Cast Adrift: A (long) How-To of Sorts
I grew up across the road from my grandma. Her kitchen served up plain, yet delicious country cooking the way we don't get to enjoy it anymore. In the winter, she cooked on her wood stove out on the back porch - - I'll never have biscuits like that again. One word: Crisco.
After Teta passed away, my family moved her things up to storage at to her mother's house, a little ways up the hill (We don't move far at home). Through the years, we grandchildren have appropriated many of Teta's kitchen goods to stock our own kitchens - serviceable plates, the perfect Tupperware mixing bowl/measuring cup, assorted wisks. Last time I was poking through things, last Easter I think, I found her old cast iron frying pans, perfect for cornbread. I love cornbread. Particularly crumbled up into little pieces in milk. I also wanted something that could make it from on top of the stove to inside the oven.
Sadly, the seasoning on the cast iron pieces was shot. Pebbly and old and sticky - not what you want your cast iron to feel like. Ideally it's smooth and shiny and not sticky. And my great-grandmother's old and empty house isn't particularly protected from friendly woodland creatures, so it needed to be cleaned, and thoroughly. These pans had probably at least (at least!) 40 years of carbonized cooking grease making them thickly coated and terrifically non-stick. And somehow, I had to get off that coating to reseason the darn thing.
Turns out there's a whole lot of literature on cleaning cast iron on the internet. The scare away from Teflon has made cast iron the frying pan of choice from the organic-movement-type, and the old-fashioned-types like cast iron 'cause their grandmas used it . Falling somewhere between these two groups, I read up on their suggestions.
Though I hated to do it, in accordance with the wisdom of the internet, I sprayed the pans with oven cleaner (corrosive, horrid stuff) with my fan on and my windows open, tried not to breathe in, then stuck the pans into a trash bag for a couple of days. I recognize the anti-Teflon irony here. I tried to scrub off the surface by hand before moving to chemicals, but that was getting me nowhere.
Amazingly, after 3 days in a bag with oven cleaner, most of the built-up grease and stuff just fell right off. Not all of it did, so I did it again. This time, while cleaning off the oven goop, I added a little sandpaper to the mix to get the hard parts clean. Now, the once black surface is (mostly) a gunmetal gray. One of the pans turned out to have a big crack along one of its sides, so I retired it before reseasoning it, which was sad. No more cornbread in that pan.
After cleaning the remaining pan as best I could, I carefully dried it and then rubbed in the Crisco I bought for that very particular purpose (um, not sure why else I'd buy Crisco these days). The pan almost sighed in relief - it was like putting the perfect Aveeno moisturizing lotion on dry hands in February. I stuck it in the oven on 225, and after 25 minutes wiped out the pooled grease. Right now, the remaining pan is slowly roasting in the oven at that low temp. I notice a dark coating on the paper towels when I wipe the grease out now. Hopefully that will go away and I haven't screwed up the first of my seasoning sessions with the remaining pan.
I am not sure I'll ever have the coating on this pan that my grandmother did. Seems doubtful. I don't make cornbread everyday, and I surely don't use Crisco that often. But we'll see. As soon as this pan gets a little more seasoned (a few more times in the oven with the Crisco coating should do it), it's time for tarte tatin.
After Teta passed away, my family moved her things up to storage at to her mother's house, a little ways up the hill (We don't move far at home). Through the years, we grandchildren have appropriated many of Teta's kitchen goods to stock our own kitchens - serviceable plates, the perfect Tupperware mixing bowl/measuring cup, assorted wisks. Last time I was poking through things, last Easter I think, I found her old cast iron frying pans, perfect for cornbread. I love cornbread. Particularly crumbled up into little pieces in milk. I also wanted something that could make it from on top of the stove to inside the oven.
Sadly, the seasoning on the cast iron pieces was shot. Pebbly and old and sticky - not what you want your cast iron to feel like. Ideally it's smooth and shiny and not sticky. And my great-grandmother's old and empty house isn't particularly protected from friendly woodland creatures, so it needed to be cleaned, and thoroughly. These pans had probably at least (at least!) 40 years of carbonized cooking grease making them thickly coated and terrifically non-stick. And somehow, I had to get off that coating to reseason the darn thing.
Turns out there's a whole lot of literature on cleaning cast iron on the internet. The scare away from Teflon has made cast iron the frying pan of choice from the organic-movement-type, and the old-fashioned-types like cast iron 'cause their grandmas used it . Falling somewhere between these two groups, I read up on their suggestions.
Though I hated to do it, in accordance with the wisdom of the internet, I sprayed the pans with oven cleaner (corrosive, horrid stuff) with my fan on and my windows open, tried not to breathe in, then stuck the pans into a trash bag for a couple of days. I recognize the anti-Teflon irony here. I tried to scrub off the surface by hand before moving to chemicals, but that was getting me nowhere.
Amazingly, after 3 days in a bag with oven cleaner, most of the built-up grease and stuff just fell right off. Not all of it did, so I did it again. This time, while cleaning off the oven goop, I added a little sandpaper to the mix to get the hard parts clean. Now, the once black surface is (mostly) a gunmetal gray. One of the pans turned out to have a big crack along one of its sides, so I retired it before reseasoning it, which was sad. No more cornbread in that pan.
After cleaning the remaining pan as best I could, I carefully dried it and then rubbed in the Crisco I bought for that very particular purpose (um, not sure why else I'd buy Crisco these days). The pan almost sighed in relief - it was like putting the perfect Aveeno moisturizing lotion on dry hands in February. I stuck it in the oven on 225, and after 25 minutes wiped out the pooled grease. Right now, the remaining pan is slowly roasting in the oven at that low temp. I notice a dark coating on the paper towels when I wipe the grease out now. Hopefully that will go away and I haven't screwed up the first of my seasoning sessions with the remaining pan.
I am not sure I'll ever have the coating on this pan that my grandmother did. Seems doubtful. I don't make cornbread everyday, and I surely don't use Crisco that often. But we'll see. As soon as this pan gets a little more seasoned (a few more times in the oven with the Crisco coating should do it), it's time for tarte tatin.
posted by mg at 8:52 PM
3 Comments:
That's a beautiful ode to so many things - your grandmother, slow-food cooking, cornbread...what a homey, cozy read on this gray and rainy PA morning.
It was sad to clean off all that built up seasoning. Absolutely no telling how many things that pan has cooked.
I commend you for re-seasoning your pan - I bet it will be back to having a beautiful, black luster in no time. In the meantime, I am looking forward to your tarte tartin recipe - yum.
Also, I have a confession - I do the unthinkable and wash my cast iron skillet with a little bit of soap. It doesn't seem to kill the coating and makes the pan a whole lot less gross/sticky/greasy. Is that terrible?
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