yes for one, and many dishwashers also have a sanitize phase which should get hot enough to again do in any wee bastards.
I wouldn’t bother trying to educate her that it’s not a risk. That won’t go well and may make her more resolved in her beliefs. Even if it’s not a risk, she may just be squicked out by the thought. It might be like if she said it’s okay to drink urine because it’s sterile. Whether it’s sterile or not isn’t the issue–I wouldn’t want to ingest it regardless.
I would not recommend cast iron for someone just starting out. Although it’s great cookware, it’s finicky and needs special care. It’s also very heavy, which someone young and mobile won’t want to deal with as they move from place to place.
ETA: Even if the rivets on the cookware don’t harbor bacteria, they do make it harder to clean. The rivets are regular steel and food can stick to it. Because of their shape and 90 degree angle edges, food can get mucky around the rivets and tough to clean out. You may need to use a scrubber brush to get the gunk out from around the rivet. So even though I doubt food gets behind the rivets, the rivets make it hard to clean and make it easy to leave gunk behind.
I’d also be very surprised if it’s any kind of a risk. Maybe some bacteria gets in there, maybe she just read something somewhere and she decided it’s right and her kid will die. FTR, just because she’s a nurse doesn’t mean she’s right. I know plenty of nurses, they latch on to the latest health BS just like any other person.
Personally, in the future when giving the kid gifts I’d either just go with gift cards or ask her what she wants. Find a nice way to get the specific item from her, something like “Hey, your birthday is coming up, anything specific you’re looking for, send me some Amazon links!”. Drop ship them right to her house with a gift receipt so mom can send them back.
I was going to suggest that you just stay away from cookware/kitchen items going forward, but if mom flipped out over something that will regularly get to 200+ degrees harboring bacteria, this is probably going to carry over to everything else. The wrong fabric will have dust mites, the wrong wooden picture frame will off gas, the wrong paint might have lead etc.
TL;DR. Gift cards or On List items only. And don’t blame mom, the kid already knows, don’t make her feel worse about it.
This is the correct and simplest answer. Does anyone think that restaurants dismantle their pans? Heat is a great sanitizer, and even if some microbes managed to end up in the pan, it would kill them. It’s a foolish obsession.
Maybe cookware isn’t a good gift for this person, but I think giving good cookware to someone starting out is a great gift. Quite often, the new cook doesn’t realize the benefits of quality cookware. They may get cheapo stuff–whether out of ignorance or expense–and then have to deal with all the associated hassles that come with it. Cookware like Calphalon would actually be great for just starting out. It’s relatively easy to clean and is solid and can last a lifetime.
Good knives are also a great gift for the same reason. It’s easy for the new cook to think cheap knives will be sufficient, but they quickly become hard to work with.
Bah. Just what would happened to the supposed bacteria when you heat that pan up to 300 degrees?
Wonderful, thoughtful gift BTW.
Tell the niece to keep the pots and pans. Send her an autoclave at the next gift giving occasion.
If that doesn’t satisfy her mother then nothing will.