Cast Iron Cooking

[muldoonthief]

@pulykamell

There’s all sorts of weird cooking rituals and superstitions with cast iron. Not cooking tomatoes in it and not washing it with soap are probably the two most common ones. They both supposedly eat through your patina/“seasoning” and destroy it or some such nonsense. Maybe when you’re first building it up, there might be some truth to that, but with an established seasoning, you’re fine. The acid of the tomatoes won’t eat through it, neither will your soap.

Yeah, I figure that for over a hundred years, they were just pans. People used them to cook, then cleaned them. End of story. All the crazy ass rituals and superstitions came after cast iron was pushed out by easier & more convenient pots & pans.

[brainstall]

To me, my cast iron pans are just cookware, not precious artifacts that have to be handled with delicate care and precise rituals. I have a collection - sweet pans and meat pans, bigger ones and smaller ones, some bought new, some inherited, some from thrift stores.

There can be some flavour transfer, so if I’ve cooked something spicy the night before in one pan, I’ll use a different pan to cook my pancakes the next day. I wash them in soap. I scrub with metal scrubbers when needed. (Sometimes I don’t wash them right away and food dries on.) I can also fry two eggs with a half teaspoon of butter and not have them stick. Cast iron can be high maintenance, but it doesn’t have to be.

[salinqmind]

@Scylla

Acid eats the seasoning and the metal which then leeches into the food.

I bought my daughter a cast iron pan because she has low iron. I was told that one can get actual iron from eating food cooked in a cast iron pan! Is this true or not?

[Eva_Luna]

@salinqmind

I bought my daughter a cast iron pan because she has low iron. I was told that one can get actual iron from eating food cooked in a cast iron pan! Is this true or not?

Yep.

[D_Odds]

@pulykamell

There’s all sorts of weird cooking rituals and superstitions with cast iron. Not cooking tomatoes in it and not washing it with soap are probably the two most common ones. They both supposedly eat through your patina/“seasoning” and destroy it or some such nonsense. Maybe when you’re first building it up, there might be some truth to that, but with an established seasoning, you’re fine. The acid of the tomatoes won’t eat through it, neither will your soap.

While one is fine with a medium length cook (>3 hours), it is better to avoid longer cooks with highly acidic ingredients, or keeping highly acidic ingredients in the pan for any length of time. Use enameled cast iron for that.

If you don’t want to use soap, use a kitchen brush and scrub the pan with kosher salt and cooking oil. Rinse then dry. Often I add baking soda too.

[AHunter3]

On the one hand I’m definitely not a purist (I make spaghetti sauce in a cast iron pan, letting it slow-cook all day long; and if something gets burned on I will use soap and a scritchy pad on my pans). But yeah, no kidding, they cook better if it’s been longer than you can remember since you used soap on them or did anything to disturb that surface oil.

I tend to keep the breakfast pan more pristine than the others (eggs being inclined to stick to pans if the sticking is possible), washing them in very hot water with no soap, and the deep 10 inch pan gets treated the most like other ordinary cookware (because it is used to cook things in ways that don’t always constitute frying – including the above-mentioned spaghetti sauce). The standard 10 inch pan comes in somewhere in between.

Cast iron is pretty forgiving: you’ve got to really really fuck it up badly to keep it from recovering from what you’ve done to it. For most everyday offenses like using soap on it or forgetting to dry it so that it rusts, a bout of TLC in the form of oil and appropriate use, plus some patience with a few runs of bad cooking behavior, and the next thing you know you’re back to a well-behaved well-seasoned pan.

[Mean_Mr.Mustard]

@brainstall

sweet pans and meat pans…

This shall be the title of my autobiography.
mmm

[Smapti]

I own two cast iron skillets and I used them just yesterday to make a couple of deep-dish pizzas. Great fried texture on the crust and they slide right out of the pan effortlessly.