Cast Iron Skillet Care and Recipes

This morning over on Tools & Toys I published a guide to cooking with and maintaining a great cast iron skillet, plus some recommended accessories and recipes.

Not only do [cast iron skillets] perform awesomely in the kitchen (once they get hot, they stay hot), but with proper care and maintenance they can literally last generations. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to be given a grandparent’s old cast iron skillet, relish this gift and take care of it. It will take care of you in return.

There are so many myths out there surrounding cast iron. I've done a lot of research on the subject over the years, trying to discern fact from fiction and experimenting on my own skillet to see what works. I wanted to write a guide covering the sort of information I wish I'd been given when I inherited my grandma's old skillet after she passed.

A truly in-depth, comprehensive guide would have been far too long for one article (probably more like book-length), but I think I managed to distill a good deal of information into this one-page resource. Think of it as "Cast Iron 101".

For a More Ordered Life, Organize Like a Chef

Dwayne Lipuma of the Culinary Institute of America, while being interviewed for an NPR piece:

“The world is a giant gerbil wheel right now. I think if we just became a little bit more organized, a little bit more mise-en-place, understand what we really need and only do what we really need, I think we'll have more time for what's important.

You'll be able to sit down at the table with your kids and actually cook a meal. Get up a little bit earlier so you could breathe. You want to greet the day.”

The timing of coming across this article is funny to me, because there's an article about mise en place and other such concepts sitting in my drafts folder at this very moment. I should really finish it sometime. I think it's going to be a good 'un.

In the meantime, you can read more about mise en place here.

"Not Your Average Bread and Butter"

Chef Dan Richer has been dubbed the "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" of bread and butter, and rightfully so. Rather than carelessly serving up some dull and forgettable form of this pre-meal staple at his New Jersey restaurant, he has poured his soul into perfecting the recipe.

His approach to food is rather similar to the editing practices of great writers:

“I'm like the anti-chef. Like, I wanna do less to something, and I wanna put less on the plate. If there's an ingredient I can take off of the plate to make it more simple and more pure so you can actually experience the essence of what it is that we're serving, that's what's special to me.”

Absolutely wonderful video. Set aside eight minutes to watch it and prepare to salivate.