cast iron – Page 2 – Cast Iron Guy

2022-05-012022-05-01 episode 302

Stir Fried Campfire

It had been far too many months since I had found myself with a good day to build a small campfire in the backyard. But Saturdays, even chilly ones in mid-Spring, can sometimes avail themselves of enough freedom and opportunity to reignite something interesting, sometimes literally.

My plan to have winter fires outdoors this past cold season was met by a couple struggles with weather, timing and general distraction. I lit up the pit a few times while there was snow on the ground, but by choices of days were never ideal and I spent multiple hours outside in the dwindling light of dusk trying thaw the ice from the bottom and sides of my fire pit for long enough to sustain a flame of anything worthy of the name.

So with the snow consistently melted and the remaining autumn leaf litter cleared, I dusted off everything — pit, grill plates, benches and tools — late yesterday afternoon and burned a couple hours worth of wood to both get rid of the winter remains and kick-start another season of backyard cookouts.

I not only slow-grilled a pair of thick pork chops for nearly an hour, roasting them slowly over the coals and smoke, turning them into deliciously flavored hunks of savory meat, but I also attempted a simple stir fry: rice.

Basic white rice finds itself in our home cooked meal rotation often enough that we usually have a cup or two of day-old rice in the fridge. My wife was planning on simply microwaving our leftovers to accompany the chops, but I suggested instead that we fry up some rice over the already-to-cook fire.

Some scrambled egg, a few finely chopped veggies in butter, a heap of left-over cold rice, and some soy sauce, all step-wise added to my twelve inch cast iron pan, and sizzled up to a toasty brown with the smoke and the flame licking around the outside.

It was delicious and nutty and savoury, and the perfect side to go along with two caramel-toned smoked pork chops that followed the bowl of stir fried rice through the backdoor and to the kitchen table.

Sometimes I wonder what the neighbours must be thinking, but I guess if they could smell my outdoor cooking they’re probably mostly jealous.

2022-03-112022-03-11 episode 299

Sourdough Muffins

What are English Muffins called in England?

Muffins? Breakfast muffins? Half a Benny?

As I grilled these doughy disks on my cast iron skillet this morning with my daughter lingering over my shoulder hoping she could nab one for her breakfast, I wasn’t really pondering such things.

As 2022 progresses and I recall back to my sourdough goals for this year — in other words, baking with my starter by branching out beyond breads and sandwich loaves — I warmed up and fed my starter yesterday with the intention of attempting to make some English Muffins.

The recipe and process turned out to be much quicker and much simpler than I’d expected.

Unlike the bagels I’d baked about a month ago, the full cycle for this recipe was short and took only about fourteen hours, from idea to tray of hot bready goodness including the twelve hour overnight proof on the counter.

The dough was essentially a wetter, sweeter version of my basic bread, including the addition of liquid sugar (I chose maple syrup, because yes, we just have jugs of maple syrup in the cupboard, ohhhh Canada!) and replacing the water with milk.

the recipe

360g bread flour 240g milk 100g active sourdough starter 20g maple syrup (or honey) 8g salt cornmeal for dusting

I combined the ingredients (minus the cornmeal) into a fully hydrated dough ball. This took about an hour of resting and folding and resting and folding. My timing here was the critical part, as this needed a twelve-hour counter-top rise. I had this ready to proof for about 7pm so that it would do it’s thing while I slept.

The next morning, the dough ball having easily doubled (or more) in size, I patted it out on a floured surface with my fingertips until it was about 2cm thick. This got cut with a “biscuit cutter” into rounds about 10cm across. (My biscuit cutter was a drinking glass.) I dusted the eight rounds with cornmeal and set them onto a cookie sheet to rest and rise for about one more hour.

I set my cast iron skillet over a medium-low heat. The key here is getting the muffins hot enough to cook evenly through to about 200F, while not over-cooking the outside. Low and slow. We’ve bought enough English Muffins over the years that I have a pretty good eye for what a finished product should look like, but I still used my digital thermometer to make sure they were cooked through. This was mostly me setting the kitchen timer for four minute intervals and flipping only on the beeps. It’s tempting to flip-flip-flip, but I think these benefit from minimal fussing.

For my next attempt (some day in the future) there are some minor adjustments I will make, specifically around the cook time and temperatures, but the only advice I can offer here is that you need to get to know your equipment and work along with it for this recipe. I’m still learning too, but my final product turned out pretty good for a first attempt.

The biggest surprise was the timing. I was expecting this to take much longer. Sure, fourteen hours is not a last minute meal idea, but in the world of sourdough it’s essentially instant fast food, and the type of thing I could see putting together the night before needing to make a family breakfast with unexpected company.

Fresh egg sandwiches everyone?

2022-01-222022-01-22 episode 292

Cheesy Garlic Pan Bread

Back in December I was going through my end-of-the-year questions and spent a post lamenting the fact that despite baking up a lot of sourdough, I hadn’t spent much time exploring the potential of my starter as a starter for other recipes besides bread.

A goal for 2022 was to branch out, and the suggestions I gave myself in that post were to try some variety of recipes such as doughnuts, bagels or english muffins.

