Question: Is there any logical and/or scientific reason that would account for the premise that heating cookware (i.e. frying pans, pots, etc) over a stove (gas, halogen or other), will cause irreparable damage if there there are no contents in said cookware. More simply: does heating an empty skillet damage it?
Answer:insert here
Overheating non-stick cookware (especially when heating the pan empty) can cause the surface to outgas fumes, which can be harmful to you and birds living in your house.
It depends on the material your pots and pans are made of and how hot you get them, as well as how quickly they are cooled afterwards. My stainless steel pots and pans, which have an aluminum/copper disk bottom, specifically state in their paperwork to heat the pan to the cooking temperature before adding the food to reduce sticking. On the other hand, heating it any hotter than the temperature you’re going to cook at is not recommended.
As **Turek **says, the nonstick coating of most nonstick pans will come off faster if it’s overheated - both in gassing and in chipping and peeling.
Aluminum pans (which really oughtn’t be used for cooking anyway, IMHO) will warp even faster than stainless, as well as dent out of shape faster when hot. Even banging a hot pan against another hot pan on the stovetop is enough to cause a lid to not fit anymore.
Cast iron is surprisingly fragile if dropped. I don’t know if heating it has any affect on it, but I have cracked cast iron dropping it on stones ringing a campfire. That sucked.
I have had cheap pans (stainless, aluminum and nonstick) warp from heating them too hot and then putting them into cold water while they’re still hot (in fact, I keep one cheap pan on hand just for this abuse). It doesn’t “break” it, but it bends it, and the bottom eventually won’t sit flat on a burner (at which point it becomes my new campfire pan and I get a new cheap one for further abuse at home.) I wouldn’t be surprised if, in theory, one could get a pan hot enough to crack it if plunged into cold water, but I would be surprised if you could do it on a home stovetop - they just don’t have the BTUs to get hot enough to properly stir-fry, much less weaken a pan.
My father told me once or twice (yeah, he repeats his stories) that they used to clean out their cast iron pan by heating it up very hot in the oven and then holding it upside down and tapping it against something. He tried this once with an aluminum pan and the bottom cracked right out.
Thermal cycling will cause internal fatigue on all metals, and the thinner the material or less conductive it is the more significant the problem is.
Aluminum cookware, which is commonly used or at least was commonly used in restuarants, will definitely fatigue from use, particularly if heated without food or water. I’ve seen pots fracture after going through one too many cycles in an industrial washer. I’ve heard of but never seen of them failing “explosively” (i.e. fragmenting), most likely from being pulled out of a hot dishwasher and having cold water immediately poured in them. In general, aluminum is not a material that holds up well to cyclic heating, and its use in cookwear is based on how evenly it conducts heat, though modern “hard anodized” Calphalon-type cookwear is much better in this regard (though they still warn you not to overheat it). As Turek notes, applied anti-stick surface coatings can vaporize, causing a potential hazard, and you never see these used in a commerical food service kitchen 'cause they wouldn’t last a week.
Old copper-clad stainless pots and pans used to have problems with the copper seperating if overheated, though most modern brands are bonded such that they can’t just come apart. I’ve never seen a problem with stainless by itself, but most stainless pots are pretty thick because they’re so prone to uneven heat conduction. I’ve heard of stainless camp cookwear breaking but it’s never been a problem for me. The titanium cookwear you can buy now definitely warns against overheating, and given how fast it heats up there’s little reason to preheat it.
Cast iron distributes heat surprisingly well (again, probably because it is so thick) and is fairly ductile so I doubt you could do serious damage to cast iron short of a blowtorch. It does have a low tensile strength, though, and is prone to brittle fracture especially if heated and cooled, or as WhyNot’s experience illustrates, dropped on a hard surface.
Stranger
If something is heated too quickly and unevenly, the side exposed to the heat expands faster than the other side, causing a stress fracture. I did this once; sat a cast iron skillet on an electric element that had already been cranked up to max for several minutes. After about a minute I heard what sounded like a gunshot and turned around to see two halves of a skillet. Sounded like somebody hit it with a hammer.
I have a glob of aluminum which is all that’s left of a pot I left on my (electric) stove while I got distracted with other things. It melted; I’m lucky it pooled on the stove surface - could have started a nasty fire.
what fun exploding pot stories!
So just to make sure I have this straight, the reason that the aforementioned problems occur is that the cookware gets a lot hotter without any contents inside to absorb some of the heat, thus stressing it out more?
Consider yourself very lucky. My mom forgot a double bottom pot with boiling water. When she came back, it was empty. She picked it up and the bottom fell off, spraying molten metal all over the place, including her feet. She still uses the other pot from the set.
try burning a regular rubber balloon with water inside. It won’t burn as long as the water is “using up” all the heat to warm up. Same with the pot. Although they do get hot, they don’t get as hot when there is something in there.
Also try using a tall pot to make soup. While you are browning the base, the handles are a lot hotter than when you have added the water and are simmering the soup (even if the burner is set at the same temp). You can easily pick up a pot of boiling soup, not one with just the base.
how very educational…it seems kinda obvious now.
if you’ll excuse me, i need to start looking for a balloon!
I actually had a (relatively new - only a year or so old) cast iron pan spontaneously crack practically in half. We had placed in on the stove on high, and were slow (taking a couple of minutes) to add in the food. Scared the poop out of us, as it sounded like a shot.
Now I’m paranoid – most of the recipes I’ve seen for meats in cast iron specifically say to heat the pan up “almost to glowing” before adding the meat, in order to get a good sear. I’ve always done just that – often a minute or two on high. But two posters here are saying I’m living on borrowed time…
TW: if the pan has an internal defect, eventually the extreme heat/cool cycles needed for blackening will make it fail. If not, not. Assuming it wasn’t defective from the factory, like Risha’s probably was, you can preserve the life of the pan by letting it cool slowly after use, i.e. never put water in it while it’s still too hot to touch the cooking surface.
There have been a rash of exploding Pyrex pans recently. Google “pyrex explosion” to find some stories. Here’s one. And here’s a previous thread about it. One thing that seemed to cause it was putting dry foods in the pan, then putting it in the oven. The pan heats up, then the food heats up, then the food leaks some liquid onto the hot pan, and boom.
Non coated metal pans will warp, giving the heating surfaces hot spots on direct contact burners, such as electric coil, ceramic glass top stoves. Cast iron tends to ‘belly’, giving it a round bottom that heats most at point of best contact. Temperatures in excess of 660 deg F will cause teflon coated pans to release a dangerous gas which could cause flu-like symptoms, discolor the coating, and make it more likely to have subsequent cooked foods stick. It may also flake, and contrary to some belief, it will not cause a toxic reaction, but will pass through the disgestive system unchanged.
All good points which other posters contributed to this thread seven years ago when the question was asked.