Any Cast Iron Cookers Out There?

[kundalini]

Over the last couple of years I have amassed several pieces of cast iron cookery. Care to share any recepies? Here's one from my mother:

Easy Skillet Apple Pie

Makes 8 to 10 servings
Hands-On time: 20 mins
Total time: 1 hour 50mins
2 lbs Granny smith apples
2 lbs Braeburn apples
1 tsp freshly ground cinnamon
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 package (14 oz) piecrust
1 egg white
2 Tbs Vanilla Extract
Butter Pecan Ice Cream (optional)

Preheat oven to 350°
Peel and cut apples 1/2" thick slices
Toss apple with cinnamon and granulated sugar

Melt butter in a 10" cast iron skillet over medium heat, stirring constantly for 1-2 minutes until sugar is dissloved
Remove from heat and place 1 piecrust in skillet over brownsugar mixture
Spoon apple mixture over piecrust and top with remaining piecrust
Whisk egg white until foamy
Brush top of piecrust with egg white
Sprinkle with 2 Tbs granulated sugar
Cut 4 to 5 slits in top for steam to escape

Bake 350° for 1 hour or until crust is golden brown and bubbly, shielding with aluminum foil the last 10 minutes to prevent excessive browning
Cool on a wire rack 30 minutes before serving
Serve with a scoop of Butter Pecan Ice Cream if wanted

 

[IByte]

Get the pan hot, have a newyork strip 1/4-1/2 inch thick. Cake it with cracked pepper, sea salt, fresh garlic. Sear both sides for 2-3 minutes. Serve with caramelized onions, garlic potatoes, asparagus spears with your choice of a Spanish red, or medium bodied beer.

Top it off with a night cap of coffee black, single malt scotch, pipe or cigar to add a woodsy after taste.

 

[cgipson1]

2" thick filet of Ahi tuna
Cajun Blackening spice
Butter
Salad of your choice

Put cast iron griddle on portable electric element on High.. or outdoor gas grill burner on High (only do this outdoors.. makes MASSIVE amounts of smoke!)

melt some butter, pour over tuna, and while the butter is still liquid... add Blackening spice to taste. Let the butter set. Flip the fillet.. repeat.When the griddle is as hot as it will get... throw a small slab of butter on the griddle, and as it melts, throw the filet on right in the middle of it.... about 90 seconds. Throw on another small slab of butter and flip the filet onto it.. again about 90 seconds (if you like your Ahi very rare! Increase time if you like it more done!)

Server with salad and beverage of your choice..

Blackening spice
------------------------------
1/2 tablespoons smoked paprika
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon ground dried thyme
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
for some extra kick, add a teaspoon of Chipotle powder

Can substitute a nice 2" thick Ribeye if desired.. cook about 2 minutes per side for rare... Add some cumin seed or fennel seed to the above mix for beef.. yummy!

 

[IByte]

2" thick filet of Ahi tuna
Cajun Blackening spice
Butter
Salad of your choice

Put cast iron griddle on portable electric element on High.. or outdoor gas grill burner on High (only do this outdoors.. makes MASSIVE amounts of smoke!)

melt some butter, pour over tuna, and while the butter is still liquid... add Blackening spice to taste. Let the butter set. Flip the fillet.. repeat.When the griddle is as hot as it will get... throw a small slab of butter on the griddle, and as it melts, throw the filet on right in the middle of it.... about 90 seconds. Throw on another small slab of butter and flip the filet onto it.. again about 90 seconds (if you like your Ahi very rare! Increase time if you like it more done!)

Server with salad and beverage of your choice..

Blackening spice
------------------------------
1/2 tablespoons smoked paprika
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon ground dried thyme
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
for some extra kick, add a teaspoon of Chipotle powder

Can substitute a nice 2" thick Ribeye if desired.. cook about 2 minutes per side for rare... Add some cumin seed or fennel seed to the above mix for beef.. yummy!

Yes beef is always yummy.

 

[amolitor]

I bake bread in a cast iron dutch oven a couple times a week. Pop it into the oven, heat to 500 degrees. Drop in a 1.5 pound round pâton of dough, slash the top and put the cover back on. Place back in the oven and turn the temp down to 475. 20 minutes later take the top off and drop the temp to 450. 20 minutes after that (40 minutes total baking time) remove from oven and turn out onto a rack.

 

[kundalini]

I've got a 4.5Qt Dutch Oven and have been thinking about making some bread with it. What is your recepie for the dough?

 

[Don Kondra]

I use http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html?_r=0

Cheers, Don

 

[amolitor]

Ours is maybe 3qt (at least, I can put 3 quarts of water in and it's pretty much overflowing - maybe that means 2.5 quarts?) and it's about perfect for a one and a half pound loaf.

Normally I make sourdoughs, but if you haven't got an active sourdough culture around, you can use yeast! Something like this should work out pretty well:

The night before mix up 1/4 cup whole wheat flour, 1/4 cup bread flour, half a cup water, and either some sourdough culture OR a good pinch (1/8 tsp?) or instant ("bread machine") yeast, or a 1/4 tsp regular dry yeast. You'll get a sort of slurry. Let this sit out overnight at room temperature. I do this in the mixing bowl I will use to make up dough, and cover with saran wrap. You should have a bubbly/frothy mass of pudding-like stuff by morning.

Some time in the morning, add a cup of water. If the bubbly/frothy mass more or less floats, you did well, the "poolish" or "levain" is mature but not over-ripe.

