The Cast Iron Pan, Volume 1: Ugly Duckling or Black Beauty?

The glass bottle, the paper cup, the cotton shirt, the paper sack – all time-honored vessels under attack for years by strange synthetic materials such as plastic, Styrofoam, polyester and teflon. Today's discussion item is the cast iron pan, a true iconoclast in the Emeril-dominated world of modern American cookware. I suspect many people have never actually used a cast iron pan but perhaps remember it as a prop in the film The Apple Dumpling Gang starring Bill Bixby and other Hollywood stars (see Special Edition DVD cover image, left). (Who can forget that hilarious scene – it was the first night Bill Bixby's character had to fix dinner for his new little charges and he tried to fry up a piece of salt pork in a cast iron pan, much to their consternation.)

Bill Bixby counting the money he saved buying cast iron instead of Emerilware.

ppressively heavy, ugly and cheap, the cast iron pan is the antithesis of modern cookware. All-Clad pans, considered the gold standard of the home chef, are shiny stainless steel, expensive ($125 for a 12-inch saute pan) and are virtual works of art. A 12-inch skillet made by Lodge, the iron standard for the 1800’s cook, go for $19.99 on Amazon. These stark contrasts don’t even take into account the increasingly important ease-of-use criteria. All-Clad’s stainless steel line pans are so smoothly polished that they release food almost as easily as a non-stick Teflon surface, but if that’s not good enough they have a Teflon surface line of cookware as well. A cast iron pan requires seasoning before its first use – a technique that involves coating the pan with oil then baking it in a hot oven for an hour…repeatedly. Don’t feel you’ve arrived after enduring the smoke, smell and messiness of the first seasoning because food will stick to the pan like your shoes to the movie theater floor until you’ve seasoned and used the pan several times. Oh, one more thing, you are directed to never use soap or a scrub brush to clean the pan no matter how stuck on that smelly salmon skin is, because that will strip away the precious seasoning oils embedded into the iron surface. You are supposed to “wipe the pan clean with a paper towel” and, unlike the radical modern cleaning technique of removing grease, you then coat the pan with oil before putting it back in the cupboard. Cast iron aficionados recommend bear fat as the best seasoning grease so look for it in the meat fridge next to corn pone and beaver steaks.

While an All-Clad pan never looks or performs better than the first time you use it, a cast-iron pan never looks, cooks or smells worse than the first time you attempt to use it. This initial hazing period understandably weeds out many first time cast iron cookware users. I believe the only people who stick with cast iron are those who have received promises and encouragement from friends or relatives who swear it will eventually pay off. Much like baseball, it seems fruitless and frustrating to the outsider but it is the highest art form to the indoctrinated. After an indeterminate number of uses and coatings with grease the pan gets darker and smoother until one day you find yourself wiping it clean with only some hot water and a paper towel. You also find yourself reaching for it over an All-Clad whenever you need to sear a steak or chop or chicken breast or filet quickly without overcooking it. This is the big payoff that keeps cast iron alive in the face of impossible odds. Its weight translates into thermal mass, which translates into a hot pan that stays hot when a cold piece of meat or vegetable hits it. Even some expensive pans can’t maintain a high surface temperature when hit with cold food and meat ends up braising and stewing instead of searing. There’s nothing worse than a piece of beef turning gray and pallid in a puddle of liquid instead of dark crusty brown like it should. Cast iron pans are also preferred for stir frying because they stay hot enough to quick fry a pile of cold ingredient better than most woks. The traditional, flared wok design is meant to take advantage of the flames licking up the side of the pan while cooking over an open fire. If you often cook over an open fire then get a wok for stir-frying, otherwise get a big cast iron skillet or dutch oven. Next chapter: The cast iron pan teams up with bacon and pork tenderloin to create a dish Bill Bixby would be proud to serve.