If it bleeds, I’ll eat it – Cast Iron Pans and You

Hey podcastage friends! Pete here again, with a hot take on hot pans. I was at a pizza party last night (FUCK YES PIZZA) and had a conversation that devolved into me evangelizing about the awesomeness of cast iron pans. If you don’t know about cast iron, let me enlighten you. It’s a block of metal shaped into a pan shape that lets you become a cooking maven all while being cheap and easy to maintain. Let me tell you a few things that’ll help you become a cast iron disciple:

 

1)  DO NOT BELIEVE THE HYPE ON OLD ASS PANS.

Old ass pans are already seasoned, are hella expensive, and seriously are hella expensive. They are likely awesome, but do you really want to pay 300 bones for an old ass pan when you could get the same thing for 30 bucks off amazon (Buy it Here) and do it yourself?  If you can consistently cook with the thing, or follow some directions online you can get a pan that is as great for a tenth of the price. In the end you’ll end up with your own old ass pan that you can sell in 50 years for like 1000 space China dollars and put your future robot cyborg offspring through Mars college.

2)  TAKE CARE OF YOUR PAN AND IT WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU

Remember, that cast iron is iron and will rust if you let it get wet and not dry it. This sounds worse than it actually is, but it’s important to remember that chemistry happens. After cleaning with just some water and elbow grease, toss in on the stove top and let the water evaporate from the heat.

3)  BELIEVE THE HYPE ON COOKING EVERYTHING IN THIS THING

Let me tell you something, cooking is easy and good for you (since I started cooking for myself I’ve lost a few lbs) and people think you’re really talented when you are actually a bum/vagrant/slum lord/swamp donkey/podcastage host. I’ve served meals to my parents off this thing, and they seriously thought I had my shit figured out. You can cook pizza (YES), meat (YES), and even corn bread (YES YES) and best of all it all tastes great. Down below check out my patented meat cooking kata, so you too can be a badass of the kitchen

Basically get a pan, cook stuff in it, have things taste good, get the girl, save the kingdom, and become an acolyte of the iron. Sound off down below if you have any awesome recipes, questions, or want to just pledge your allegiance to the pan. Talk to you soon friends.

-Pete


CAST IRON MEAT PETE STYLE

1)      Pre-heat your oven, with the pan in it, to 500. The most important part is making sure the pan is hot, you’ll be using this to sear the meat when it’s time to cook. I usually will wait for a while after the timer goes off just to make sure the pan actually gets up to the desired temp.

2)      Take the pan out, and remember THE PAN IS REALLY REALLY HOT. Do not touch it, unless you have some mits on. After it’s out, put the pan on your stove top and put your piece of meat in that pan.

3)      Sear both sides, and then put pan with meat into the oven for 5 minutes.

4)      Remove pan after the 5 minutes and flip the piece of whatever. This is when you’ll need to do some right sizing to how you like your meat cooked. Depending on the thickness you’ll cook anywhere for 2-5 minutes to finish it up to your desired well doneness.

5)      Take it out of the pan and eat it.