Tag: skillet

June 11, 2024 – Cooking With Cast Iron

June 11, 2024 /

Amongst cooks, I would say that cast iron is a standard. Everything product seems like to compares with it. We have a number of pans and skillets but I always gravitate to cast iron first. A lot of it is because I don’t really clean it but just wipe it out. I have always liked cast iron because I have only had electric cooking elements. I won’t make you read all the way through it to know the secret. It is the mass. Yes, it makes it harder to heat and make incremental decreases in temperature. But when you want a hot searing cook, you cant beat cast iron.

Cast iron has been with us for literally thousands of years. The first cookware dates back to England in the early 1700s. I suppose in our culture, I think of cast iron as Americana. It was inexpensive, but more importantly durable.

There has been a lot of todo about old cast iron versus new cast iron. Old cast iron would be cookware made before 1950. From what I have heard, it is primarily about the surface milling. Old surface milling was done by hand and yielded a visibly smoother looking surface. Whereas today’s cookware is mechanized and can have a ‘grainy’ looking surface.

The second thing you hear after cast iron is the word ‘seasoning’. This is the process of putting a coating on the metal. This coating helps prevent sticking on a hot surface. I have observed a lot of seasoning over the years and I think a lot of it is overblown. It is true that you don’t want metal on food contact. But the coating is and can be only so thick. Most of the ‘seasoning’ is the remainder of food stuck on the surface.

When cooking things such as bacon, it should be fatty enough to not stick to any surface. When the bacon in done, there is always a lot of residue which look like black bits. This is the sugar that is used in the cure. Sausage does the same thing. It is almost impossible not to have the sugar stick to the surface no matter how ‘seasoned’ it is. This happens to all cookware, not just cast iron.

Scrape off what you can with the spatula and the rest contributes to ‘seasoning’. After cooking the bacon, you are in the magic zone. Most people mistakenly think that it is the bacon fat that keeps the eggs from sticking. You need any kind of oil be it oil, lard, butter or whatever. But, the skillet has finally gotten to the proper temperature to cook an egg without sticking. You can literally pour all of the fat out of the pan and it still wont stick.

Common lore says don’t cook high acid foods in cast iron. The reason being is that acid will dissolve iron causing a potential metallic taste. In my opinion, I don’t really consider tomato sauce high acid. It probably doesn’t benefit the pan or the sauce too much from a non-stick point of view, but I have done it a lot of times with no ill effect. Wash the sauce off the pan at the faucet and go on with life.

Certain scrubbing pads, like chain mail are favored for cleaning cast iron. I don’t have one and I don’t really worry about it. I just scrape whatever is stuck with the spatula or wipe it out with a paper towel. I store the pan in the oven so I don’t have to fuss about it being greasy.

End Your Programming Routine: I talked a lot about traditional cast iron. The skillet in the picture is not the only piece I have. Enameled pieces like Le Creuset are fabulous as well. This is truly lifetime cookware unlike Teflon coated aluminum or every junky fad that has come along. Take care of it and it will take care of you,

May 24, 2023 – Been Making Skillets

May 24, 2023 /

Sometimes you get surprised by things. I was pretty blasé about another cookbook as our April book club choice. That being said, cooking in skillets fits my life. It is easy clean-up and simple construction of recipes and techniques. In the last six weeks I have made four or five recipes and it is growing on me.

Shown above is a Cuban pork chop. By the way, I think that my picture looks much better than the one in the book. We like to vary what we make and eat from day to day. Sometimes I just take something out of the freezer just to have something defrosted without knowing exactly what I am going to do with it. This happened to be the result.

Within Milk Street: The World in a Skillet, there are several pork chop recipes. The other one was a Chinese version. I chose this one because all I needed was cilantro, we had all the rest of the ingredients and time is always a factor on weeknights. I really do want to try the other recipe some day. That one also had cilantro but some additional peppers, including Sichuan which I don’t have or know if the they are in our local store. I might be inclined to skip or even substitute but I on that night, I just wanted dinner going.

The other reason this book fits our lives is that we eat the world. Friday night we had Mexican, Saturday we ate from food trucks (I had Bahn mi) that inspired me to make pho on Sunday. Earlier in the week we had round steak with gravy over mashed potatoes. I would say on any given week we have Latin, Asian and American but I also love Indian and just good food.

