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So I have a nice 12 inch nonstick pan, which I always run through the dishwasher, and it's always fine. There's nothing unusual about the pan. But tonight, I needed it for dinner and the dishwasher was just finishing its run (the heated drying cycle ran too.) I took the pan out, dumped out the remaining water, and put it on the stove. About a minute later, I started hearing "shhhkk!" noises, looked over, and saw the nonstick coating blistering along the rim. Since this has never happened before, I only had one hypothesis - that despite the pan appearing dry, the heat and pressure of the dishwasher had gotten tiny water droplets underneath the nonstick coating which caused the blistering when they heated into steam.

  1. Is my hypothesis correct? Is this what caused it?
  2. Is there anything I can do to prevent this, other than waiting a few hours before using the pan?

edit:

The pan is a Cuisinart 12" Black Aluminum Non-Stick Skillet. Looking at the reviews of the set, it seems I'm not the only one with this problem.

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How old is the piece? Is the piece actually rated for the dishwasher?

I don't know what the latest stuff is rated for, but I've always been under the impression that non-stick coatings are pretty fragile, and that while they are better today than ever before, I just assume that I'm not supposed to dishwasher them.

Assuming that it is rated for the dishwasher, this seems odd, unless the pan was a bit old, and the coating had degraded somewhat, allowing it to fail in this way.

I REALLY think you should contact the manufacturer about this - they should have some clue what happened, and should be able to give you hints on prevention.

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  • It's pretty new, around 6 months. But it's not top of the line by any means. Not cheap either.
    – Tesserex
    Jan 25, 2011 at 4:42
  • Some nonstick cookware does claim to be dishwasher-safe these days. I've personally never tried it; reviews on shopping sites suggest that it works fine for some, and not for others. This particular skillet doesn't look like it makes that claim, though.
    – Cascabel ♦
    Jan 25, 2011 at 5:09

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