Learning Cast Iron

 A number of years ago I somehow stumbled onto the Kickstarter campaign for Stargazer, which was seeking to make a line of cast iron skillets (10 inchest first).  I chipped in and soon had my pan (it's an original run; no manufacture date is on the assist handle).  Then... I pretty much didn't do anything with it.   I cooked a couple of things in it, but it more or less just sat around, eventually developing a little rust in a few spots.  I hadn't ever really cooked much with cast iron.  It came nominally seasoned, and what I had cooked in it had worked out okay, but it never made it into daily (or even monthly) use.  Finally, I did a little research, got a cast iron eraser from Lodge to remove the rust spots (that worked okay, not great), and did two coats of avocado oil seasoning at 400 degrees for an hour.  That worked well enough that I decided to try fried eggs.

The eggs are working out great; mine don't necessarily slide around the pan on their own, but neither do they stick--exactly.  Usually a nudge from the spatula is needed to make them mobile. In the picture above, an egg is shown with about 3/4 tablespoon of butter.

I have also done cornbread and pancakes; all work well.  For the cornbread, I used the tallow recipe mentioned previously, and it worked very well.  The surface area of the pan is about the same size as that of an eight-inch square glass dish at the cooking surface, but then the walls slope outward and up.  It is probably an insignificant difference.  The cornbread was not noticeably thinner than when baked in glass, but the crust was much better-developed. I put the pan in the oven to preheat, then used some lard to grease the bottom and sides before putting the batter in. This may be my go-to method in the future.

There's a lot cast iron can do and much it cannot do well.  I'm going to be experimenting more with it in the future.

 

Thoughts on Latex/Vinyl/Nitrile Gloves

I use these gloves for a variety of purposes--cleaning, kitchen work, painting, spraying insecticide or herbicide, and other uses.  I've had a variety of issues with them.  Sometimes they're hard to get on, particularly with sweaty hands, and they can tear easily.  I had very bad luck with some nitrile gloves I got at a big box store: many tore when I tried to put them on.  It was enough to make me rule out nitrile gloves for years.  I then went mostly with vinyl, because (although they aren't rated for medical use) they function well and don't have the too-tight issues that seem to be ubiquitous with latex gloves.

It may be that I was just using cheap gloves.  The ones I had problems with didn't have their thickness on the box, but they were probably pretty thin.  Nitrile is available in a wide variety of thicknesses: Uline sells them anywhere from 2 mil. to 12 mil.  Home Depot has 8 mil gloves as well as thinner ones.  In my limited experience, 6 mil. nitrile gloves are not at all prone to tearing.

Vinyl gloves are also sometimes susceptible to tearing, but in my (again) limited experience, anything 5 mil. or greater is strong enough for the uses to which I put them.

In the picture below, 5 mil. vinyl is on the left; 6 mil. nitrile is on the right.

Another factor to consider that impacts ease of putting them on is whether they're powdered inside.  I've found that powdered gloves help a lot when hands are sweaty.  Getting a glove on somewhat wet/tacky hands is almost impossible otherwise; if I have to attempt it, I usually dunk my hand in water to get it thoroughly wet rather than just moist.  That helps.  With powdered gloves, however, it's no problem.  Some don't like powder residue on their hands, so avoid powdered gloves. It's not a problem for me.

More detail on the uses to which I put them:

When painting, I sometimes use them to avoid issues with splatter or the otherwise inevitable paint-on-hands syndrome I seem to suffer from whenever I take a roller or brush in hand.

For cleaning, it's a best practice to use some sort of barrier when using cleaning solutions.  Reusable (e.g., Playtex) gloves are an option, but disposable ones work well, too.  It's also advisable when spraying herbicides or pesticides.

When cooking, cleanup after some tasks is much easier if gloves are used, such as greasing baking dishes with lard or tallow.

 So in summary, go thicker than the minimum and, if needed, look for powdered varieties.

Tallow Cornbread

I've posted my recipe before (adapted from another one online) that I use for cornbread.  I've adapted it for use with rye flour, too.  As the recipe notes, some sort of fat is called for.  I use 3 tablespoons, plus whatever I use to grease the dish (which is maybe a half teaspoon more).

