Recently, my folks were at a local K-Mart which was having a going out of business sale, and they picked me up a set of non-stick ceramic coated frying pans. I've been seeing a lot of these advertised lately as an alternative to traditional non-stick teflon coatings. These particular pans were not one of the more popular Seen-On-TV brands, but were instead a brand I had never heard of. One thing I immediately noticed when cooking on them is that they have a tendency to burn and scorch food very easily. After reading online I've since discovered this is a common issue with this type of non-stick surface. It's so much so, that they advise you do not use cooking spray on them since the small particles of oil will quickly "carbonize" and blacken on the surface. When this happens continuously it will actually cause the surface to lose it's non-stick properties and stain the pans. In general though, even when you use cooking oil or butter, this can still happen. So what ends up happening quite often is that the food gets blackened and scorched on the exterior before it's actually finished cooking through. Anyone else having problems like this with ceramic pans?
I have a cheap ceramic pan and I have problems with it too as I feel it can't be used the same way as regular pans where you can just let the fire under it burn as high as you like, which I kind of get peeved by since that's usually the way I like to cook. I don't use cooking spray though as it's not really too common here. I find that the surface is not really that nonstick and I wonder sometimes if that's only because the ceramic pan I have is cheap. Nonetheless I think it just has its specific uses but I think I'd stick with traditional pans for regular use, personally.
