works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron

  • Should I avoid using soap on my cast iron pan?

    About a week before I am writing this post, the official Twitter for Lodge Cast Iron posted a simple question: “Soap or no soap?”

    About fifty people weighed in on the debate, asserting a broad range of opinions from both Team Soap and Team No Soap.

    For the uninitiated the argument goes something like this:

    For much of the long history of cast iron cookware, soap was a harsh chemical usually derived from a process involving lye. These natural soaps would chew through the seasoning of a cast iron pan. Soap-free techniques for salting, scrubbing, cleaning, heating, and oiling a recently-used pan have long been refined and shared among cast iron users, passed down as general means of care and tending of cookware.

    But soaps are now mostly gentle chemical concoctions that bear little resemblance to the soaps of our great-grandparent’s era. Couple that with an overall aversion for most people to use something that hasn’t been scrubbed clean with a squirt of lemon-scented goo, and many people will tell you that no, actually soap isn’t going to harm your pan.

    Team Soap asserts that almost all modern dish soaps are fine, and so long as you dry and oil your cast iron your pans will be just fine.

    Team No Soap argues back that soaps, harsh or not, are unnecessary as there are techniques and tools to clean a pan without that product. And, oh-by-the-way anything that doesn’t help your seasoning is possibly hurting it.

    Personally, I don’t use soap.

    I fall into the Team No Soap camp because I stick to the core rule that whatever I put in my pans is either improving or degrading the seasoning.

    Soap, in my opinion, no matter how gentle is not helping the seasoning so thus it is degrading it.

    If I’m going to degrade my seasoning, it’s going to be from cooking something delicious to eat, not for taking a cleaning shortcut.

    That said I will invoke my other rule, that is my Rule of Participation: anyone who participates in something should be encouraged to do so even if it means shortcutting or bending the rules of best practice at the beginning because eventually they will grow their knowledge and either change themselves towards the norm, or shift the normal to something better.

    In other words, if a little soap is going to get more people into cooking with cast iron, great! As they learn, invest, and practice they will either see things with a different eye or will bring new evidence to the table for the rest of us.

    Should you avoid soap on your cast iron pan? I think so… but don’t get so hung up on the question that you switch back to aluminum. A little soap is probably just fine.

  • Tech Help: Fixing a Photographer’s Nightmare

    I turned on my computer this meta Monday morning and was greeted with the following message in the black and white boot screen:

    WARNING: Please back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent and cause unpredictable fail.

    It seems that my life never fails to present me with timely topics to write about.

    But you ask, why am I writing about computer tech problems on a cast iron blog?

    If you are an outdoors guy like me or just love to take photos and video of your travel adventures, chances are you too have gigabytes of media stored in fragile spaces.

    Yet, all of this epic computer fail wasn’t necessarily a surprise.

    When I built myself a new computer a few years ago I had salvaged my data backup drive from my old machine. It was a two terabyte drive that also happened to be where I stored all my photos and my music library. I popped it out of the old and dropped it into the new, and voila… all my media were on the new computer. Yet over the last couple weeks, working from home from this machine, some odd noises have been emitting from the big black box and I’ve been a terrible techie and basically ignored the early warning signs.

    Imminent hard drive failure warnings are something like a stage four cancer diagnosis for your computer. You don’t deal with that stuff tomorrow… you act. Today.

    Now, to be clear, I do have a cloud backup of all those photos in case of an epic emergency like a fire or a flood, and local backups scattered across old hard drives and such, but my core library is… well, was this drive.

    I write “was” because as of this morning that first action step was to immediately start to move all that data to a newer drive…. all seven hundred plus gigabytes of what I hadn’t copied already. (The music files are up next and that’s also nearly a terabyte of data I need to contend with!) All in all, I’m looking at about six hours of data migration today in a race against the ticking timebomb of my hard drive giving up and deciding not to work anymore. A race against a fragile piece of equipment which I need to push to its very limits by copying every last byte of data it has stored inside it. A recipe for a technical nightmare.

    Cue the epic action movie soundtrack:

    Hard Drives are not Cast Iron…

    They are the exact opposite actually… temporary, fragile, and mysterious in their operation. Even so, I use the former every day to share my love of the latter.

    So, if you got here by Googling and are mid-panic and wondering how to deal with this kind of error yourself, here’s my advice:

    First, stop whatever else you are doing and get that data off the failing hard drive. Put it on another hard disk in your machine. Put it on an external drive. Drag it onto another computer. Move it to memory cards. Push it to USB sticks. Write it onto recordable media like DVDs or even CDs if that’s what you have handy. Whatever you can do to save all those precious files, particularly files you don’t have other copies of, cannot replace, or would be time consuming or expensive to restore. Save as much data as you can first.

    Second, figure out a backup solution (or two). Backup external hard drives are fairly inexpensive these days and even a hundred bucks to store a decade worth of photos and video is a relatively small investment to protect your memories and work. Free cloud storage products are hard to find anymore, but if you don’t mind paying a hundred bucks a year you can store a lot of data with Apple or Google or Dropbox or any of a dozen reputable companies who will keep your data safe in their datacentres. Watch for fees for things often called “data egress” which means you pay extra to download those files when you need them back.

    Third, don’t mess around with broken drives. Get that old hard drive out of your system and replace it. There are lots of software programs that claim to fix or restore failing drives, but too often these are temporary fixes at best, fixes that give you time to nab your data before it’s done for good.

