A repurposed blog comment re cast iron cookware

From this thread. 

If you have a cast iron pan you need to get cleaned up and reseasoned, for my money, the best way to go is the oven cleaner in a plastic bag method, which involves covering the pan in lye-based oven cleaner and putting it in a plastic bag overnight.

It may take a few days, but that will get the nasty gunk off nice and easily. Just wash the cleaner off every night and apply a fresh coat before rebagging. I cleaned a nice skillet down to fresh metal that way. You may need to do a little scrubbing, but not much.

Then, you want to remove any rust, and the best way to do that is to soak it in a solution of water and vinegar for a few hours, and then rinse with just water. The pan should be thoroughly dried in a hot oven before applying your first coat of seasoning.

Your best bet for seasoning is a thin coat of a drying oil like fresh flaxseed oil or soybean oil. Canola also works, but sometimes creates a harder, more brittle coating. My preference is soybean oil; flaxseed oil is expensive, difficult to find, and goes rancid very quickly if not properly stored.

You’ll want to do several coats, ideally at least three, before you start cooking in it. The best way is to heat the oven to 500F and when heated place the pan in it, covered in a thin coating of oil. Leave it upside down so the oil doesn’t pool. You should leave it in there for an hour on full heat, and then turn the oven off and allow it to cool.

You should see an instant shiny coating – repeat as many times as appropriate, at least three. If the coating isn’t immediately black, don’t worry – it may turn a very dark brown, which is entirely normal, and this will become black with repeated applications and cooking.

Also, the things you cook in it will affect the seasoning – don’t do anything with a lot of sugar in it, or tomatoes, or anything which requires a lot of boiling. There is no surer way to f*ck up new seasoning than the above.

You should do lots of things involving frying at first; skillets are very good for this, obviously, and they are very good for making cornbread with a super crunchy crust, especially if you preheat oil in them and pour the batter into that before baking.

Day 17: Nooch!

Today was veeeery busy at work, plus I overslept a little and ended up in a rush this morning. I didn’t really do myself proud at lunch (becoming a theme) but I did stay vegan, despite an overpowering urge to go and buy cheese and scoff the lot while laughing maniacally. Yay me!

To celebrate this, I decided to make cheesy food for dinner. I didn’t succumb to the cravings because the Force is strong in me but I did want a cheesy taste. Like a nicotine addict with that horrible gum. I swear, giving up smoking was never as hard as giving up dairy.

Read the rest…

Day 15: Bourbon Tofu

This is just going to be a quick one, as it’s late. I left it kind of late in the day to do this one, because I was, well, doing other stuff.

Lunch was fairly dull, I’m afraid: bits of cheddar-style Sheese in wraps with salad. Not about to light the vegan world on fire with that, really.

Dinner was more interesting. One of my favourite things to eat in the whole world is bourbon chicken. It’s tasty and moreish, and I can eat platefuls of it all day long, especially when there’s broccoli in it as well. I was really craving some tonight, but obviously I couldn’t have any.

But then I thought to myself, why not try it with tofu? One of the virtues of tofu is that it takes on flavours very easily when cooked. A classic form of it is to simply marinade firm tofu in soy sauce and fry it. It comes out very nicely, especially if you let it get really crispy. The saltiness of the sauce comes over really well.

Read the rest…

Day Nine: Pita Bread and Climate Change

Not much happening today. I ate kind of badly, if you want the truth: pita bread with hummus for lunch, and left-overs for dinner. Not a terribly inspiring sort of advert for the vegan lifestyle, but to be honest, some days I just can’t get into cooking, which is something of a shame, because I do enjoy doing it and talking about it.

I have noticed that a lot of my bread intake lately has been in the form of pita bread; lots of it in the form of garlic and herb pitas from Tesco, which are actually rather tasty, if a little stinky! That, combined with garlicky hummus, is making me somewhat difficult to be around… Hehehe.

Read the rest here.

