Cast Irony

Saucyman, I'm the proud owner of a beautiful All-Clad fry pan, I find myself using my tried-and-true cast-iron skillet for just about everything. Am I a bad person? --Iron Man

It is quite possible you are a bad person but it has nothing to do with cookware, so don’t get down on yourself (about that). Saucykitchens uses many different kinds of pans: There is a strange heavy pan I inherited from my granny that makes the best popcorn but does little else well; steel pans specifically for crepes; there is an aluminum sauté pan; ceramic coated pan for soups and slow cooked items; stainless All-Clad for sauces but the two pans I use the most are my pressure cooker and my cast iron skillet.

The cast iron pan gets used all the time for 3 reasons. First is my diet, I like bread toasted in olive oil, I enjoy grilled cheese and frequently make bean burritos - I have been on this omelet kick lately, so good, so often – each of my regular meals cook well in cast iron. Second, because the pan is heavy, a small pan weighs more than my lapdog/laptop (they are both light enough to carry and one is ambulatory), but the pan isn't and stays on the stove all the time making it accessible/convenient to use. Finally, because of how it is made and maintained, it cleans up really easy.

Cast iron is mostly iron (Fe) - iron is a very soft metal, to make cast iron, it is hardened with about 8% carbon. The two elements are heated and mixed together then poured/cast into a mold. (As opposed to wrought iron, which is shaped by hand or worked out by hammering and bending.) The pans are then removed from their molds and even though the mold lines are sanded down if you look closely at your pan you can find them.

Iron is soft but heavy: Iron itself is denser than aluminum and structurally speaking, it takes a lot of it to maintain the integrity of the pan. So much metal means the pan can absorb lots of heat. Copper and aluminum dissipate heat rather than absorb it – these fancy pans heat up and cool down quickly, you have to constantly adjust the heat, while iron pans are a bit like a black hole - they just keep absorbing energy. This isn’t so good if you are trying to boil water quickly, but really good if you are cooking and want to maintain a constant temperature.

Even if you can live with the weight of the pan, not all is well with cast iron. Iron, like aluminum, is a reactive cooking medium, which means the metal from the pan interacts with the world around it, particularly food: Iron will leach into food, this is the same dietary iron that comes from red meat and spinach, so it isn't harmful, but you can taste it.

The bigger issue with reactive cookware is it does things like turn butter and cream a very unappealing gunmetal gray and for acidic foods like tomatoes, what is normally a slight metallic taste becomes very pronounced. To mitigate cast iron’s downside and still take advantage of the slow even cooking, manufacturers like Le Creuset coat their pans with an enamel shell.

The other benefit of an outer shell is that it doesn’t need to be seasoned. Seasoning, a misunderstood concept that strikes fear into hearts of novices, is a very simple process of applying a layer of oil over the surface of the pan so that iron, will not react with the oxygen and moisture and rust. The oil polymerizes, yes a word, a word that describes how metal, oil and heat react to form a hardened layer over the pan. This can be done by heating oil, any oil– olive, canola, Crisco, peanut, soy, corn – in the pan over moderate heat. In addition to protecting the iron from rust, seasoning turns cast iron into a virtual non-stick surface, making the pan easy to clean.

Cleaning cast iron pans also strikes fear into the hearts of the uninitiated, but short of going at the pan with an abrasive cleaner and a scouring pad you aren’t going to remove the pan’s seasoning. Contact with soap will not harm the protective coating on the pan, but some of the harsher cleaning agents used in the dishwasher can harm the pan’s finish. But you shouldn’t have to even think about putting the pan in a dishwasher, the joy of nearly non-stick surface covered by a hardened polymer is you don’t need to scrub; it cleans easily. I rub coarse salt into the pan with a paper towel to ‘wash-up’.

Different pans do different things; cast iron does high heat and even temperatures very well. When you are cooking your version of the omelet, the grilled cheese or the burrito, the meals you eat most often, it is good to have a pan that is predictable and easy to clean up each time you use it.