  • Can I use an outdoor grill or campfire to season my cast iron pan?

    Iron. Oil. Heat.

    These are the three foundational ingredients needed to season any cast iron pan.

    If you have a cast iron pan, a bit of oil, and a heat source then you should be able to season that pan. And so the simple answer is, yes, if your heat source is a campfire or a gas grill this would count and you should, most definitely, be able to season cast iron outdoors on a grill or other open flame.

    In fact, in my own experience, I’ve had some great luck seasoning cast iron both on the barbecue and over the fire while out camping. There are many practical benefits including dispersal of smoke, efficiency of the process, and the honest-to-goodness joy of sitting around a fire doing something as practical as seasoning your cookware.

    I’ve also had a couple bad experiences. So, a caveat…

    Cast Iron Guy Caveat: Fire and flame are less predictable than electric heat sources. And unpredictable heat can mean things might get a little too hot or too cool as you work to find the just right level of heat to achieve the best seasoning results.

    Too low heat means that the chemical reactions to create seasoning won’t happen and the oil will likely just get gummy and sticky and fail to properly polymerize to become seasoning.

    Too high heat means the oil and any established seasoning will likely burn and disintegrate leaving bare iron behind.

    Check out my article on using a self-cleaning oven to strip seasoning for a refresher on how different levels of high heat affect the seasoning on a pan. I wrote about some of the chemical properties of seasoning and how the blast furnace temperatures of self-cleaning modes torch seasoning to ash.

    Finding that just right heat in an oven somewhere in the middle of that too high and too low value is a matter of setting the knob to the just right number.

    Finding that just right heat on a campfire or over a gas flame is a trickier prospect and requires attention and care above the heat source, and definitely not just throwing it into the flames or coals and hoping for the best!

    While many things can go right, there is more wiggle room for things to go wrong: uneven seasoning, soot and ash contamination, over-heating and burning off the seasoning you’ve already created, increased difficulty to season handles or edges, or even in the extreme, possible cracking of your pan by moving it through too much temperature variation too quickly.

    So, with a good steady-burning bed of coals or a medium flame on your grill, a rack or grate to rest your pan above the heat, the right tools, the right oil, and with work and care, yes, you can season cast iron on a campfire or outdoor grill… but maybe start with a practice pan to learn.

  • Suburban Fire Craft (Part Two)

    Back in early March I introduced my readers to my simmering big plans to upgrade my backyard fire pit set up.

    For years we’ve not made campfires in our backyard a priority, mostly because we could go camping any time we wanted and evenings in the city were otherwise filled with social visits and travel. Backyard campfires were an occasional indulgence.

    For half a decade we have had a small fire bowl which for basic purposes allowed us to have a small marshmallow-roasting fire in the backyard if we wanted, and I kept a bit of wood in the shed for a those handful of evenings a year when we kindled a flicker-filled gathering out our back door.

    But the prospect of another summer of limited camping and sidelined travel plans… blah, blah, blah. You know the story. You’re all living it, too.

    Since that post, I’ve made some purchases and done some setup work. Last night it all came together for an innagural (if small and simple) backyard cookout involving some sausages, marshmallows, and a beautiful evening watching the sunset beside some glowing coals.

    First, I bought the family a new movable fire pit. It’s a much more elaborate setup than our old bowl, though. It’s a side-vented deep body steel fire pit, with a removable tray for charcoal burning, and two cast iron grill plate attachements. I can either cook on the grills directly, or it’s strong enough to hold a pan or a small dutch oven atop.

    Second, I bought some cooking fuel in the form of both charcoal and smoking pellets. The tray insert allows us to have simple grilling fires which (unlike the gas grill we often use for backyard “barbecues”) is a more authentic cooking-over-fire option we now have.

    Third, I stocked up on wood. Not only did my coworker chop down a bank of aging trees in her backyard and provide me with a few good chopping stumps and a truck full of logs, but I ordered a cubic meter of firewood from a local supplier, dried and ready for a summer of backyard fires.

    Summer isn’t quite here, but I’m officially ready to tackle it with flame and iron… right in my own backyard.

  • Grilled Grilled Cheese Spring Sandwich

    Late last year I bought a slab of cast iron from the local home improvement mega store. The idea was not to buy a quality cooking griddle, but instead supplement my outdoor grill with a reasonably inexpensive multi-purpose cooking surface.

    Delicate grill items, like veggies or fish are fine on aluminum foil, but I figured an outdoor flattop would be so much better.

    If I recall correctly, I spent less than thirty dollars on a reversible barbecue griddle. The one I found that fit my dimensions was meant to match into a specific model of barbecue, but on its own sits just fine atop the grill I own.

    I seasoned it up with a triple round of oil and heat. Smiled contentedly at my own ingenuity. Stored the griddle in inside the grill and then … winter hit.

    Yesterday at lunchtime I was working from home, as usual. As I rummaged through the kitchen I discovered a loaf of freshly baked sourdough, some leftover Easter ham, a big block of cheddar cheese, and an abundance of painfully beautiful spring weather.

    Inspiration struck.

    I fired up the grill. Brushed the grill plates down a little (still crusty from the over-the-winter storage). And put some fresh oil on the slab of home improvement store cast iron.

    I was rewarded for my efforts with a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, fresh off the backyard grill. Hot. Fresh. And in the fresh air.

    Ain’t spring grand?