Now You're Cookin!

Cooking with cast iron has, unfortunately, become a lost art with the exception of campfire cooking. I'm sure there are still a select few people who will not let go of their cast iron, but for the most part it has been replaced with Teflon and other fancy new cookware.

Many years ago I had a nice well "seasoned" cast iron skillet. There was nothing special about it. I was in college and poor...so rather than picking up the extremely cheap cook set made of tin with a dusting of Teflon I opted for a less expensive cast iron skillet. It served me well for many years until I came back home from a long weekend and found it soaking in water...rust already starting to develop. I threw the skillet away and gave my roommate at the time a stern "talkin to."

Since then I haven't owned a cast iron skillet...that changed today when i was out picking up stuff for my camping trip. Again it's a very simple "as cheap as they come" cast iron skillet. But this one was "pre-seasoned." Generally cast iron requires some initial work to make it non-stick. Usually this involves heating up some oil or lard in the skillet or cooking some fatty food. I decided to test the "pre-seasoning" on the pan. Last skillet I had worked extremely well...you could cook an egg "dry" without it sticking, of couse not on the first day that I got it...but after a month or two it was as good if not better than Teflon! I also have a Dutch Oven which I bake massive loaves of bread in, but this has never seen a campfire. And while I would LOVE to get some Dutch Oven camp fire cooking going on, it's just not going to happen this trip...because you really have to cook for at least 4 HUNGRY people in a Dutch Oven!So since an egg is a good baseline I heated up the skillet and threw and egg in there...which stuck horribly! After about 10 minutes scrubbing cursing the "pre-seasoning" I finally got all the egg out of the pan. Then got to work on REALLY seasoning the pan. I started by cooking some bacon...then some spicey sausage. Don't worry...I saved most of the sausage in the freezer. I don't need that much fat in one evening!

The thing about seasoning, as the name implies, is that the skillet will retain some of the flavor from everything that it has cooked...and it will impart that flavor onto everything that hits the skillet. Some people don't like this...but I think it's just part of the fun of cooking with cast iron. Eventually you have a skillet that nothing will stick too that has it's own flavor, which you have developed! I really can't think of anything that I could cook in the skillet that I wouldn't want to taste like bacon and spicey sausage...can you?

There are a couple of bad things about cast iron. First if you're used to today's "high tech" cookware you'll probably burn yourself when you forget that the handle is actually hot...second you have to store it extremely dry which means that after you wash it (rinse really...or use little soap) that you have to put it back on the burner to completely dry it, storing it in a paper bag or two is best...plastic, which traps humidity, is bad. And finally if you don't follow the second step you can ruin your skillet...which would destroy all the hard work you put into seasoning your skillet.

So ya, it's not a cycling related post...but if you go camping you'll thank me :)

J