Your old Teflon skillets are starting to show their age. You had been ignoring the peeling at the bottom of the pan until a friend mentioned some of the dangers of Teflon because of its potentially toxic qualities. A new set of three replacement pans would cost less than $20 at the nearby discount store, but you remember hearing that there are many advantages to buying iron cookware.
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Grandma used cast iron cookware and her food certainly tasted delicious. Yes, she was a fine cook, but there was something about that cast skillet that added to the flavor. Indeed, iron skillets have remained popular for generations for many good reasons. (See How Heirloom Cooking Saves Money.)
Here are some reasons you should seriously consider adding iron skillets and pots to your kitchen.
Since the skillet or pot is entirely made of iron, no plastic handle, it can be used on the stove top or in the oven. This implies cost-effectiveness because it can be used in multiple ways, which means more savings for you and fewer pots to store.
Because it is an ideal heat conductor, it takes a bit longer to heat up, but then continues to cook and remain hot long after the stove burner has been turned off. So you want to remove food from the iron pot or pan when it is done being cooked.
When you go to a restaurant and the food comes to your table still sizzling, and the waiter tells you not to touch it because it is still hot, it may be sitting atop a small iron skillet.
Before its first use, make sure you have seasoned the iron cookware, unless it was purchased pre-seasoned. Instructions with the skillet will provide simple steps for the one-time seasoning of your pan. Or look online for directions. Beyond that procedure, just rinse it off after each use.
Iron cookware is earth-friendly. It is made from nature&#;s resources and not from manufactured synthetics like most other cookware. Using iron cookware is just plain smart.
Everyone needs iron in their diets, particularly females of certain ages. Foods prepared in iron cookware inherently have more iron by nature of how they were cooked. Additionally, iron cookware lends itself to fat-free cooking. Because skillets are seasoned, they are non-stick. No fats or oils are required for the cooking process.
Iron cookware is a bit heavier than cookware made from other materials. That&#;s really a good quality, unless you have weakness or some other health problem in your wrist or hand.
Iron cookware seemingly lasts forever. There is little damage you can do to iron cookware. That may be the reason you seldom see it on a website of free stuff or in garage sales or resale stores.
If you own iron cookware, you are not likely to need to replace it. Plan on it outlasting you! Expect big savings for the long term.
Online prices are generally lower than those in the store, especially if you qualify for free shipping as many online retailers offer. Pre-seasoned iron pots and skillets typically cost a bit more, and since the one-time seasoning process is so easy to do at home with vegetable oil and a few minutes of your time, it is probably cheaper to avoid purchasing the pre-seasoned cookware.
Like your current pots and pans, iron cookware comes in a variety of sizes and styles, so before you click &#;add to cart,&#; figure out what you really need. Because of the possible option for free shipping, it may be best to buy all you need at the same time. You can compare prices on cast iron cookware here.
Having just adopted a French bulldog named Dumpling, I'm quickly finding out that taking care of a puppy is very similar to taking care of a good cast iron pan, and in some ways, almost as satisfying. They both require a little work, a little patience, and a whole lot of loyalty. The main difference is that in return for my investment, my cast iron pan gives me golden-brown fried chicken, sizzling bacon, corn bread, apple pies, charred hash, perfectly seared steaks, bubbly pizzas, and, yes, crisp dumplings. Dumpling the puppy, on the other hand, gives me mostly licks, chews, and a whole lot of poop. You do the math.
As far as retaining heat goes, nothing beats a good, thick cast iron pan. Its density means that it takes a long time to heat up&#;I give mine a good 5 to 7 minutes on the fire&#;and doesn't cool down very much when you add food to it. So while a thin aluminum pan may drop by as much as 300°F when you add a half-pound rib eye steak to it, a cast iron pan will stick close to its original temperature, delivering a thicker, crisper, more evenly browned crust. Similarly, you can get away with using a little less oil when frying your chicken, since the heat retained by the metal will rapidly reheat the oil as soon as the chicken cools it down.
The fact that its oven-safe means that you can braise and bake in it just as well as you can fry or sear. Cornbread comes out with a beautiful golden-brown crust, and pies come out wonderfully crisp on the bottom, even with moist fillings. It's heat retention abilities means that even when your oven's temperature fluctuates up and down (as most thermostat-driven ovens do), your pan's heat will stay fairly constant.
