Cooking with Cast Iron

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The cast-iron skillet is one of the most popular cookware items on the market. iStockphoto.com/Elke Dennis

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When Food Network stars Mario Batali and Paula Deen, genius Mexican restaurateur Rick Bayless and domestic diva Martha Stewart are all pitching lines of cast iron, you know it has to be scorching.

When French stalwart Le Creuset, longtime makers of Dutch ovens for the gourmet class, serves up its old faithful designs in colors like Kiwi and Caribbean Blue, there’s got to be some serious luring of youthful tastes going on.

If you talk to kitchen connoisseurs – from cowboy cook-off champs to trendy chefs – one pan rules them all. There’s one pan you want if you were stranded on a desert island, or had to move into a new home with hungry mouths to feed and no luggage but what you can fit in the trunk of a Prius.

That pan would be the cast-iron skillet.

The conductive quality of cast iron smoothes out the uneven heat of the crankiest electric burners, gently sweats onions, brings frying oil to just the right temperature and keeps it there. The skillet leaps into service to flatten a chicken breast, crush cookie crumbs or, in a pinch, hammer a nail or clobber a mouse. Iron puts the perfect crust on corn bread, releases frittatas without regrets. You can sear a sesame-crusted salmon fillet one moment, rinse the pan, wipe it clean with a paper towel and then poach pears for dessert. Fire it up dry to toast nuts or spices. Plop it on a wooden cutting board at the table to keep a gratin warm. Exploit its willingness to go from stovetop to oven to table. Use it. Use it again.

Cast iron sees frequent use as proof of your love.

Perry and Rosalind Wells of Loveland, Colorado, surely love theirs. They do most of their everyday cooking in pans that bear on their bottoms the mark of Griswold, a foundry in Erie, Pennsylvania, that began operating in 1865 and sold its operations to Wagner in 1952. Griswold and Wagner pans are collectibles that can sell for hundreds of dollars, especially the rarer sizes and cast-iron muffin, or “gem,” pans.

But the Wellses found most of theirs at relatives’ estate sales or at flea markets for as little as $30. They’re especially fond of a pan they call their “chicken cooker” – a deep, Griswold skillet that came with a second, shallower skillet that fits onto it and can be used as a lid. “The versatility of that set is just wonderful,” says Perry Wells, who believes the pan belonged to his father’s second wife.