Ongoing Struggles with Non-Stick Spray

Hello! Welcome to Beyond Soy!

Non-stick spray is tricky. Sometimes avoiding soy can be difficult because a food label is unclear, or because you don't know what ingredients were used. Non-stick spray is different: it clearly labels soy as an ingredient (usually soy lecithin), but it is hard to tell if it actually causes any problems.

Ashley has never had a reaction that we could attribute directly to non-stick spray. And, because non-stick spray is used in such small amounts, we are pretty sure it essentially burns off of the pan. Therefore, it is possible that it could be safe to eat. Instead of taking that chance, we error on the side of caution and opt to buy soy-free non-stick spray to limit any chance of eating soy. 

image via pixabay

Finding a soy-free non-stick spray was harder than you might expect. While butter is a decent option (though not without its own soy-related challenges), we didn't want to have to butter every pan. After scouring the grocery store, we finally found some non-stick spray marketed as high-temperature that doesn't list soy as an ingredient. It works, and Ashley doesn't have a reaction to it, but it is a little more expensive and we feel like there must be a better option out there. 

Recently we've been looking at atomizers that can be filled with olive oil, but we haven't convinced ourselves that it is worth it yet -- mainly because they seem prone to clogging and take some work to clean.

As it stands right now, non-stick spray is still a work in progress for us. It hasn’t been a problem for Ashley and there are several options available to try, but we haven't found a solution that we love.