cast iron – Page 12 – Cast Iron Guy

2021-02-062021-02-09

What’s the best first cast iron pan to buy?

First, always consider that the tool you’re most likely to get the most use out of is the tool you have the most reason to use. Buy a pan to suit the type of cooking you like to do.

A big flat skillet will let you cook big batches of pancakes or grilled sandwiches.

A small frying pan will be your breakfast companion for years to come.

A generous dutch oven will serve you well for chilis, deep frying and crunchy sourdough breads.

So, the simple answer here is buy the pan you need first and build out a collection from there.

A simple grilled cheese sandwich on a flat cast iron pan.

But, you ask, what would the Cast Iron Guy recommend?

You’ve read all about this cast iron movement and you’re looking at your chipped and scratched collection of aluminum pans from the supermarket and pondering leaping into building a legacy collection of cookware and begin replacing your nonstick throwaways.

You can’t go wrong with a medium-sized frying pan, of course. A simple ten to twelve inch pan is a staple of any collection and will be of great use in any kitchen.

But the piece I recommend, the piece that sits atop my stove and rarely ever finds it’s way back into the cupboard, the piece that I would buy as a gift for a friend or family member who was debating their first acquisition is a round griddle.

I own the Lodge 10.5 inch round griddle. *^{not a paid endorsment}

This piece is a low walled, simple round, smooth pan with a bit of a lip around the rim. It’s simple to use and maintain, and cooks just about everything day-to-day: grilled cheese sandwiches, quesadillas, fried eggs, crepes & pancakes, and naan bread. It heats fast for warming leftovers. It packs well and I often take it local travelling to hotels (like when we go skiing in the mountians where we often have a kitchen but usually not-so-great pans.) It’s an all-in-one workhorse for egg sandwiches, grilling sausages, and my lunchtime meals-for-one. It goes into the oven as a roasting pan for numerous meat and vegetable dishes, and if I need to broil anything it’s the pan I turn to first.

And if I was rich, I’d buy these by the caselot and hand them out as gifts.

So, my recommendation: you need a great first pan, and you are not looking to fill a specific cooking need, I don’t think you can go too wrong with a simple round griddle.

2021-02-042021-02-09

Can I use a self-cleaning oven to strip a cast iron pan?

The short answer is yes.

The more complex answer is … maybe.

A self-cleaning oven is the closest most of us have to a blast furnace inside of our homes. And as many people will tell you while there are multiple ways to strip old seasoning from cast iron, the high heat of an oven’s clean cycle might be the simplest.

My oven claims that on self-clean mode the temperature gets to nearly 900 degrees Farenheit (or about 480 degrees Celsius.) That’s hot. Hot enough to incinerate the seasoning off of any pan.

So what is cast iron seasoning anyhow that we can burn it off our pans, pans that we use over heat all the time?

The back side of a small cast iron pan sitting atop a cutting board.

Cast iron seasoning is a layer of polymerized oil.

Oil is a word we use to describe a vast variety of chemicals with complex molecular structures and specific physical properties. Cooking oils generally come from crop plants and we can eat them.

Polymerizing is a fancy way of saying that many smaller molecules can be chained together to form one massive molecule. Plastic, rubber, nylon are examples of polymers you might be familiar with already. Cast iron seasoning is also a type of polymer.

Cooking oil at the right temperature can be turned into a polymer onto many types of surfaces. We take advantage of this process to season cast iron cooking pans, covering them with lots of very large oil polymers that at the correct window of temperatures create a non-stick cooking surface. Simplistically, we are creating a kind of coating by linking uncountable small oil molecules together using heat.

This coating improves and strengthens with just enough heat, but as with many types of natural compounds if we use even more heat we can destroy it too. By design, because we like to have clean things, it incinerates at the same temperature of other charred food bits, grease, and cooking stains… or the temperature a self-cleaning oven.

So, yes, you can exploit the almost-blast furnace temperatures available in your kitchen to burn the polymerized oil layer from your cast iron pan and “clean” it bare in your self-cleaning oven. Almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit will reduce those polymerized oils to a fine ashy powder that you can wipe off with a damp cloth.

The maybe part of this answer is that high heat is unpredictable. Even some of the best cast iron is not made as uniformly as it may appear as you heft that heavy pan onto the fire. Pans are meant to be heated and then disperse that heat in a specific way (into food, into the air, etc.) So when you heat a pan in very hot in contained space, in a way it was not designed to be heated, there is a chance it could crack or warp.

I’ve personally stripped multiple pans by this method and never had a problem, but all of those pans were replaceable and inexpensive. If I was restoring something more valuable or an antique, I might not take the shortcut of a self-cleaning oven.

So again, can you use a self-cleaning oven to strip a cast iron pan… maybe. This method is fast and convenient (especially if you’re already cleaning your oven) and you can start fresh with a bare metal pan. This might be worth the maybe.

2021-02-032021-04-22

Cast Iron Care Checklist

Kinda surprising actually that I haven’t written on this topic yet, but here goes…

If you’ve been thinking about investing in a cast iron cookware collection, your new pans and griddles need a small collection of tools to live their best life with you.

As with many hobbies, there are expensive and cheap versions of available care accessories. Many companies will happily sell you branded tools, purpose-made implements, and specially crafted concoctions. Most of these items are important to care for your iron, but the pricy version of it is not. Cheap or free alternatives often exist. After all, cast iron cookware has been common for hundreds of years, but imported organic flaxseed oil probably has not.

A dozen strips of bacon frying in a medium cast iron frying pan.

