Why cast iron griddle

Sitting down to eat together always means someone is left with cold food. All your food can be cooked at the exact same time. Moving on, glancing at a griddle, you will notice that it has a smooth, wide-open space with no big sidewalls as a regular pan does.

You may not realize it, but the walls of a skillet can hold moisture that, in turn, affects the food you are cooking.

Without them, your food can get nice and crispy — and there is nothing to get in the way of an easy flip! Finally, the power of a griddle comes with the ability to cook different foods on the same surface at the same time. Do you know why? You will only have one pan to clean afterward. What a score! As you venture about your kitchen creating delectable meals using your cast iron griddle, keep everyone safe with these 2 important tips: Monitor the grease.

With no sidewalls, grease can build up and have nowhere to go. If it overflows, it could cause a serious situation — especially if you are using your griddle with a gas stove. Protect your hands with an oven mitt. The surface of a cast iron griddle can get very hot, just like touching a burner or the grate on your grill. If you need to move your griddle or touch it in any way while cooking, put on a mitt.

Tips for Griddling Perfection Griddling is not hard. You just need to use it. Of course, knowing a few cooking tips in advance is always beneficial. To get you started, here are 3 notes for griddling perfection: Timing is different on a griddle.

Things will cook much faster than if you were cooking in a skillet. Remember, nobody likes charred food. The reason for the faster cooking times is that the entire griddle is a solid block of heat — with no means for the heat to escape. The surface is not non-stick. To wash, simply rinse in really hot water while scrubbing with a stiff brush. For stubborn food that's stuck to the pan, boil water in the skillet and let it stand for minutes.

Then rinse again. Another note: Never allow cast-iron to drip dry--you should always towel-dry it immediately to prevent rusting. After patting it down with a clean towel, you can also place you cast-iron over low heat on the stove to dry it completely. You'll know it's time to re-season your cast-iron skillet when food begins to stick or the once shiny black pan starts turning a dull color which means the food may start sticking soon.

Here's how to do it:. Line the bottom with foil. Clean your pan with hot soapy water and a scrub brush and dry it well. Spread oil over the entire surface inside and out of the pan. Place the pan upside down on the top rack and bake for one hour. Guess how many times I've chipped their seasoning? Try doing that to your non-stick skillet without damaging the surface. The Theory: Searing steaks and frying potatoes requires high, even heat. Cast iron is great at searing steaks, so it must be great at heating evenly, right?

The Reality: Actually, cast iron is terrible at heating evenly. The thermal conductivity—the measure of a material's ability to transfer heat from one part to another—is around a third to a quarter that of a material like aluminum.

What does this mean? Throw a cast iron skillet on a burner and you end up forming very clear hot spots right on top of where the flames are, while the rest of the pan remains relatively cool. The main advantage of cast iron is that it has very high volumetric heat capacity, which means that once it's hot, it stays hot.

This is vitally important when searing meat. To really heat cast iron evenly, place it over a burner and let it preheat for at least 10 minutes or so, rotating it every once in a while.

Alternatively, heat it up in a hot oven for 20 to 30 minutes but remember to use a potholder or dish towel! The other advantage is its high emissivity—that is, its tendency to expel a lot of heat energy from its surface in the form of radiation.

Stainless steel has an emissivity of around 0. Even when it's extremely hot, you can put your hand close to it and not feel a thing. Only the food directly in contact with it is heating up in any way.

Cast iron, on the other hand, has a whopping 0. This makes it ideal for things like making hash or pan roasting chicken and vegetables. The Theory: The better you season your cast iron, the more non-stick it becomes. Perfectly well-seasoned cast iron should be perfectly non-stick.

The Reality: Your cast iron pan and mine may be really really really non-stick—non-stick enough that you can make an omelet in it or fry an egg with no problem—but let's get serious here. It's not anywhere near as non-stick as, say, Teflon, a material so non-stick that we had to develop new technologies just to get it to bond to the bottom of a pan. Can you dump a load of cold eggs into your cast iron pan, slowly heat it up with no oil, then slide those cooked eggs right back out without a spot left behind?

