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New cast iron skrillex?
Drez
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I need a new skillet - for the proper assemblage of a steak dinner (and other skillet things). I'm tired of pan frying steak like a n00b.
I'm not sure what to look for. I'm down for getting something decent, but not over, like, 70 bucks.
Couple of questions:
1) A cast-iron skillet is what I want, right?
2) What is pre-seasoned? Is that the same thing as non-stick? I've been told I should avoid non-stick. I never heard the term pre-seasoned before last year.
3) How is something like this? http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00L4771OG?dd=JkfWgrARekPFt7r1U7sQHw,,&keywords=cast iron skillet&qid=1452872244&ref_=sr_1_2&refinements=p_96:10155283011&s=kitchen&sr=1-2
I'm not sure what to look for. I'm down for getting something decent, but not over, like, 70 bucks.
Couple of questions:
1) A cast-iron skillet is what I want, right?
2) What is pre-seasoned? Is that the same thing as non-stick? I've been told I should avoid non-stick. I never heard the term pre-seasoned before last year.
3) How is something like this? http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00L4771OG?dd=JkfWgrARekPFt7r1U7sQHw,,&keywords=cast iron skillet&qid=1452872244&ref_=sr_1_2&refinements=p_96:10155283011&s=kitchen&sr=1-2
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2) Pretty much anything you buy new will be pre-seasoned. Cast iron "seasoning" is a coating that develops on the pan from oil and high heat, and a seasoned pan will stick less. The internet would LOVE to tell you how to best accomplish and maintain seasoning, and you'll find there is some mildly contradictory advice out there. My main advice is don't combine all the contradictions and thereby convince yourself that cast iron is delicate and difficult; it is not.
3) That looks fine! Any cast iron will be fine, even cheap stuff or yard sale finds. I myself like that Lodge brand cast iron is made in the USA, but it's hard to get cast iron wrong.
Although, if you're willing to spend up to 70, look up de Buyer carbon steel pans. All the advantages of cast iron, but lighter and more responsive to heat.
It all depends on what type of cooking you plan on doing. Cast iron is more multi-purpose (shepherd's pie is a snap!). Carbon steel is lighter and easier to use and maintain/season.
Whichever one you get, resist the temptation to wash your pan. For the first year or two, use oil/butter as you normally would. When washing, just use a vegetable brush or a brillo pad and plain water to rinse the pan. The oil/butter builds up the seasoning and patina, and the plain rinse will help maintain. After a few years of this, you can start laying on dishsoap to lightly wash the pan and the seasoning won't be affected.
Oh, and never soak your pan. It can and will rust.
Note that it's likely that you'll still want to whip out a small nonstick for eggs, and perhaps fish if you cook it, especially in the beginning.
Then I'll pick up an onion, steak, and preciousss taters to cook.
use whatever oil/fat you want to cook in. Don't worry so much about all the don'ts with cast iron that people throw around, ruining a pan takes some serious effort and is easily fixed.
use your pan to cook things, wash it with soap and scrub it after just don't soak it in water for a long time, and occasionally heat it up pour a tablespoon or so of oil in and rub it around until it smokes then cool the pan on the stovetop.
The biggest difference between old (pre-1950s) cast iron skillets compared to modern reproductions is that the old stuff was hand polished to a near perfectly flat surface. Due to the inherent expense of hand polishing, modern cast iron skillets are never polished, so you have these tiny bumps on the cooking surface, due to the casting process, which makes cooking (slightly) uneven and (slightly) less non-stick.
Finex was the first modern company to take the time to actually polish the cooking surface, via a CNC machine, making it the first one modern iron skillet with similar cooking properties as the old iron skillets.
As for seasoning the iron, use grapeseed oil, a near flavorless, high temperature oil, which is exactly what you want for seasoning.
If this is your 1st rodeo cooking steaks on cast iron, then I'd say there's about a 98% chance you will set off every smoke alarm in your place.
If you live in an apartment, point a box fan at your smoke detector, and note that your hood probably doesn't actually do shit (ours doesn't actually vent to the outside, for instance), but if your apartment is tiny enough, your bathroom vent can help (it has to vent outside).
