So a little while ago, I mentioned how my parents had sent me their old cast-iron skillet. It had been sitting in the basement unused for the better part of a decade, and had gunked up pretty bad with rust and other stuff.
Well, I’m happy to say that I got it cleaned up! Toad, a friend from my short story writing group, helped me out with it. We poured a bunch of salt into the bottom as an abrasive and scrubbed it down with a rag and some oil. After that, we fried some eggs up, seasoning the skillet with oil both before and after (we didn’t even bother seasoning it in the oven, just did it all on the stove top).
Right away, we could tell that this was a good quality piece of cast iron. You can tell by how smooth the surface is. The cheaper modern and/or Chinese stuff has a fairly rough surface, so that food tends to get stuck in it. The good old-fashioned skillets are much smoother.
I’ve been cooking regularly with it ever since, and I can confirm that these things only get better with use! Here are a couple of things I’ve been cooking with it:
I love omelettes, but it’s hard to cook them in old teflon pans because the eggs tend to stick (or worse, the teflon peels off into the food). However, in my cast-iron skillet, it’s not a problem at all! In the picture above, I mixed two eggs with chives, red pepper, garlic salt, and a splash of milk. Later, I added a sprinkling of cheddar and mozzarella. To oil the pan, I used about 2/3rds tablespoon of butter.
I’m not very good at turning these things over, but as you can see it’s not really sticking to the pan at all. If it does, it’s not hard to scrape it off. I use only metal cookware with this skillet, so I don’t have to worry about melting plastic (ever notice how an old plastic spatula tends to have a sharp edge with bits of plastic peeling off?). And honestly, it doesn’t take much work to scrape food off of this thing, even when it does stick.
Another thing I love to cook in my cast-iron skillet is hash browns. I’ve got a small herb garden in my kitchen window, so I fry up my potatoes with rosemary, chives, and dill. It tastes FANTASTIC.
With my old second-hand teflon pans, I could never get the potatoes very crispy because they’d always stick to the pan if I cooked them for too long. But with cast iron, that isn’t a problem at all! As you can see in the picture above, these potatoes are browning quite nicely.
But that isn’t even the best part.
See that? It’s a selfie I took in the bottom of the pan after cooking all the stuff above! I didn’t wash it at all, I just dropped a little bit of oil on it and used a paper towel to wipe it down.
I’m telling you, this cast-iron skillet is AMAZING. I can cook whatever I want in this thing! Even better, I fully expect that this skillet will outlive me. It’s WAY more durable than any other piece of kitchen equipment that I’ve ever seen. And it’s versatile, too–I can hardly wait to go camping with it!