As I have said with other cookbooks that some of them just don’t fit me. If they are seasonally oriented and we don’t have alignment in the season or the fair doesn’t excite me, like salads the book will slip to the bottom of the pile. This one seems to speak to me based on the composition and techniques.

I also like that there is an index by main ingredient. So, I can look at pork and see the fifteen different recipes that are listed. I often use this technique on the internet as well. I search “recipes for round steak”. And sometimes I also use “quick” or “easy” as well. I works fine, but there is satisfaction on using a resource that you paid money for like a cookbook.

I also find that many recipes are very similar on the internet. They might be named differently or the picture looks different but they are often duplicates of the same things. I guess that is why they are in the common domain. I find that often cookbooks go deeper into the subject matter and are more unique. That is what you are paying for.

This is not to mention that I have a hard time trusting internet recipes unless they are pretty basic, particularly the timing. I find Food Network recipes to be particularly poor at this and very often it is 3x to 4x the overall time. I am not sure that all of these celebrity chefs are really in touch with reality on such things and I think that they are more concerned about content generation than content accuracy.

The other thing that drives me crazy is all the crap you have to wade through to get to the recipe. So many of the blogs talk about how to select the cut of meat or the history of ingredients and I have to search around for the oven temperature or the list of ingredients. It makes it difficult to decide to execute the recipe without going through the entire article to find if you want to do it.

End Your Programming Routine: My wife gets on me for her perception of me complicating dinner. I think that if I do the planning, cooking and finish in a reasonable time why does it matter? Continuing to work on the craft with challenges and new ideas makes me better altogether. The overall time was listed at 40 minutes and I don’t think that it was much over that. Plus, it got good reviews from the eaters. I think it was a win on multiple fronts.

April 18, 2023 – Milk Street: The World In a Skillet

April 18, 2023 /

The World In a Skillet by Christopher Kimball is the April 2023 is the Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection for April. We find ourselves back from fiction last month to a cookbook. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I find a it difficult to evaluate a book without using it. That certainly is the case here. That being said, there are some unique elements to this particular cookbook.

You may be familiar with Christopher Kimball as he was a host of America’s Test Kitchen for many years. I did notice that he was gone from the show about eight years ago. In fact, his fixture was so long and his transition abrupt that I thought that maybe there was a health problem or something. This is actually the first time I had seen anything publicly and learning that he changed directions.

My supposition about his whereabouts were not without merit. I ran across some allegations and apparently there was a lawsuit between America’s Test Kitchen and Kimball accusing theft of intellectual property and damages in his new endeavor Milk Street. If you ever watched any of his previous work then you will know it was highly technical. Fortunately, it appears this new direction is simpler and more approachable.

It is interesting to see different approaches, dare I say novel approaches to cookbook and I would say this is one of them. Let’s talk about the title first. Kimball’s premise is that there are a lot of specific apparatus involved in ethnic cooking. Or said another way, each culture uses a proprietary piece of cookware and he surmises that this could all be substituted with a skillet.

That was the approach, but it wasn’t the only innovation. The cookbook is organized by time to cook. So, the user can go to the section and look at the 20 recipes that require less than 45 minutes to make. I think that this is a brilliant because skillet meals are often one dish meals. One dish meals are often those made in time constrained periods (weeknights, after work).

I do have a varied palate and I like the idea of Asian one night, Mexican another, soul food on another and comfort food on Friday. I think that it is pretty interesting that the recipes go from Vietnamese, to Italian to African to Chinese on page by page basis. So, it does seem to me that this approach fits my cooking instincts and preferences.

But wait… there’s more. It is not just single dish recipes but also sides and deserts and all things skillet. Now, maybe that is a step too far from what we need in a cookbook. But, if it is anything it is all in on skillets. So, I will give props for wringing the most out of the one-trick pony.

Out of 300 or so pages, nearly half of them are pictures. It does make you stimulated to page through the book. So, barring the fact that I haven’t cooked anything yet, it is a beautiful book. However in my kitchen, books are starting to clog up spaces so I am moving to the point that they need to earn their place. I do plan on trying a few things in the next month to see if it is worthy.

End Your Programming Routine: The book club is emerging out of our Covid hangover. Starting in 2020, we cut our interactions from about 10 a year to 4 (including March that was already scheduled) with outside summer gatherings. We have more books and meetings in the pipeline again as the composition of the group has changed to the new reality. I love reading and cooking but I warm up to people over time. I also love that being part of this group is a leap of faith for the interests of others. More books to come.