Cooking Green: Cast Iron Will Rock Your World
03:58 | 
Have you ever cooked with a non-stick skillet and had the non-stick surface flake off after a few months? That super slick surface is made up of many harmful chemicals that should absolutely not be eaten! What’s the alternative to cheap-o, toxic frying pans? Your grandma’s grandma had the secret in her kitchen — Cast Iron! You might be thinking ‘Hey, isn’t cast iron archaic cookware from the pioneer days?’. Well, yeah, but they had the right idea, cook with heavily oiled metal and never have nasty non-stick chemicals peeling off into your food. Cast iron cookware has been used for generations because it literally lasts that long! It’s also fully recyclable, since it’s one big hunk of iron which can be melted down by a scrap yard. You can nab a high quality cast iron skillet for under $20 and it will probably have at least a 10-year warranty. What other frying pan can top that?
Tags: Cast Iron
2 Responses to “Cooking Green: Cast Iron Will Rock Your World”
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Copyright ©2008 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Modified: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:22:03 -0700
June 25th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
I must agree: cast iron rocks! But we use just a touch of dish soap to clean all our cast iron and then just season it after each use (takes 2 minutes). We do the same with our wok. You want to get the pan really hot in order to dry it past the water vapor stage, then apply just a touch of oil with a paper towel after you turn off the heat. Fold the towel so you don’t burn your fingers. If you heat the pan with the oil present, the water does not evaporate. Not that rust is bad for you — it is actually a good source of iron in your diet — but it will wear your pans 20 years earlier (my guess). I have pans from 3 generations ago and we can’t really tell them apart from our 5-year old pans.
Also, if the non-stick surface does stick (eg, you burned oil onto it really bad) use coarse kosher salt and a paper towel to scrub. It really works and does not break down the non-stick surface (much).
Lastly, the reason you’re destroying your non-stick pans is that you’re using high heat. Teflon and silverstone are not designed for that level of heat, and it says so in the instructions. We’ve *finally* made a Celphalon pan last more than a year by limiting ourselves to medium heat, which, I admit, is not as much fun to cook with…
June 26th, 2007 at 9:37 am
hey gregg
thanks for all the advice!!
great to have found so many cast iron enthusiasts.