Skillet kitchen tool

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Raw Food. Summer Recipes. Fall Recipes. Winter Recipes. With Marcella on my mind, I thought of pasta. But nobody would boil noodles in a cast-iron skillet. Until now! Marcella writes that if you use insufficient water your pasta will turn out gummy. It was at this point that I remembered an article in The New York Times by Harold McGee whose book On Food and Cooking is still the first place to go for answers about culinary science , recommending that noodles can be very happily cooked in only small amounts of water.

Yes, this was heresy, and right there in The New York Times. But I tried it, with a pound of noodles, and it worked. The next issue was the cheese sauce. The most basic cheese sauce begins with a roux: flour and butter heated in a saucepan until they foam and cook for a minute or two without darkening as they would in Louisiana cooking. Then you whisk in some milk and simmer until it thickens. And the elephant was this thing we call cast iron. How does it behave? And why? For nearly a month I had been cooking blind, like a Neanderthal.

Indeed, some experts believe that the Neanderthals never figured out how to cook, which is one reason they faded away. Iron is the most common metal on Earth, and the type used in cast iron is pig iron, an impure form that contains lots of carbon about 3 percent and silicon from the blast furnaces used to smelt it—to separate the metal from the ore.

Cast iron is soft and eager to rust. What else is wrong with it? People used to think that cast-iron skillets had a unique talent for spreading heat quickly and evenly when set on a gas or electric burner. Some people still believe this. I once did. Not only is the idea completely wrong, but this should have been obvious to everybody, including me, who has ever cooked with a cast-iron pan.

Two of my favorite writers on the science of cooking have demonstrated this in strikingly visual ways. Harold McGee cut out a circle of paper and fitted it into his cast-iron skillet.

Dave Arnold, whose posts on the blog Cooking Issues are irresistible and informative, dusted the inside of his cast-iron skillet with flour. Both set their pans on burners. And both showed that the patterns of charred paper and charred flour exactly mirrored the six- or eightfold star or circular pattern of the burner below the pan. The alternating hotter and cooler areas in cast iron guarantee that some food in the pan will get burned before the rest is fully cooked.

One way around this is to preheat your cast-iron skillet. A related defect is that cast iron heats up slowly. The specific heat capacity of a substance—whether iron or gold, air or water, milk or eggs or steak or ice—is the energy usually heat needed to raise a given amount of that substance by one degree. Before you get to work, make sure your cookware is cool and dry. Then, start "erasing" and prepare to be blown away.

The handy product revives your cookware by stripping it down to the bare iron. Because you're essentially giving your pan a new chance at life, don't forget to re-season it before putting it to use again in the kitchen. What are you waiting for? Grab your rust eraser, clean up your skillet, celebrate with Ree's mouth-watering mocha brownie sundae! UK ministers rally around embattled Boris Johnson, for now. Full screen. Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.