Did you know cast iron was the cookware of our settlers. It was drug across this land from teh East coast to the west coast.
I have been cooking on cast for a long time. ITs all I use camping. Its kid proof. The best place to find affordable cookware is garage sales. I dont care if its completely covered in rust, it can be brought back to life.
The first thing to do with new cast is toss it into the campfire and get that sucker red hot. That will cook off any rust, burn off any impurities, and restore the metal. Pull it out, and cover it with Crisco. Let cool. Cook and enjoy.
Cast is great becasue the metal is pourous, flavors stay in the steel. Hence why you dont use soap. Teh soap will stay in teh metal and you may get the hersey two step after the next meal. To clean a cast cookware, put it back on teh stove, add some water and boil the food off. Use a green scratch pad or metal spatula if you must, provided it doesn't ahve any soap on it. Careful the water will be hot, boiling. My method is simple. I cook, and clean teh skillet/ dutch oven last. Empty the sink of all other dishes. Put the cast on the stove, add water and bring it to a rolling boil, use a hot pad and draint he water into the sink, add cool water and scrap off any remiainig food. Then place the cast on the stove and warm it up. Once all teh water has dried, turn off the burner and let it cool a mintue or two. Use Crisco and a paper towel, spread teh crisco over the entire sureface, top bottom, back, insdie, outside etc. As the cast cools it draws the oil into the pours and seasons it. The oil from cooking also gets drawn into the pours and add flavor to each meal. Everything you cook will add flavor. If your pan becomes sticky, you dont have enough oil in it.
If your cast is properly seasoned you can get the black soot from a campfire off the bottom with a paper towel.
I have made a ton of things in my dutch oven, from donuts to pizza. Yep, pizza. Kids love it on campouts. Pizza for dinner, cobler for desert after a night hike, and donuts for breakfast. All cooked in a 12" dutch oven.
i bought all my cast iron from lodge mfgs. i see you live in ga. in commerce ga they have a store and it a little cheaper there. thats all i use for cooking inside or outside.
For a quickie 'non stick' solution, put a hand full of table salt in your cast iron skillet. Take a paper towel and scour it with the salt. Good for one, maybe two, no stick cookins.
I just finished sanding, cleaning and seasoning an PB 8 quart cast iron bean pot I picked up at a yard sale last week. I followed the directions of the previous posters. It looks really good...and when I get a chance, I am going to slow cook a big pot of pintos in it on a gas cooker. Thanks for posting the seasoning techniques.
I just finished sanding, cleaning and seasoning an PB 8 quart cast iron bean pot I picked up at a yard sale last week. I followed the directions of the previous posters. It looks really good...and when I get a chance, I am going to slow cook a big pot of pintos in it on a gas cooker. Thanks for posting the seasoning techniques.
before you do i would give it a good reseasoning again. after you reseason it fry some bacon, it'll help with the seasoning.
I just finished sanding, cleaning and seasoning an PB 8 quart cast iron bean pot I picked up at a yard sale last week. I followed the directions of the previous posters. It looks really good...and when I get a chance, I am going to slow cook a big pot of pintos in it on a gas cooker. Thanks for posting the seasoning techniques.
Your welcome!
Bacon never hurts and adds a ton of flavor. When I cook bacon and eggs for breakfast I toss the bacon in the skillet, turn the stove on high/medium. Cook the bacon, take it out and turn the burner to med/low, add two eggs and cook them. take the eggs out and turn the burner off. Clean up- drain the grease/scrap it off if you let it cool too long, then use a paper towel to remove the rest. The skillet is good to go next time.
If you have bacon low in fat, lean bacon, add some olive oil to the pan so the bacon doesn't stick and you can leave that for the eggs, and follow the same clean up instructions.
the whole key to cast is keeping a good layer of oil/fat on the cooking surface. Niether will go racid.
My wife prefers to cook venison meatloaf in the skillet/dutch oven, a lot less mess to clean up compared to a glass cooking utensil.
This past weekend we took a bunch of kids of divorced famies out fishing to some privately owned strip mines. Not only did I show them how to fillet fresh fish, I let them fillet the fish as well. We caught a mess of Bass and Bluegill. I brough two cast iron skillets and two dutch ovens.
We cooked the fish in the skillets and made dutch oven cobbler for dessert. Plus we had a water melon and cooked up some corn on the cob over charcoal. To fry up the fish we washed it in clean water after filleting it, dried the fillets, dipped them in milk, dipped them in shore lunch batter. I half filled each cast iron skillet with oil and heated it up. We dropped the fish in slowely so the hot oil wouldn't burn us. Let the fish cook and pulled it out, set it on a plate with a paper towel to suck up some of the remaining grease. Layer by layer we added more fish and paper towels until we cooked it all. There wasn't any fish left.
As for the Dutch oven cobbler, its really more of a dump cake. Put in 2 cans of your favorite pie filling, two boxes of your favorite cake mix, and pour one can of 7up over the top. If you have a 12" dutch oven place your dutch oven on top of 9 burning coals and place 15 coals on top, spread them around evenly. Let it cook for 20 minutes and check it. Should take about 20-30 minutes to cook. Longer if the coals have passed thier prime. The best dutch oven to use for coals had the littel feet on the bottom and the lip on the lid. The feet help balance it on the coals, and the lip keeps the coals and ash out of the food. As for the best cobbler, there are some instant favorites. Chocolate cake and apples or cherry pie filling is a great combo.
Clean up for the fish is simple, dump the oil and run a paper towl around to clean up the remianing oil.
Clean up for the dutch oven requires boiling the water as outlined in a previous post. Some use aluminum foil to help ease claenup, however you tend to burn the bottom and they dont make foil big enough to seal the bottom so some juice always seeps apst and burns in the bottom of the dutch oven. Actually makes clean up harder.
Let me know when your ready for dutch oven pizza, bubble up pizza. We did a lot of cooking in our cast iron while camping witht he Boy Scouts. You can even make some killer donuts in cast. Add a little cake frosting and sprinkles and it wil become an instant favorite.
Then again for breakfast we prefer Breakfast Burritos. Let me know if your insterested.
All of these are kid favorites. Some us are just bigger kids than others.
Thanks for the Dutch oven cobbler recipe, I needed that as I was wondering how many charcoal briquettes’ to put on my Dutch oven for peach cobbler. My wife and I put on two family cookouts each year at my cabin in the mountains. One at Memorial Day, with the traditional pig shoulders and bbq chicken on a cooker. That one worked out really well, we fed 53 relatives this year. The second one at Labor Day weekend this year will be a Poor Man’s Supper. This is actually the first year for a poor man’s supper.
Everything or as much as possible will be cooked with cast iron.. the pintos slow cooked all day with a big pork chop for seasoning in a cast iron bean pot on a gas single burner cooker, fried taters and onions, fried hog jowls, fried cabbage all in a cast iron skillet, corn bread flitters/hoe cakes in a cast iron griddle, and peach cobbler in a cast iron dutch oven. And then we will have cole slaw, home made chow chow, minced vadalia onions, homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers and finally ICE COLD milk to wash it all down.
One question I do have thought....about the briquettes you put around the Dutch oven. Is this calling for a cooking time of 20-30 minutes with a cold Dutch oven? Thanks again for all the help.
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