I’ve occasionally been finding strange, sticky residues on some of my cookware lately. It’s a bizarre, sap-like substance (as far as I can tell), that is completely resistant to soap, and doesn’t dissolve in water. The only way I seem to be able to get it off is to use really hot water, and scrub until it eventually goes away, though this takes pretty much forever to do. Kinda like, I dunno, scrubbing sap.
Except it can’t be sap, because these pans never go outside. And it’s nothing that I’ve deliberately put there, AFAIK. It just seems to appear, typically when I’ve used a pan, and then don’t get around to washing it for a few days.
It’s thus far happened to two pans. The first is a small skillet with a teflon coating, that was last used to grill some chicken with a little olive oil. The second is a giant anodized aluminum uber-skillet that I use almost exclusively for french toast. The ingredients involved would be bread, egg, milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla extract, and margerine.
Whatever it is, it’s a pretty rare occurance. It doesn’t happen every time a leave a pan sitting around for awhile. I think it’s only happened once or twice per pan.
So… what the hell is it? Is there a way to get rid of it easily?
Jeff
Ah, thank you, Squink. That would make sense. Any way to get them off, short of paint thinner?
lieu: Don’t know how glue would get on it in such a uniform coating. Squink’s theory sounds more likely, based on the fact that the substance looks like a thin layer of some type of shellac, and covers a large portion of the pan.
Jeff
Sorry if this is nasty, and I don’t mean to imply anything…
But do you have a roach problem? They secrete a sticky residue. I tried to sublease a house once - I had to leave within the month. Every plate or pan I picked up made a sticky sound. Residue everywhere. It was so nasty.
I have this stuff called De-Solv-It that is great at getting off anything sticky; it even lists sap on the front. The website is www.orangesol.com . I believe the active ingredient is just citric acid, so you may be able to find something similar in your local supermarket.
As for removing it - I’ll assume that “uber-skillet” is a black hard-anodized type. Calphalon makes a cleaner called “Dormond” that’s specifically for hard-anodized aluminum. Pretty effective stuff, even on the oil-turned-into-varnish. Just be prepared to invest a little elbow grease. It costs about $10 for a jar, but a jar will last a long time. (Think years) Strangely, this seems to be the one Calphalon product not sold on Amazon. Macys and Bed Bath & Beyond both sell it, at least.
Whatever you do, don’t try using oven cleaner or that new “Spray this on and let sit for 15 minutes” stuff that claims you’ll never need to scrub again. Either of these will hurt your aluminum pans faster than you can say “Oh crap! That was a bad idea!”
No offense taken, but I doubt it’s a roach problem. Never seen one before, and the coating is way too uniform. And too expansive. It would have to be one gargantuan mutha of a cockroach, and if that was the case, it probably would’ve eaten one of my cats by now.
Jeff
The other method: just call it “seasoning your pans” and try to encourage it. Before the teflon age, that weird shellac coating was the only thing keeping your scrambled eggs from instantly gluing themselves to the bare metal.
If you acquire an old non-teflon frying pan or Wok, you’ll want to “season” it by coating it with a very thin oil layer, baking it into shellac, then repeating this several times to create natural ‘teflon.’
