Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsA reliable skillet with PTFE-free non-stick coating requiring consistent care
Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2019
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[ SEE UPDATES BELOW ]
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With the oldest of our children interested in cooking some foods on her own, and her omelets preference, I decided to get her a frying-pan with anti-stick coating. My primary concern was steering clear of skillets coated with PTFE (a polymer known as Teflon), and not necessarily a long durability (particularly at this price range). It has been long known that PTFE undergoes degradation after some time at temperatures above 360 °F [200 °C]. Its extent and rate increase as the temperature rises, and this pyrolysis yields toxic fumes and a sublimate; such temperatures can be reached while cooking with a domestic stove at high heat. Depending on the concentration and exposure, PTFE fumes from an overheated pan may be a health risk to humans, and even be lethal to birds and other small animals; the best studied health effect of such toxic fumes is a flu-like syndrome ("polymer fume fever"), but more severe ones can occur, such as pulmonary edema and pneumonitis.
Teens cannot be relied upon avoiding overheated pans and using good air exhaustion when cooking, so I got this non-PTFE frying-pan despite critical reviews about the durability of the coating. Sprayed plastic coatings have a thickness just larger than the 0.0015" diameter of the average human skin cell, so it is illusory to expect a long useful life for them; even careful cleaning is likely to remove it bit by bit.
SOURCE
Ozeri is a brand name of Commonpath LLC (CA) and the coating is produced by Weilburger Coatings GmbH (Germany). The final product is assembled in China by an unidentified company, likely to be Zheijang Neoflam Inc., a cookware manufacturing operation of Neoflam Inc., headquartered in South Korea with subsidiaries in the US and Germany. In the past (but no longer now) the Ozeri website stated that the product centers were in the US, Germany, and Korea (see comment in amzn.to/2xXKSug), so it is possible Ozeri is simply a Neoflam product.
SPECS
This ZP1-20, 8-inch Green Earth Frying Pan has a textured surface cooking bottom and a Greblon ceramic non-stick coating. The frying-pan is made out of a heavy-gauge, die-cast aluminum -- likely commercially pure 1100 aluminum as the distributor claims the pan has no heavy or trace metals like lead or cadmium. It also has a ferromagnetic induction base since magnets stick to it. This base is not completely flat : it slightly curves inwards towards the center, as shown by red arrows in one of my figures. A concave base --recommended by the German Standard DIN 44904, provided the air gap is not too large or the metal base too thin-- is not a defect. When heated up it expands more in the center than in the periphery, making the pan to sit flush with the heat surface for an efficient use of heat (provided the heat-source size is similar to the pan's base size).
Unlike the Bakelite handle of the smooth-surface pan model, the handle of this pan is coated with silicone (and not "silicon"), whose elastomers are generally resistant to temperatures as high as about 570 °F [300 °C]. The Product Information section of this webpage says the weight of the pan weighs 1.6 lbs, but the one we got only weighs 1.4 lbs [640 g]. For comparison purposes, that is between one-third to one-half the weight of similarly sized cast-iron skillets. It comes with a flower shaped, felt-like protector for the surface of the pan when stored with other items on top of it.
COATING
Weilburger produces several different Greblon coatings for houseware products, and those for cookware are identified by an initial letter C. At the time of this writing, most of them contain PTFE (CR, C2, C3 and their variants) and only two are PTFE-free (CK1, CK2). Instead of using the C-identifiers, whose properties are given in the Weilburger website, Ozeri uses names like Stonehenge for C3, and CERAM (later CERAMIC) for CK2. Neither this webpage nor the Ozeri website currently specify this skillet's coating -- it is CK2 (see my other figure).
The difference between CK1 and CK2 is the number of sprayed coats. Both receive a primer coat with 30 to 40 μm of dry-film thickness, but CK2 receives an extra coat of 5 to 10 µm thickness. In the Weilburger's testing (British Standard 7069 abrasive pad test), CK2 has a better abrasion resistance than CK1. The resistance of CK2 is better than that of plain C3, and is as good as that of C3 reinforced with ceramic (C3+), so it is reasonable to expect that this pan's coating compares well with (Greblon) PTFE-coated pans in terms of abrasion. On the other hand, CK1 and CK2 have less non-stick capability than C3 in the Weilburger's testing.
USER GUIDE
The guide contains useful information on the handling and care of the skillet as well as on its limited lifetime warranty. The latter is only for personal and not commercial use, and requires the prepaid freight for returning a defective skillet. It is written in eight languages (English, Chinese, German, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Korean). I cannot judge the clarity of the Chinese and Korean texts, but in the other languages the concepts are well expressed, but for the funny mistranslation of water hardness (i.e., the amount of dissolved calcium and magnesium in the water) into "water scarcity" in the Spanish text.
RATING
We tested the frying-pan by cooking sticky foods (e.g., scrambled eggs, omelets, scallops, salmon, and fried rice), and in these initial tests we encountered no problems during cooking or when cleaning the skillet according to the user guide. Since we got this skillet a short time ago it is early days for degradation of the coating to develop, if that were to happen at all in our case. At any rate, even if it indeed happened after, say, a year or so, I'd consider that an acceptable outcome, as it is balanced by the pan's lifetime warranty and the absence of PTFE-fumes risk.
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UPDATE October 2019 -- Over the last 4 months the skillet has been used intensively and, to unending primogenital horror and drama, once (if not more times before that) someone cleaned it with a scouring pad. Despite that, the non-stick surface looks good and works well.
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UPDATE October 2022 -- The skillet has been in use now for more than 3 years, without any major issues. Its surface is not as pristine as it originally was but that is to be expected, particularly when often used by a teen. The pan ended up being stored with others, often on top of one another, and the felt-like surface protector included with the pan has surely contributed to the long life of this product with an excellent design. Upgraded to a deserved 5-star rating.
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