How many threads have there been on cast-iron cookware? How many have I posted to? A lot. But what the hell. Here’s another one.
Two complaints I’ve seen by people who won’t consider cast iron is that they take too much work to keep up, and that food sticks to them. Today I made some hash to tone down some corned beef that came out too salty. I thought the fat in the beef would be enough, so I didn’t add anything to the pan before dumping the diced beef and potatoes to the pan. Yeah, it stuck; and I added some butter.
But here’s the thing: When you don’t mess with the food, it comes unstuck. You just have to let it cook the proper time, rather than feeling it constantly has to be in motion. When I moved the leftovers into the fridge – BTW, they were nicely crispy but not burnt – they came up easily from the skillet. No stickage at all. Cleanup? Hot water, once over with a brush (no soap), wipe with a paper towel, back on the burner to heat up, a rub with Crisco, heat off, and into the oven for storage. A piece of cake.
So if you’re one of the people who are avoiding cast iron, give it a try. The more you use it, the more non-stick it gets. And no putting your hands in scalding water to clean up, as happens when I do the rest of the dishes.
It’s the same principle for stainless or your BBQ grill. Once the meat caramelizes, it will unstick itself like magic. If it’s stuck, it’s usually because it’s not ready to be turned.
Just to play devil’s advocate. With my stainless steel pans, they get a once over with a brush and some soap, rinse, dry done (I can even put them away wet if I want). Either that or toss them in the dishwasher.
I’ve used cast iron a few times and what really got to me was the weight of it, and the up keep. I didn’t use it for a few months and the whole thing rusted over. I know, I should have been oiling it from time to time, but hell, all my aluminum and stainless pots and pans that haven’t been used in months are still nice and clean and shiny.
That’s not to say I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t find anything it could do that I couldn’t already do on my SS or my grill.
I don’t understand your rust problem. I have cast iron I rarely use. Certainly some that haven’t been used in months. It’s not rusted, and I don’t do any ‘upkeep’. I just wipe them with Crisco after using them, keep them on the burner a bit, and put them away. No rust, and they’re ready to use even months later. And I live in the Pacific Northwet, by the beach.
I’ve got a big cast iron skillet I use for breakfasts only. When schedules permit, I make breakfast on Saturday for my wife and I. Nothing better than cast iron for this!
La creuset. All the heft and thanks to the enamel none of the rust [or contact between my food and iron. Cooking in regular cast iron is way too much iron for my poor body to absorb and i get bright green diarhhea for several days until that bolus of food is entirely out of my system.]
:eek: Ok, now I’m sure I don’t want a cast iron pan. Plus the fact that I’ve now learned from the first post that I have to oil it after cleaning and put it back on the stove to heat up, then let it cool and put it away. I’m sorry, for someone like me who dislikes cooking to begin with (and I’m not all that good at it anyway) that is too much maintenance for a pan.
I’m happy for the people who do like using it and find it no trouble. Glad it works for you.
If you make sure to season cast iron, and wipe it out and make sure it has no water drops standing on it [a brief heat in the oven manages to do it] it lasts wonderfully. Not everybody has issues consuming iron from the foods cooked in cast iron. Really, cast iron is phenomenal for doing up steaks … I just cant be arsed to care for them properly when I really cant eat foods cooked in them … hence the la creuset goodies =)
My problem with my cast iron pan is that in between uses, the surface gets so tacky from the oil. I feel like cooking on it would disperse the sticky residue in my food.
I’m not a big fan of modern cast iron, which basically consists solely of Lodge items.
Griswold and Wagner antique pans were better made, slightly lighter, and much, much slicker. When it comes to skillets, I’d rather hop on ebay and pick up one of these two brands. Lodge is good for a dutch oven, but I’m just not that crazy about the rough texture of their products.