Ten of the tools I keep handy to maintain my cast iron collection are:

Seasoning Oil – Personally, I lean heavily on canola oil for a post-cleanup wipe-down because we always have it in quantity and handy, but I also keep a bit of shortening or leftover bacon grease in the house for my purpose-seasoning efforts. There are numerous products on the market that are labeled as cast iron seasoning products (and I intend to buy some and try them) and many people online swear by flaxseed oil (but it is expensive). Whatever your oil of choice, this tool is a must for ongoing maintenance of your pans.

Heavy Duty Paper Towels – If I’m feeling flush, and I happen to be near a hardware store there is a brand of blue, commercial grade paper towels that are just about perfect for cast iron clean up. If I don’t have these around, plain old paper towels are a must for our supply closet.

Coarse Salt – The first time I tried it I was amazed by how much basic post-cooking cast iron cleanup could be accomplished with a quarter cup of water and a tablespoon of coarse salt. A few minutes of simple soaking usually means that with only salt and elbow grease I can clean up almost any pan. For anyone new to cast iron who is skeptical about the no-soap approach, try a salt scrub and your uncertainty will be alleviated.

Stiff Bristle Brush – To help with the salt scrub (as above) a good brush is also a must. We use our Lodge-brand brush so much it rarely even makes it back into the drawer.

Plastic Scraper – For slightly tougher clean-up jobs, I keep a couple of these in my collection. They are also invaluable for scraping out bits of set fat or other pan leftovers that don’t make it onto your plate, either by design or because you’re just too full to eat it.

Chainmail Scrubber – An optional big gun in your arsenal in the war on pan clean up is a heavy-duty scrub pad. I rarely use this personally but for those deeply stubborn bits (or when I’ve let my daughter cook and there are bits of burnt food clinging to the pan) a coarse, seasoning-safe scrubber is worth investing in eventually.

Heavy Duty Oven Mitt – It probably goes without saying, but the best way to use and care for your cast iron is to make it hot. Over a flame, from the oven, or atop a burner, you can neither use it nor care for it if you can’t touch it. Get yourself some serious mitts that will allow you to hold, lift, move, and carry a hot pan without grilling your digits.

Storage Rack – Sure, you could stack your pans one on top of each other — like an animal! Or you could invest in an elegant way to give those pans a way to stack or hang in style. There is probably something to be said about preserving seasoning and preventing damage this way, but the simpler reason is that if you can access them, you can use them.

Self-Cleaning Oven – A dual-purpose tool, a hot oven is vital for seasoning new pans or touching up the ongoing effort to keep your season even and strong. Additionally, a self-cleaning oven can get hot enough on the clean cycle to obliterate all the seasoning layers on a pan that needs a refresh. This is controversial and you shouldn’t do this with antiques or anything you can’t easily replace. Whenever we run the self-clean on our oven, I always toss in a pan or two that are starting to chip or build up seasoning in weird ways. This strips them clean and allows for start a fresh on bare iron.

Fire – Heat is heat, but nothing beats cooking over real fire. Plus, if your pans could talk, they would thank you for the chance to touch some real flames. Not everyone has access to daily fire in the form of a gas stove or barbecue, but taking your pan to a campout or picnic with some burning wood is what your cast iron cookware was made for.

2021-01-292021-02-12

Dozens of Dozens of Sourdough

I woke up at 6 am this morning to bake bread.

It had been proofing overnight in my cast iron loaf pan, dusted with flour and lightly covered with a bit of plastic wrap to keep it from drying out for the twelve hour counter-top rise.

It was the one hundredth and fourty-fourth loaf I’d baked since that first pandemic lockdown began back in March 2020. One dozen dozen sandwich loaves.

Bread as far as the mind can see.

A slice of sourdough bread rests on a cutting board.

Had I not picked the “cast iron guy” as the name for this blog, a close runner up could have easily been something to do with sourdough.

As much as countless people have jumped on the sourdough bandwagon during these times of COVID restrictions and being stuck at home needing something to do I’m going to claim early-adopter status and say I have been dabbling in sourdough bread for half a decade now. My interest sparked after reading a book by Michael Pollan where he discussed the history of fermentation and other slowish food preparation methods. My research didn’t end there, though, and after a couple false starts with starters, I gave rise to my current levain in early 2019.

Yet a mere one year ago my two year old starter was nothing special. I’d been baking bread three or four times a month, usually when we needed a good dome loaf for a holiday or a party or to accompany a nice meal at home.

Then about ten and a half months ago I got sent home from the office to “temporarily” work from home.

On my drive the radio was talking about potential food shortages and the chance for panic buying as people stocked up for the long haul. I stopped and picked up a few groceries, including a big bag of flour. Upon arriving home I pulled the starter from the fridge to let it warm up for a batch of bread.

I’d been tracking my bakes with sharpie tick-marks on the lid of the starter’s container, but I switched colours to track the loaves I was going to cook while the pandemic passed us by. The Kid asked me as I was weighing out the flour if I could make “square loaves” (instead of the usual domes) because it was easier for her sandwiches. We baked those first loaves the next day after a long rise in a pair of cast iron loaf pans. We haven’t really stopped. Multiple times per week fresh bread comes out of the oven, usually two loaves in a batch, and there is always fresh sourdough to be eaten on our counter.

One hundred an fourty-four loaves later, a dozen dozens, sourdough has become our pandemic legacy.

So many sandwiches, breakfast toasts, afternoon snacks, and heels turned into garlic wedges.

A pair of pans.

A tub of cultured flour, water and natural yeast.

And one family fed on a reliable source of delicious bread.