Guide
It is genuinely PTFE-free. It is also not really ceramic, and the recipe is a trade secret. What the evidence supports, and where it stops.
Ceramic non-stick is sold as the clean alternative — the pan you buy to stop worrying. The honest answer is more interesting than that, and it partly undercuts the products we would most like to earn a commission on. Here it is anyway.
The American Ceramic Society — whose whole subject this is — describes the process as spraying a mixture of silica, metal oxides and binders onto a metal pan and firing it at 400–800°F. The result is “quasi-ceramic”, not a true ceramic.
Our Place said much the same to The Guardian in 2025, describing the Always Pan coating as a “ceramic precursor”: “we are heating it at a lower temperature, it never gets to that ceramic state”.
Underneath, it is almost always aluminium. So “ceramic pan” means an aluminium pan with a sprayed-on silica-based coating. That is not a scandal. It is just not what the word suggests.
Ceramic sol-gel coatings genuinely contain no PTFE and no PFOA. The chemistry does not require fluorine. If your reason for avoiding non-stick is specifically fluoropolymers, this category does answer that.
The American Ceramic Society puts it plainly: because sol-gel compositions are considered proprietary, it “has led to questions about what (potentially toxic) chemicals may be released during decomposition”, including organic polymers of varying toxicity. It also cautions that while these coatings avoid PTFE and PFOA, some may be made with other forever chemicals.
We looked specifically for peer-reviewed work characterising the thermal decomposition products of a ceramic cookware coating — what it gives off when it is overheated. We could not find any. There is published work on particle release from damaged coatings, below. On what happens when you burn one, there appears to be nothing, and it is missing because the formulations are secret.
Regulators have noticed. Washington State now requires cookware makers to report non-stick ingredients, and the state’s senior toxicologist told The Guardian: “There’s this fundamental challenge of figuring out what’s in our products.” Caraway declined to disclose its formula.
This is the most-cited concern about ceramic pans and it is routinely overstated, so here is exactly what the evidence says.
A study in Food Control, with FDA researchers among the authors, measured nanoparticle release from nanoceramic cookware. Two findings, and both matter. Ordinary washing and scouring with pads or steel wool did raise dissolved titanium and silicon in the food simulant compared with an unused pan — but produced no detectable nanoparticles. Particles, at around 10⁸ per square decimetre, appeared only after the coating was deliberately destroyed with a tungsten carbide burr.
Separately, EFSA concluded in May 2021 that titanium dioxide “can no longer be considered safe as a food additive”, because genotoxicity could not be ruled out. EFSA expressly limited that finding to E171 as a food additive, “not to other uses”.
One study measured release under deliberate mechanical destruction. A separate assessment concerned eating titanium dioxide as a food additive. No study we could find connects the two into an exposure estimate for someone cooking on a ceramic pan.
Anyone telling you ceramic pans deliver a genotoxic dose of titanium dioxide is going well past the evidence. Anyone telling you the question is settled in the other direction is too.
Both the American Ceramic Society and The Guardian cite Tamara Rubin of Lead Safe Mama, who reports high titanium levels in GreenPan, Always Pan and Caraway pans, lead up to 70 ppm in an Always Pan lid, lead in Caraway lids, mercury in a Caraway product and antimony in a GreenPan.
This is XRF screening, not peer-reviewed migration testing. XRF measures how much of an element is present in the material scanned; it does not measure how much gets into food. That is a real limitation and it cuts both ways — it does not make the readings meaningless, and it does not make them evidence of exposure.
This is the part that decides whether the pan was worth the money, and it is not really a chemistry question.
Ceramic coatings degrade with heat. Manufacturers say low to medium only. Caraway’s one-year warranty explicitly excludes coating deterioration from high heat — which tells you how they expect these pans to fail. Run one hot and it can be finished within months. Treated gently, several years.
Compare that with a $25 cast iron skillet that improves for decades, or a stainless pan with a lifetime warranty.
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