Seriously, my method is to pour the hot fat from the pre-heated frying pan into the batter and give it a quick mix IF I AM GOING TO USE THE STAINLESS STEEL PAN. If cast-iron, I leave the fat in the pan and pour the batter on top of it.
You would THINK this would be enough lubricant to give the advantage to iron, but even so steel always produces the perfect browned crusty delight. Iron generally turns out a stuck-on, disheveled mess.
“Cleanup is a wipe with a paper towel” – see earlier question about vermin.
My cornbread never sticks, either. And it leaves the pan pretty clean, so yeah, clean-up is wiping it with a paper towel. I’ve never noticed vermin being attracted to the pan.
Now, if I cook something messy, like pork chops, or Indian chick peas in spices, or scrambled eggs, I do wash the pan. With a little soap and warm water and a scrubby. If I just make cornbread, or popcorn? Wipe up the extra oil, and it’s good to go.
Probably if I wanted to store it for long periods it would have to be better cleaned, but we use it a few times a week. It’s great.
(But not ideal for eggs. I usually cook eggs in a different frying pan. Likewise pancakes. And it’s fine for the chickpeas, but heavier and no better than the stainless pan, so I prefer that one. The cast iron pan is ideal for things I want to sear – which includes corn bread.)
What they do well is soak up and retain a LOT of heat relative to your average stainless/aluminum clad pan. It’s mostly due to the mass and specific heat of the cast iron versus the mass and specific heat of the aluminum & stainless.
So throw your steak in the clad pan, and it’ll cook evenly, but it’ll also cool the entire pan down drastically, giving you a less than awesome sear. Your cast iron pan, OTOH, will not cool down as quickly or as much, searing your steak much better, if somewhat less absolutely evenly.
What this means in terms of the OP’s conundrum is don’t cook eggs in your cast iron. It doesn’t buy you anything in terms of cooking them, and only sets you up to have cleaning issues and uneven cooking.
I agree with pulykamell; get yourself a good non-stick egg pan. My vote would be for a restaurant supply store non-stick skillet or something similar. (Sam’s club has a pretty solid rendition of the style).
I don’t own any non-cast-iron frying pans*. I grew up using them and they do everything I need a frying pan to do. Mine are Wagners, old pans with milled surfaces (better than those modern Lodge things with the pebbly surface). allthegood occasionally puts them in the oven and lets them bake. I tend to pour a quarter cup of grapeseed or safflower oil into the skillet after cooking and cleanup and stick it back on the burner to heat and then mop up the residue with a paper towel.
Flaxseed oil is very good for seasoning cast iron pans because it’s a drying oil. What that means is that it readily polymerizes to form a tough coating that stays put and resists scratching.
The pebbly surfaced ones aren’t unusuable, but you have to work much harder to develop a seasoned cooking surface. And there’s no discernable advantage to it, they (Lodge) just don’t bother to mill them, which is a shame since they’re the last man standing (barring perhaps some tiny artisanal iron casters making pans somewhere). Wagners and other vintage milled-surface pans can still be obtained second-hand.
The other thing they do really well is last. Its pretty hard to really ruin cast iron - maybe you could rust it bad enough to have to toss it, but you’d have to really abuse it. Teflon takes one time where you grab a metal utensil (or your teenagers cook in it).
(Lots of people have a 40 year old cast iron pan - I’m not sure that I have a five year old teflon pan in the house).
I’m not fond of cast iron because its heavy and my wrists can’t take too much working with it. I think my next batch of pans will be stainless - I’m moving my pots over to stainless now, pans are next.
Something nobody has mentioned yet - to the OP jonpluc, sounds like you may be using too high of heat too. ISTM that a lot of people think cooking means high heat all the time for everything (maybe not you, but other people I know).
My brother has a set of cast aluminum pots and pans that my grandmother used. My mother is using the same aluminum-clad stainless she used when I was a kid. I have stainless pans I got when I was married 25 years ago some with aluminum, some with copper sandwiched to the bottom) that are still as good as new. Pots and pans keep pretty well. Except for the no-stick ones. Those wear out quickly.
I rarely exceed ‘6’ on the element dials, unless I’m boiling something. Most of my cooking seems to be ‘4’ or ‘5’-to-‘5.5’. Mrs. L.A. has burned a couple of my pans. Fortunately, they were the non-stick ones. Calphalon, but not expensive. (My other non-cast-iron pans are Calphalon tri-ply ones. They hold up very well to high heat. Mrs. L.A. marveled at how easy they are to clean, even when scorched.) She mentioned a week or so ago, ‘I think I’m catching on. You cook “low and slow”.’
It lives on top of the stove, and gets used more days than not. The vermin in my biosphere re always somewhere, the frying pan as good as anywhere. They run away when it starts to get hot.
Nah. I always preheat a tablespoon of bacon grease or peanut oil in the pan as it preheats. No way would just a thin coating be enough.
Your second paragraph is exactly the way I do it, except that when I use cast iron the cornbread either falls to pieces or separates leaving most of the crust in the pan. With stainless or nonstick it does fall right out.
Also, I serve it upside-down, so the nice crusty part is uppermost. In many ways I am still a Dam Yankee.
I think this post is spot on. I was going to suggest that the pan isn’t the problem. (And I’d rather just shrivel up and DIE than use Teflon, AYKM?) THe problem is egg cooking technique. Low and slow is the way to go – I make up a little tune and sing that to myself whenever I cook eggs. I think your pan is too cold before you toss the eggs in. But be careful because too hot too fast just makes burned rubbery eggs. I really don’t think the type of pan matters at all; this is all about proper temperature.
If your pan is well-seasoned, ISTM the problem lies in either the batter or the fat. If your batter works well in the stainless steel pan – i.e., the cornbread isn’t dry, it holds together, etc. – then take a look at the oil. (Oh, FWIW the cornbread recipe I use is the one on the box of Albers corn meal.) I’ve never had the cornbread stick when I’ve used the Crisco.
This probably deserves another thread, but…I could make an argument for hot n’ fast egg cookery.
Remember the last scene in Big Night (1996), where Stanley Tucci cooks an omelette and shares it with his brother, played by Tony Shaloub? Olive oil – not butter – goes in the pan – stainless steel – and is set over a HUGE gas flame. Omelette done in approximately 20 seconds.
I made fried eggs in olive oil over soft polenta the other night. Recipe asks for sunny-side up eggs with brown crispy edges but a soft, runny yolk. Which is exactly what you get with a good hot pan and about 45 seconds.
Pretty much how I do my eggs most of the time. Hot & fast. There’s all sorts of ways to do it, and you get different results, but I like crispy edges on fried eggs, and I’m an impatient fellow, so I subscribe to this school of thought more often than not.
When I make cornbread, I take a little more fat (butter or goose fat) than the recipe calls for and melt out in the cast iron pan. I move it around to coat the pan, then pour most of it into the eggs, stir well, then add the milk. Then I dump those into the dry ingredients, mix out a bit, and pour into the still-hot greasy pan. I cook it (covered) for a few minutes on the burner, to get a good crust, then I either turn the burner down very low, or pop it into the oven to finish cooking.
When it’s done, I invert the pan and the bread falls out.
