When Good Iron Goes Bad

My beloved twenty inch cast iron grill pan developed an ugly blemish over the autumn months.

A scar. A scab. A patch of failing seasoning crusted, bubbled and flaked off leaving a rough spot the size of a medium pancake on the middle edge of an otherwise awesomely seasoned piece.

This isn’t beauty-shaming. A good quarter of the grill was rendered useless for cooking by a spot of flaking seasoning.

I worked around it. At first.

Then I ignored it.

But it only got worse.

Three years ago I had cleaned this particular pan down to bare iron. I ran it through the deep cleaning cycle of the oven and burned off all of the seasoning. It was a mess. It took some serious love in the backyard and four rounds of reseasoning love to get it back into service as our Saturday pancake grill.

But a January mid-winter in mid-Canada is neither the time nor the place to strip a pan to bare iron.

Solution? Elbow grease, some steel wool, and an hour of grinding the blistering patch of dead seasoning into a smooth, bare spot. Then three rounds of hot-oven-baking-on some fresh carbon layers.

The results were successfully tested this morning… and those pancakes were delicious.

Hello World

This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Ok.

It’s the first day of 2021. New Year. New hope. New blog.

I went looking for something fun and positive to add to my daily reading list and wow are we ever dropping the ball guys!

You’ve all been feeding your socials and mining the gold for twitter and facebook, it seems. Gah!

I present this as your alternative. This is my new daily blog. Nothing complex. Nothing deep. Nothing newsworthy. Just words about a good life, well lived, and enjoyed aloud.

You may want to bookmark it.