And talk about durability! Cast iron cookware is one of the few items in your kitchen that actually gets better the older it is. The very best pans have been passed down sometimes over multiple generations, their well-used surfaces worn as smooth and nonstick as a Teflon-coated pan, without the toxic chemicals. Cast from a mold in a single piece of metal, there are no welded joints or even rivets to wear out.
For more information, please visit Pre Seasoned Cast Iron Grill Pan.
There are, of course, a few downsides:
All that said, there's really not much to it when it comes to seasoning, maintaining, and storing your cast iron cookware. Here's a quick guide:
When you first get your cast iron pan, it will have either a bullet-gray dull finish (for an unseasoned pan), or a black, slick-looking surface (for a preseasoned pan). Unless you are buying a 75-year-old pan from a garage sale, your pan will also have a pebbly-looking surface like this one:
Modern cast iron is bumpy like this because it's been cast in a sand-based mold as opposed to the solid molds old cast iron were cast in. Some people claim and that it's not possible to season these bumpy pans properly. I don't buy it. I have compared my shiny, totally smooth s Griswold (acquired at a flea market) to my 10-year-old Lodge skillet (which I bought new and seasoned myself). The old stuff is certainly more non-stick, but the new Lodge pan is pretty darn close, and good enough for most needs.
So the key is all in seasoning it properly. How does it work?
Well, if you look at a cast iron pan under a microscope, you'll see all kinds of tiny little pores, cracks, and irregularities in the surface.* When food cooks, it can seep into these cracks, causing it to stick. Not only that, but proteins can actually form chemical bonds with the metal as it comes into contact with it. Ever have a piece of fish tear in half as you cook it because it seems like it's actually bonded with the pan? That's because it has.
To prevent both of these things from happening, you need to fill in the little pores, as well as creating a protective layer above the bottom of the pan to prevent protein from coming into contact with it. Enter fat.
When fat is heated in the presence of metal and oxygen, it polymerizes. Or, to put it more simply, it forms a solid, plasticlike substance that coats the pan. The more times oil is reheated in a pan, the thicker this coating gets, and the better the nonstick properties of the pan.
Here's how to build up the initial layer of seasoning in your pan:
Until you've got a good layer of seasoning built up, avoid excessive use of soap or cooking acidic sauces, as both can make the process take longer.
People are irrationally afraid of caring for cast iron. The truth is, once you've got a good layer of seasoning, cast iron is pretty tough. You can't scratch it out with metal utensils. You can't destroy it by using soaps (modern dish soaps are very gentle on everything except for grease). To maintain and build on it, all it takes is to remember a few key points:
There are basically only two really bad things that can happen to your cast iron cookware&#;scaling and rust&#;and neither of them is that bad.
The photo on the left shows a cast iron pan that has undergone scaling. This happens when you heat the pan too often without adding extra oil to it. Rather than coming off in microscopic bits like normal seasoning will, the layer of polymers sloughs off in large flakes. To reach this state, I stored my pan in the oven for a month's worth of heating cycles without reoiling the surface in between heating. It's easy to avoid this problem by regularly oiling the pan after each use and not overheating it (don't leave it in the oven during the cleaning cycle, for instance), but once it happens, there's no turning back&#;you'll have to reseason it from the start.
The photo on the right is a spot of rust that appeared on a cast iron pan that was not seasoned well enough and was left to air-dry. Water came in contact with the iron, causing it to rust. Unless the entire pan has rusted (in which case, you'll have to reseason the whole thing), this one is not much to worry about. Rinse it out with water, dry it, heat it up, and rub it down with oil. After a few uses, the rusted spot should be perfectly well seasoned again.
If you're lucky enough to come across a reasonably priced cast iron pan from the early 20th century at a yard sale or flea market (say, under $50 or so), scoop it up immediately. You can occasionally also find good deals on eBay and sites like it.
I personally find it ridiculous to pay the $150-plus that some sellers are asking for old cast iron when a new cast iron pan, like the cast iron skillet from Lodge costs a mere $16.00 and will give you an equally lustrous nonstick surface with just a bit of time and care. Check out our cast iron skillet review to read more about our favorite cast iron pans; there are so many these days, they even make dual-handled cast iron skillets.
*These are not to be confused with the bumps and dimples you can see on the surface with your naked eye, which have no effect on its nonstick properties.
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