A daddy blog.

08 December 2005

Pans!

Cast iron steaky makin' advice from the Times

As most experienced cooks know, you can't brown food unless you preheat your skillet.
Sure you can. You just gotta flip the steak more than once.
So cast iron is a logical choice, especially in skillets, unless you require gorgeous stainless to make a style point or you can afford copper -- which is ideal for sautéing because its heat distribution is incomparable -- and the time to care for it.
We should all be using cast iron, or copper, or we are shallow people.

Or, perhaps people don't want to "season" our cast iron pans to make them non-stick, as the article tells us to. (Actually an interesting process, and one which allows the author to use the totally awesome compound word "pig-iron" again and again. If a car made entirely out pig-iron were on the market, what man could say no? That said, this "seasoning" is still a process, and I don't want to add a process to my cooking ritual. Plug and play, man.)

Cast iron really struts its stuff when you want to get a pan good and hot and keep it that way.
Look, I may be half-retarded in the kitchen, but this is not a feat I've had difficulty performing over my stove. Anyone else?
For "grilling" a steak indoors, it can't be beat. Ridged cast-iron "grill pans" are good for two reasons: They raise the meat slightly above the surface, which promotes browning by preventing escaping liquids from contacting the meat, and they leave grill marks, which are attractive if nothing else.
I thought this was down home cookin' for jes folks who could see right through the pretension of grill marks.

I am now convinced I am using the cast iron pan I already own correctly. It hangs from a nail on the wall. It's there to look nice and to suggest I'm the type of person who might use it. I don't. I use the cheapest crap available on the market, namely my '99 Teflon K-Mart pan with a plastic handle that melts around a hundred degrees.