Instead, as inspiration would have it, I started instead with a crusty pan bread.

The Youtube algorithm tends to show me a lot of baking content these days, and my playlist offered up a recipe for a thick crust pan pizza. I skipped the pizza part and instead used some of the pizza advice and a half a recipe of my sourdough bread to whip up a tasty cheese bread that complimented our evening meal of beef stew.

cheesy garlic pan bread

500g bread flour 350g water 12g salt 250g active sourdough starter 250g hard cheese 3 garlic cloves 60ml olive oil 10g finishing salt

I made my basic sourdough recipe using the flour, water, salt and starter. This went through the typical hydration and folding cycle and then got covered and popped into the fridge overnight. Technically, I only used half of this to make the pan bread and used the other half to bake some simple sourdough rolls, but I’m sure any innovative baker can figure out something clever to do with half a recipe of ready-to-rise sourdough dough.

I oiled up my ten inch cast iron pan (using half the oil) and halving the dough from above, I balled and then flattened it, shaping it into a thick disk that sat about an inch from all sides of the pan. It was about 8am when I did this, and I wouldn’t go onto the next step until nearly 5pm when the dough disk had risen to a lovely volume that was closer to being ready to bake.

My folks had given us a huge wedge of gouda cheese as part of a Christmas basket, so I grated down a bunch of that. I also crushed the garlic in the remaining oil. Just like one might do with a loaf of foccacia I dimpled the surface of my dough disk with my finger tips then spread the garlic oil roughly over the surface.

Here’s the first trick I learned from that Youtube video. I took about half the grated cheese and made a thick edge right up against the edge of the disk and touching the cast iron. The point here is that as is melts it drips along the crack and gets all fried and crusty making a crispy cheesy edge.

The point is, you want the cheese (and quite a bit of it) right up to the edge of the dough.

With a saltier cheese I may have skipped this extra finishing salt sprinkled atop this whole creation. I like salty garlic bread, probably an artifact of growing up on garlic bread made from buttered toast sprinkled with garlic salt not real garlic, but it really does bring an added dimension to the finished product.

This spent 28 minutes in a 425F oven, but I was watching it carefully for the last five.

The second trick I learned from that Youtube video came right at the end. I checked the browning on the crust of the bread after I pulled it out of the oven to make sure it wasn’t too brown (it wasn’t) and then lit up the stovetop where I continued frying the bread right there in the cast iron pan for another 3 minutes. That crust just browned up a little more and it popped out of the pan glorious and crusty and cheesy as I expected.

My biggest problem was making sure there was some left over for tomorrow.

It was delicious, fresh and steaming hot from the oven, and I’ll be adding this to my regular rotation for family meals or perhaps even to share with friends some day again.

2021-12-272022-12-27 episode 280

Sustainable All

The back of a large cast iron pan with an embossed maple leaf.

If you asked me for my political position on where the world should be going, I’d tell you. After all, it’s never great to write these things down, particularly on a public website where you are trying to foster a positive, happy vibe without some means to avoid the wrath of the countless people who disagree with you.

Instead, I’ll write about why I like cast iron so much.

What do you think the world will be like 25 years in the future?

We live in a disposable world, don’t we?

We’re arguing over single-use plastics — bags, straws, and wraps — as if the question is one of convenience trumping trash. In reality, it is a question of sustainability.

Everything we do shifts energy. Everything we do increases the general entropy of the universe. These are just laws of physics, not even opinion.

The opinion comes into play when we ask what the accumulated effects of billions of people shifting around energy and increasing universal entropy mean for this tiny ball of dirt and water and air upon which every one of us are bound past, present and future.

For as much as I love great cooking and hefty cookware, there is a often said but generally understated benefit to cast iron: it lasts forever.

The thing is that a lot of things last forever. That plastic straw you sipped your cola through for fifteen minutes will last in the ground as waste effectively forever. Well, okay, sure, ten thousand years is not actually forever, but it’s a heckuva long time on a human scale.

On the other hand that plastic straw is not usable forever. It’s usable for a few weeks under ideal circumstances, if you saved it and washed it and took care with it. But ninety-nine percent of the time a plastic straw lasts forever but is usable for fifteen minutes.

Cast iron pans last forever, but more importantly the are usable for a very long time. Generations in many cases. We can confidently say that any well-made cast iron pan is usable for good hundred or so years because we have examples of collector pans that date back easily as far back as cast iron pans were commonly manufactured. Yes, they take energy to cast and energy to mine iron from the ground and energy to move around the supply chain to get into your kitchen, but over the usable life of a pan — which can be very long — it even out, and likely even wins out.

On the other hand, there are much less sustainable ways to fry an egg.

In the next twenty-five years, say by the mid-40s, I really think we’re either going to need to have our collective mind firmly wrapped around the kinds of choices we make about disposable versus sustainable objects.

Do we drink from a straw or do we slurp from a cup? Do we love our non-stick Teflon™ or do we cook on cast iron? Do we keep the species alive for a few more hundred years, or do we turn the Earth into an unlivable wasteland?

I think that decision, however we manage to get there — by consensus, force, or inevitability — will dramatically shift what the world in twenty five years looks and feels like.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.