I actually suggest cooking bacon in it for the first thing, not because the grease helps the pan, but because its really easy to get a feel for frying something and feeling out the heat of the pan's surface without ruining something more expensive.
Well, I don't have any windows, but luckily we disabled the smoke alarm like 6 months ago so there's no worry of those going off!
Sounds like a plan.
At my apartment we have a total of three, all of which are for some reason within 10 feet of each other at the back end of the apartment (one just inside each bedroom, one in the hallway in between), but if there is so much as a puff of smoke from cooking in the kitchen at the opposite end of our place they all go off instantly. Hood vent on the stove is worthless and there's no other ventilation to open aside from the patio door a good 25 feet away. I would seriously consider disabling the detectors except that to do it I'd have to physically remove them all from their sockets in the ceiling - a missing or dead battery just causes them to chirp incessantly - and then I'm afraid if maintenance ever came in and noticed it the complex management would crawl up our asses.
Ours have been disabled for that exact reason. I know it's not smart. Or compliant. Or whatever. But...well, yeah I should probably sort that out too at some point.
1) It might be worth scanning flea markets, yard sales or even old junk piles for a skillet. They're damn near indestructible and all you have to do to clean one up is scour off the rust, wash it and season it. Seasoning from nothing isn't that hard, you just rub shortening all over it in a very thin layer and then pop it on a grill or in a very hot oven (there will be smoke) for an hour or so.
2) Cast iron is usually cast in a sand mold. This gives it a rough texture. In the past manufacturers would sandblast the cooking surface of pans in order to smooth it out. I'm told this helps with the non-stick properties of the pan. Modern manufacturers often skip this because it adds to the cost of manufacturing. If you can get one with a smooth bottom rather than still rough from the mold you may have less trouble with sticking. Anecdotally, I have a skillet I inherited from my grandmother which has a smooth bottom and one which a bought a few years ago which has a rough bottom and I think the smooth one sticks less.
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let it cool, viola, the start of a seasoned pan.
Also another vote for Lodge. Cockroaches and Lodge cast iron skillets are all that'll survive the nuclear holocaust.
It's tough to stop an alarm from sounding if it has a clear air path to a kitchen where you're cooking a steak on cast iron, so the STFU button is a big improvement.
I mean, I get it a first time cooker might do it a few times, and its a valid warning for someone getting into it.. but dang.
One is maybe 10 feet away from the oven (walking distance, not from oven to ceiling), and the broiler is effectively unusable unless you want them going off. You can't even see any visible smoke but it will set off every single fucking alarm in the house (they are all wired together). I'm not sure if they even have a STFU button (just the test button, unless it is dual purpose but they are going to be replaced soon since they have an expiration date), but you need a ladder to actually reach the thing.
A lot of hoods don't vent outside. You see this in apartments because routing conduit outside is difficult and expensive if you don't plan on it.
My last apartment was like this, unless I closed the bedroom door. Then they added a smoke detector right outside the kitchen so it became a "Someone is using the oven, or cooking something in oil" detector. Thankfully that one had a snooze button.
My new apartment I'm terrified of cooking, there is a detector in the kitchen / dining area and it went off just from turning on the central heat when I moved in (burning the dust off).
I take mine down when I cook like that. Mine will go off because of heat from the oven too.
Yep, first thing I'm doing in the spring is changing out the venting and potentially the hood as we want a better range. Fortunately, it's on an outside wall, so it should be pretty straightforward.
a lot of them will also vent into the attic, but most just blow like right out into the kitchen
Yeah, that would end up in a shower if it went directly up, so I'm just going to horizontal vent out of the house.
But it's kind of like pooping in a toilet and never actually replacing the water as far as the smoke detector is concerned in regards to the air quality.
Put a shower cap on it. I've heard that helps tuning down with oversensitive firealarms while still leaving it operational when there is a lot of smoke, as in an actual fire.
What are you talking about? My hood vent does exactly what it's supposed to.
The smoke from cooking gets sucked up and blown directly into my face.
That's what they're designed for right?