Cast Iron Cooks Everything

The title was obviously an intentional misnomer. I’d call it click bait if I cared about clicks, but I don’t. We cook everything in our cast iron. We exclusively use cast iron to cook everything on the stove top. We do have one stainless steel pot that we use on occasion to make pasta and hard boiled eggs but we’ll ditch that for a large dutch oven if we find it’s too small for the job. We would likely survive without the stainless steel pot. Why? Because you can do anything in cast iron. You can boil water in cast iron, you can cook tomato based sauces in cast iron, you can cook eggs and bacon in your cast iron, you can cook anything in cast iron. Creating a non-stick egg experience starts with cooking bacon, of course…

My brother Matt was here recently (as seen in blog posts such as Escape room with the fam) and his family has gifted us the majority of the cast iron we use. Actually, all of the cast iron we have was gifted to us. Our first piece was gifted to us by our friends Minka and Steve as a wedding gift. Cast Iron is an amazing gift. I don’t think it’s possible to go wrong with gifting a piece of cast iron as a wedding gift. I can’t tell you how many pots and pans we’ve gone through in the last 6 years of our marriage but I can tell you that the pieces of cast iron we have will never fail to serve their purpose.

Back to Matt. Matthew mentioned a few times in passing that it’s pretty obvious nothing will stick to our cast iron cooking devices. This reminded me of how awesome cast iron is. We beat the shit out of em and the more we use and abuse our cast iron, the better they serve us. Tonight, we browned up some meat and threw red sauce over it for a real nice bolognese sauce which we toped with large shrimp. Some may not agree with putting tomato sauce in the cast iron pan and some may not agree with putting shrimp on top of red sauce with meat already in it. I clearly don’t agree with any of those people. ^_^

My Only Cast Iron tip: Don’t let it rust.

As a person who’s used cast iron every day (at least) the last 6 years, the only tip I have for using cast iron is to not let it rust. I would say, “use it all the time” but that’s probably not realistic for everyone. Most of the world keeps metal from rusting by keeping it coated in some kind of oil or grease to keep the oxygen and moisture from oxidizing the surface. My brother Chris mentioned to me that they cook the oil right to the edge of burning after cleaning the pan and that’s definitely a hot idea that surely won’t fail. Ours seem to be perpetually covered in something since our cast iron rarely leaves the stove top.

As an aside, since we have a few pieces lodge cast iron I would like to point out that products from lodge have an annoyingly rough surface to start with. If you want a great surface to season and start cooking on, you’ll want it to be smooth. I really don’t know why they start with an artificially rough surface to start with but it seems counter intuitive.