My go-to cast-iron skillet is a 10-1/4" one by SK. I don’t know anything about that company, other that my skillet says ‘SK’, ‘8’, ‘D1’ and ‘Made in USA’ on it. (Most of my other cast-iron is Lodge, there’s a small Griswold skillet, I think my waffle iron is Griswold, and there are a couple of Chinese pieces.) I bought it sometime in the '80s from an Army-Navy store.
I’ve just washed the SK skillet after having used it for fried chicken. I picked up a little fajita pan for $2 at a yard sale a few years ago. All it says is ‘MADE IN CHINA’ on the bottom. That one was well-used when I bought it, and still had bits of scrambled eggs encrusted in the handle’s eye. It’s my grilled-cheese sandwich pan. After making a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches last week, I fried some SPAM in it. No stickage in cooking. I heated the pans up, rinsed them under hot water, and gave them a once-over with the brush. I dried them with paper towels, and they were nice and slick. Heating them up again, I wiped them with Crisco.
The best thing about cast-iron cookware is that the more you use it, the more non-stick it gets!
I’ll just step in to say that there is no better cornbread than the stuff I bake in a cast iron skillet or cast iron cornstick pan. The crust comes out just perfect.
My granny used to clean hers with a handful of cornmeal. She’d do a dry scrub with the it and save the now seasoned cornmeal for the next batch of cornbread. A swipe of grease in the skillet with a square of brown paper bag and it was ready to put away.
I clean mine pretty much the same as Johnny L.A. does. I usually take them on a camping trip periodically and let any baked on crud on the outside get burnt off in the campfire. No problems.
Still, I don’t have any cast iron pans anymore since I’ve got a ceramic cooktop stove. Which sucks, as burgers and steaks are peerless when cooked in a well-seasoned cast iron pan.
I’ll use the kosher salt after frying up a steak. Sometimes I’ll use cornmeal too, but the stores I go to up here tend to carry small bags of cornmeal that are ‘gourmet’-type. I haven’t found large containers of cornmeal up here, as I did in L.A., probably because there are not a great number of people who grew up with cornbread. So I’d rather save my cornmeal for cooking rather than cleaning.
Incidentally, I did some searching and found out that ‘SK’ is a marking that was used on Lodge cookware. I found a page with pics of a #10 skillet, and the markings are like mine (except for the numeral). That one was from the '70s/'80s, which puts it in the same timeframe as when I bought mine (new). My new(er) Lodge stuff says ‘Lodge’ on it.
Someday I’d like to renovate my kitchen. (Better yet, I’d like to turn my kitchen into a library and build a new kitchen.) Too bad I’m not rolling in dough. There’s a gas main about 100 meters from the house, but the gas company won’t run a line up this street. So I’m stuck with electricity. I like the looks of the modern stoves, but I also like cooking with cast iron. So I was thinking that I might get a modern stove, and also install a gas cooktop. I can either use a small propane tank to power it, or else run a line from my 124-gallon propane tank into the (new, as yet non-existent) kitchen. (I have a propane heater in the house.) That way I can use my stainless steel on the ceramic cooktop, and my cast iron over the flame.
I have 2 solid cast iron skillets, both quite old. One was my mother’s and it’s got to be at least 65 years old, maybe more. The other was left behind by a previous tenent in an apartment we rented about 45 years ago. I use both for bacon & eggs mostly. I rarely do more than wipe them out with a paper towel.
We have about 6 or 7 cast iron skillets ranging from 6 to 15 inches. A few we bought ourselves, but most came from my parents or Rhiannon8404’s grandmother, so they are probably between 50 and 75 years old. We clean them with kosher salt and a little oil after every use, and never have to do any other maintenance.
The other beauty of cast iron is that it’s darn near impossible to ruin. We did have one pan a while back that got set aside with something in it and somehow forgotten for some time. When I went to clean it, the entire bottom of the pan was rusted. But some steel wool, a bit of oven cleaner, and a bit of reseasoning has it back to new. Unfortunately, that means its going to take a while to rebuild the lovely layer of non-sticky goodness that previously coated it…but given that we no longer own any non-cast-iron skillets, that shouldn’t take too long