Because you can do that in Teflon. Yeah, didn't think so. That said, macho posturing aside, so long as your cast iron pan is well seasoned and you make sure to pre-heat it well before adding any food, you should have no problems whatsoever with sticking.

The Theory: Seasoning is a thin layer of oil that coats the inside of your skillet. Soap is designed to remove oil, therefore soap will damage your seasoning.

You season a cast iron pan by rubbing it with a relatively thin coat of neutral food-grade oil I stress a light coat of oil. Rub the oil off with paper towels or a cotton cloth. The pan will look like there is no oil left on the surface, but there is as the oil is just very thin the pan will look dry, not glistening with oil.

Use vegetable oils canola, sunflower, etc. Place the lightly-oiled cast iron pan, upside down, in the oven, with a sheet of aluminum foil on the bottom to catch any drips. Heat the pan for 30 minutes in a to degree F. Once done, turn off the oven, and let the pan cool to room temperature in the oven.

I usually do this process 3 to 4 times. NOTE: Seasoning cast iron pans does generate smoke similar to cooking in a dirty oven.

The oil fills the cavities and becomes entrenched in them, as well as rounding off the peaks. By seasoning a new pan, the cooking surface develops a nonstick quality because the formerly jagged and pitted surface becomes smooth.

Also, because the pores are permeated with oil, water cannot seep in and create rust that would give food an off-flavor. Your ironware will be slightly discolored at this stage, but a couple of frying jobs will help complete the cure, and turn the iron into the rich, black color that is the sign of a well-seasoned, well-used skillet or pot. Never put cold liquids into a very hot cast iron pan or oven. They will crack on the spot! Be careful when cooking with your cast iron pans on an electric range, because the burners create hot spots that can warp cast iron or even cause it to crack.

Be sure to preheat the iron very slowly when using an electric range and keep the settings to medium or even medium-low.

Unless you use your cast iron pans daily, they should be washed briefly with a little soapy water and then rinsed and thoroughly dried in order to rid them of excess surface oil. If you do not do this, the surplus oil will become rancid within a couple of days. Remember — Every time you cook in your cast iron frying pan, you are actually seasoning it again by filling in the microscopic pores and valleys that are part of the cast iron surface.

The more you cook, the smoother the surface becomes! Every time, after I use my cast iron pans, I do the following:. Wash it with dish washing soap and water. Never soak or let soapy water sit in the pan for any length of time — just briefly wash it out. Rinse thoroughly, then dry with paper towels. NEVER put cast iron cookware in the dishwasher. A lot of people disagree with using dish washing soap and water to wash cast iron pans.

A chef told me that if a health inspector ever found a pan that had not been washed with soap and water in his kitchen, he would be in trouble. Plus the grease that is left behind will eventually become rancid. You do not want rancid oil in your foods and body.

Place the cleaned cast iron frying pan on the heated burner of your stove for a minute or two to make sure that it is bone dry. While the pan is still hot and on the stove burner, lightly oil inside of pan I mean a light coat with a neutral cooking oil. I use a paper towel to spread the oil lightly over the pan.

Neutral Food-Grade Oils — Use vegetable oils canola, sunflower, etc. Leave frying pan on the hot burner of stove for a few minutes. Remove from hot burner and wipe excess oil off the pan with a paper towel. Store your cast iron cookware with the lids off especially in humid weather, because if covered, moisture can build up and cause rust.

Be sure that you place a couple paper towels inside your cast iron pan when storing to make sure that any moisture that forms will be absorbed by the paper towel. Never put the utensil in the dishwasher or store it away without drying it thoroughly. Cast iron is a great alternative to non-stick cooking surfaces. Cast iron can be pre-heated to temperatures that will brown meat and will withstand oven temperatures well above what is considered safe for non-stick pans.

You can cook almost any food in cast iron cookware.