Month: May 2021

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a’la plancha

It’s Friday afternoon and it turns out that you really can learn something new every day. For example, while I was reading a new e-book that I had downloaded I also learned a new cast iron word.

In fact, last night I was sitting in the truck waiting for my daughter to finish her dancing class for the night and was skimming through a PDF of The Backyard Fire Cookbook by Linda Ly (which you can pick up for a few bucks in this month’s Humble Bundle by the way… tho only if you’re reading this in May 2021. No affiliation.)

The author’s introduction noted that (in her opinion) cooking over a campfire required three foundational pieces of cast iron: a dutch oven, a big pan, and a plancha.

Pause.

I’ll admit. That was a new word for me: plancha.

So, of course, I temporarily closed the PDF, swiped open a browser window, and Google’d it.

… to which a confusing selection of advertisements for griddles appeared on my screen.

Um.

As it turns out the English translation for what turns out to be the Spanish word plancha is iron.

More specifically, and digging through more sites helped me discover this, the word plancha in reference to a cooking tool is a flat, iron griddle with shallow sides.

Or, a big flat hunk of cast iron… and what I would have up until last night called a griddle.

Even Google knew better.

Not that griddle is a great word. I have a round griddle. I also have reversible griddle with grooves on one side and a flat smooth pancake-friendly surface on the other. I’ve a got a small griddle I put in my barbecue. And I even have an electric griddle (which I will mention as little as possible going forward.) Lots of griddles that have multiple different meanings even in my own kitchen.

Plancha may be a new word for me, but it suits the specificity of the kind of griddle-like pan I tend to prefer: an oblong, squarish piece of flat iron that has a bit of a lip to keep the food from slipping off but is otherwise a big broad cooking surface.

So. Friday afternoon and I have a new word to help me talk about one of my favourite topics. How’s your week going?

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Should I avoid using soap on my cast iron pan?

About a week before I am writing this post, the official Twitter for Lodge Cast Iron posted a simple question: “Soap or no soap?”

About fifty people weighed in on the debate, asserting a broad range of opinions from both Team Soap and Team No Soap.

For the uninitiated the argument goes something like this:

For much of the long history of cast iron cookware, soap was a harsh chemical usually derived from a process involving lye. These natural soaps would chew through the seasoning of a cast iron pan. Soap-free techniques for salting, scrubbing, cleaning, heating, and oiling a recently-used pan have long been refined and shared among cast iron users, passed down as general means of care and tending of cookware.

But soaps are now mostly gentle chemical concoctions that bear little resemblance to the soaps of our great-grandparent’s era. Couple that with an overall aversion for most people to use something that hasn’t been scrubbed clean with a squirt of lemon-scented goo, and many people will tell you that no, actually soap isn’t going to harm your pan.

Team Soap asserts that almost all modern dish soaps are fine, and so long as you dry and oil your cast iron your pans will be just fine.

Team No Soap argues back that soaps, harsh or not, are unnecessary as there are techniques and tools to clean a pan without that product. And, oh-by-the-way anything that doesn’t help your seasoning is possibly hurting it.

Personally, I don’t use soap.

I fall into the Team No Soap camp because I stick to the core rule that whatever I put in my pans is either improving or degrading the seasoning.

Soap, in my opinion, no matter how gentle is not helping the seasoning so thus it is degrading it.

If I’m going to degrade my seasoning, it’s going to be from cooking something delicious to eat, not for taking a cleaning shortcut.

That said I will invoke my other rule, that is my Rule of Participation: anyone who participates in something should be encouraged to do so even if it means shortcutting or bending the rules of best practice at the beginning because eventually they will grow their knowledge and either change themselves towards the norm, or shift the normal to something better.

In other words, if a little soap is going to get more people into cooking with cast iron, great! As they learn, invest, and practice they will either see things with a different eye or will bring new evidence to the table for the rest of us.

Should you avoid soap on your cast iron pan? I think so… but don’t get so hung up on the question that you switch back to aluminum. A little soap is probably just fine.

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Misinformed

the moment
a tree
falls in the forest
crashes
breaking branches
thrashing limbs
cracking wood
makes a sound
heard by just one
witness
who tells the story
to friends
who were not there
an audience
unable to confirm
the moment
the noise
the disruption to
the peace of the forest
exaggerated
amplified
by words
feelings
hunches
fears
misrepresenting and
unable to precisely
articulate
the moment

– bardo

I have reserved some space on this blog each week to be creative, and to post some fiction, poetry, art or prose. Writing a daily blog could easily get repetitive and turn into driveling updates. Instead, Wordy Wednesdays give me a bit of a creative nudge when inspiration strikes.

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Caribbean Star Wars Day & That Yoda Guy

It’s Star Wars Day. May the Fourth be with you.

And back in February of 2013, we had a weird and wonderful Star Wars morning on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin (or Sint Maarten).

While the idea of big ship cruising these days seems about as fantastic as starships and galaxies far, far away, eight years ago we splurged and spent seven days on one of those mega cruise ships touring a short list of tropic islands.

On one of those islands we found an unlikely science fictional cultural touchstone.

for whatever one photo is worth:

From where I stand Nick Maley, “that Yoda Guy” seems to be living the dream.

After a successful career doing special effects for over fifty movies, including co-creating the puppetry work that brought Yoda to life, he semi-retired to a tropical island and opened a museum to showcase his life’s work.

He also sells prints of his personal paintings… one of which hangs framed on the wall of my living room. A sunset over the water.

That is roughly the extent of my knowledge of Mr. Maley. Though I do seem to remember nodding a friendly greeting to him back in 2013 when, on a morning off-ship walkabout in Philipsburg, Sint Maarten a few kilometers from the docks, my wife and I stumbled upon the “that Yoda Guy” museum and exhibit in a sand-coloured mos-eisley-esque building adorned with multiple colourful signs beaconing lost Star Wars fans hither into it’s mysterious realms.

It’s not a big exhibit.

At least it wasn’t when we visited in 2013.

The website says that they expanded in 2016, and that Mr. Maley was honoured by Lucasfilm for his work that same year. The tone of the museum space was part Caribbean art shop, part Star Wars artifact collection, and part examination of the lifelong quest for the proprietor to reclaim the credit for his work for which he seemed to have been unfairly deprived. I hope he found his due, and perhaps 2016 marked a new chapter in that legitimacy he seemed to be seeking.

We brought our art back to the ship and later that day we went snorkeling and ate a big buffet meal back on the boat. That night the massive ship fled out of the Sint Maarten harbour like a rebel transport ship off to the next destination in the inky star-filled blackness of a nighttime sea.

If your nerdy self happens to dock in Sint Maarten and you need an hour break from shopping for perfume, diamonds or tacky souvenirs, you can’t go wrong embracing the sunny side of the force and paying that Yoda Guy a visit. It’s a sequel I’d like to see myself.