Now add bread flour 1/3 cup (or so) at a time. Strip for 50-80 strokes for each added 1/3 cup. You'll be adding about 3 cups of flour, more or less. What you're really looking for is a target texture, though, a rather soft dough. If you threw the final result out on the counter, it would flow out after a minute or two into a blob maybe an inch or so thick, roughly. The texture is not that far off of say raw calves liver. It's definitely sticky! You should have stirred enough to get it pretty smooth, but maybe a bit lumpy. That's ok.

Now let it rest half an hour.

Add 1.5 tsp of salt to the dough.

At this point you have two choices:

- knead it thoroughly using a "slap it down until it sticks, stretch it out, fold it over and scrape it up, repeat" technique. See: for 5-10 minutes. He says
20 minutes, but he doesn't stir as much as I do.
- "stretch and fold" every half hour or so for 3 hours or so. This is basically: reach into the bowl and grab the edge of the dough, tug it out long and fold it over. Rotate the bowl 45 degrees or so, and repeat, until you've stretched out most of the dough and folded it over itself.

Either way after 2-4 hours the dough should be smooth and sleek and stretchy and also inflated to something like twice its original volume, maybe a bit less.

Now shape it into a ball, there's a bunch of techniques for this but basically you flatten it out on a heavily floured board, fold it over itself from 3 or 5 sides. Maybe repeat. The BOTTOM side should now be quite smooth and stretched out.

Now place the ball, smooth side DOWN, into a colander or strainer that you've lined with some sort of well floured cloth (it doesn't have to be pretty, the cloth will have folds and stuff -- that's ok. You can also buy pre-lined baskets called bannetons, but I'm cheap). Cover the exposed surface with saran wrap, with a little flour to prevent or minimize sticking. Let it rise until when poked it springs back quite slowly (several seconds) and leaves a little dimple.

Heat the oven to 500 degrees with the dutch oven in it.

Now get a very sharp knife, or a serrated one, and leave it handy. The next bit is scary and dangerous (i.e. awesome!).

Get the dutch oven out of the oven using a lot of oven mitt. It's 500 degrees F, yowza.

Take the saran wrap OFF THE DOUGH. Invert the colander into the dutch oven, so now you have a cloth-covered ball in there. Ease the cloth off carefully. If you tear the dough up some, don't panic, it's FINE. Try not to rip it up too much. Use your handy knife to scrape if necessary. Work quickly but without haste.

Now slash an X or some other shape into the top of the dough, The smooth side should be up. Ideally it will spread after you cut it to reveal a spongy interior.

Get the pre-heated dutch-oven-top out of the oven and put it on the dutch-oven. Now place the entire insanely hot and rather heavy assembly back into the oven without burning the living crap out of yourself. Somehow. I am.. maybe 80 percent on this last bit.

Lower temp to 475, bake 20 minutes, remove dutch oven top, bake an additional 20 minutes, or maybe 22-24 more. Until it looks lovely golden brown.

Now take the slightly less heavy and slightly less hot assembly OUT, invert the loaf onto a rack. You might have to smack the pan to get the loaf to crack loose, but it should pretty much pop out.

--

For your dutch oven you might try a 2 pound loaf, actually, so maybe 1/3 cup whole wheat, 1/3 cup bread flour, pinch yeast, 3/4 cup water (ish). The 1 1/4 cups water and between 3 1/2 and 4 cups flour in the dough, and 2 tsp of salt. Basically I use: 1 cup water, 1 tsp salt and "enough flour to make the dough the right consistency" per pound of bread.

There's TONS of info on the web. You could look up "No Knead Bread" for a variation on the techniques above. All the material above is my particular hybrid technique with stuff drawn from a half a dozen sources, that happens to fit into my schedule for the day pretty well.

 

[terri]

I use http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html?_r=0

Cheers, Don

That loaf looks beautiful, Don! Where's the salad and red wine?? Let's eat!

 

[oldhippy]

Wow thanks for the recipes and video. copied for later.

 

[pic_chick]

I cook only in cast iron I love love love them in the oven or on the stove easy to clean and they are the best nonstick we have ever made.
My fav is corn bread

Mix equal part corn mill and flour
two eggs
dash of salt
about a teaspoon of sugar
butter milk till you get a slightly pourable dough/batter
pour in to your skillet bake at 400 till done

Spicy Corn Bread
all of the above steps but use 1/2 as much butter milk and add spicy salsa in its place
I also add bit of corn and some chillies just a touch and or caramelized onions

sever both with butter or hot sauce( Texas Pete is my fav.)

 

[kundalini]

Ohhh, thanks Don and Andrew for the bread info. Will try soon.

I've done cornbread already pic_chick, but your spicy cornbread sounds like a good twist.

I think I'm doing a pot roast tomorrow in the Dutch Oven. A chuck roast, potatos, onion, carrots, celery and a herb bundle, garlic of course and stewed in a red wine & beef broth sauce. About a 4 hour cook. The beef will top a risotto cake and garnished with watercress, parsley and lemon juice.

Apparently I've been a bad boy lately and need to make ammends. Comfort food always soothes the soul. Then we'll have "the talk".

 

[Don Kondra]

LOL

Good luck with that

Cheers, Don

 

[IByte]

I cook only in cast iron I love love love them in the oven or on the stove easy to clean and they are the best nonstick we have ever made.
My fav is corn bread

Mix equal part corn mill and flour
two eggs
dash of salt
about a teaspoon of sugar
butter milk till you get a slightly pourable dough/batter
pour in to your skillet bake at 400 till done

Spicy Corn Bread
all of the above steps but use 1/2 as much butter milk and add spicy salsa in its place
I also add bit of corn and some chillies just a touch and or caramelized onions

sever both with butter or hot sauce( Texas Pete is my fav.)

Oh no no no you do not clean cast iron ><

 

[amolitor]

Sourdough, baked last night. This is out "daily eating" bread which I make a couple times a week: