Cooking For Engineers

[guest]

you go ahead and "nuke" your food then. i rather keep my food molecules radiation free.

[Michael Chu]

[Guest]

I'd avoid cooking/baking with aluminum pots & pans if I have something else to use.
One question... I lined the bottom of the oven with aluminum foil, is it consider harmful ?

[IronRinger]

Do any of you Aluminum Alarmists ever eat in restaurants? Every commercial kitchen I've ever poked my head into uses Al cookware almost exclusively. It has great cooking properties, and it is cheap, which is a prime criteria because pots and pans get replaced frequently.

I use different criteria for choosing pots and pans in my own kitchen than restaurants do. I still like to eat out sometimes, but I worry much more about excessive salt and trans fats in my dinners than I do about cookware composition.

[ApacheRosePea00]

I came here because I have some camping cookware that is said to be aluminum---it is a cheap set made in Taiwan I picked up a few years ago. After reading everything here, I think I'll stay away from the cheap set I have but not because it is aluminum. Cooking with aluminum a few days a year is a small concern comparable to daily activities where we are exposed to lots more aluminum. I'll steer clear because it was a cheap set made in Taiwan and because of that, I don't know exactly what it is.

But I did read one thing I want to comment on. Microwaves heat your food by heating up the water molecules and other compounds such as fat in said food(popcorn can be popped in the microwave for this reason and if you know why popcorn pops then there is the proof). Nothing more, nothing less. The only way you would be exposed to the radiation would be if you have a broken microwave---like you have broken the shield in the door that protects you(some waves escape but if you're that paranoid, you shouldn't be watching TV or sitting in front of a computer screen) or you're foolish enough to mess with the microwave unit and have made it a danger to use. Again, all it does is throw waves through your food and the food molecules do a little dance which causes them to heat up---which is why certain foods heat up better than others in a microwave. Concerning my food in a microwave or just a microwave oven in general, I'd be far more concerned about eating foods I prepare at home and eating nutritional foods versus 99.9% of the junk found at my local grocery---full of preservatives, man-made chemicals that are indigestible, fillers, etc.