I usually use sunflower oil as the fat, plus lard to grease the dish.  I used to use Crisco--I got a huge vat of it that sat in my refrigerator for a couple of years before I went through it all.  However, I've grown more skeptical of the product, figuring that at a minimum it offers no advantages over animal fats. I switched to lard for greasing duty. I was initially using hydrogenated lard from the store, which is pretty tasteless.  I recently got some from leaf lard from Fatworks that has more of a flavor to it, and I will try adding it to my next batch.  In the meantime, it's doing duty greasing pie pans (including the one I baked my recent pumpkin pie in) and other baking dishes.

Before I got the leaf lard, I bought some tallow.  I had always wondered about tallow and wanted to see how it would behave and taste.  I was inspired by Jill Winger at theprairiehomestead.com, who renders tallow from her cattle and uses it for a few things--culinary and otherwise.

My initial plan was just to use it for greasing instead of vegetable shortening, and it is not really the best for that, although it will work at some level.  The texture is not as smooth as lard; it's clumpy (which can be ameliorated by heating it a bit). It also has a beefy smell and taste that's noticeable (at least I noticed it; when I baked pies I could usually detect the tallow flavor, though others who ate slices never commented).

Then I used it on some cornbread.  After a pause of a few months I'm making that again; I have some Blue Clarage to grind up but in the meantime I trekked to the only store I know of (Whole Foods) that sells organic cornmeal.  In most cases I'm not too concerned with non-organic foods, but in the case of grain, I don't really want to eat Roundup-ready varieties to the extent that I can avoid them...they're obviously in commercial corn products like grits, but avoiding when possible is relatively painless so I do so--as another example, before the Crisco I used to use Canola oil but have now ditched that, too.

At any rate...I made a batch of cornbread and could taste the tallow (otherwise, sunflower oil went into the mix).  In this instance it was pretty good, more so than when traces of tallow essence showed up in a blueberry pie.  Cornbread picks up the flavor of whatever fat is used, assuming there is one; in many cases, bacon grease is used which definitely impacts the taste of the finished product.  So I decided to give tallow as the fat in the dough a try.

It worked reasonably well.  Tallow cornbread might sound unappetizing but it isn't.  The tallow is definitely there and definitely flavors the bread much more so than the sunflower oil, which has a very subtle flavor that gets lost in the finished product.  I'm looking forward to trying lard with it and may get some that's not as neutral as the leaf lard for special applications in the future.

Cornmeal Brownies

First, an apology:  the fonts on this may be messed up on your screen.  For whatever reason, I can't get them to save in anything other than micro type.  I tried a few things, but haven't found a fix.

Cornmeal brownies?  Seriously, yes.  Although the concept may sound a little gross, they are actually pretty good.  I found the recipe one day at Grit magazine's site. I adapted it a bit to make it a more conventional brownie recipe (black walnuts are okay for brownies; peanuts are not so much).  I ended up with this:

1/2 c cocoa powder (I used dark)
1 stick of butter
1/2 c flour (I used white flour)
1/2 c cornmeal
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
4 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 c sugar
1/2 c brown sugar
1/2 c nuts (black walnut, but almost any other nut would be fine--and 1 c will also work with the same baking time as described below)

I mixed it all up and found that I had to bake it longer than the recipe suggested: I left it in for 40 minutes at 350 degrees.


This shows a cutaway view of the first pan (I have now made two)--the flavor is nice.  There's definitely a texture of granularity because of the coarseness of the cornmeal, but what I tried tasted basically like brownies.  Of course, the black walnuts may impact that, too, since they are fairly strongly-flavored.  In the second batch, I used 1 cup of nuts and it worked well.


One other note is that I tried a new cooking fat to grease the dish beforehand: tallow.  I'd read about it and wanted to try some, so hunted down a jar online.  It's definitely pricier than the partially-hydrogenated lard I have been using.

When I opened the jar, I was greeted by a faint, unmistakable, and not necessarily welcome beefy aroma.  It had a slight flavor to it, too.  Crisco and processed lard are very neutral.  I may have more to say about tallow in the future.  It worked and it is no longer perceptible in the finished product.


Overall, this recipe has definite potential.