Day Seven

So, it’s the end of the first week of my month as a vegan. Things seem to be going well so far, although there have been some things which have been difficult to do or avoid, I think overall thing’s are OK.

Probably the biggest change I’ve noticed is that I tend to snack a little less. I seem to be less hungry between meals this week, and I think that can be put down to a change in habits: I can’t snack as easily, so I tend to eat more of what I’ve cooked at meal times. The absence of easily edible snacks has left me in the position of eating more at meals, so avoiding snacks in the first place has let me avoid them further, if that makes sense…

Six Degrees of WordPress

So I’m sitting around thinking about lard, and…

OK, yes. An explanation may be in order. Lard is my new wonder fat for cooking with. It’s got lots of unsaturated fats, less saturated fat than butter, and fries to a crispy finish. It also works very well in stuff – I made biscuits with it the other day that were just divine, dahlinks. Seriously, it’s like the best fat to work with, in cooking terms. The only thing to remember is to buy the refrigerated kind that is non-hydrogenated; the hydrogenated kind contains trans-fats, which are teh evol.

Short digression about lard: lard comes in various grades. The best is called leaf lard, which is made from fat around the loin and kidneys; the next one down is from the fatback, which is unsurprisingly on the pig’s back; and the least good grade is made from the caul covering internal organs. Most lard is made from a mixture of these fats. It has a high smoke point, a neutral flavour and is chock full of nice fats.

Anyway, so I’m sitting around thinking about lard, which leads me to start thinking about bacon, what with lard being rendered from the fatty parts of porkers. Bacon’s brilliant. And has anyone else seen this? The thing I love about this product is that it is actually kosher. Comedy genius.

Anyway, thinking about bacon obviously started me thinking about Kevin Bacon. He’s not as brilliant as actual (pigflesh) bacon, but he’s still pretty good. I liked Flatliners, and one of his films, Pyrates, which also stars his wife Kyra Sedgwick, is unjustly overlooked, in my not so humble opinion. Sure, it’s not Citizen Kane, but I liked it.

Which brings us not-so-neatly to the famous trivia game involving Kevin Bacon – six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The idea is an expansion of the famous (and somewhat inaccurate) axiom that there are never more than six degrees of separation between any two people in the world; there are, for example, four degrees of separation between me and George Bush – I have met my MP, who has met whichever non-entity happens to be current leader of the Liberal Democrats, who has met Tony Blair, who has met George Bush. The conceit of six degrees of Kevin Bacon is that any actor can be linked to Kevin Bacon in six steps or less, which leads to an actor’s Bacon number, the number of links between that actor and Bacon. Ronald Reagan, for example, had a Bacon number of 2; Matthew Perry has a Bacon number of 3, because he was in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip with Ed Asner, who was in JFK with Kevin Bacon.

While I was thinking about Bacon numbers and the like, I happened to have my browser open and I caught sight of a recent comment, and thus was a new meme born. It’s not exactly like SDoKB, but it evolved.

The way the meme works is this:

1. Go to the latest comment you have from someone else. Go to the blog of the person who made it. If that person doesn’t have a blog, go to the next one.
2. Click the latest comment on that blog from someone else. Go to the blog of the person who made it. If that person doesn’t have a blog, go to the next one.
3. Do this again until you have gone six blogs away. If anyone on the way doesn’t have a latest comments widget, just pick the first comment you see.
4. Post about it. Tag at least a couple of other people.

Mine went:

1. Anxious Mofo commented on Thor is Angry!
2. Paul from Cafe Philos commented on Finally, someone takes a stand against irritating celebrities
3. Lirone commented on The Rain at Dawn
4. Michelle commented on Little boy’s toy…
5. noahthegreat commented on Monday Mural, and…
6. Bob at Average Poet commented on Actions…

I tag Gary and Lottie.

Currently listening to:
Shivaree – I Oughta Give You A Shot In The Head For Making Me Live In This Dump

Milla Jovovic – The Divine Comedy