Archive for the ‘Cast Iron Cookware’ Category
January 31st, 2010 | 
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With all of the bad advertizing that Teflon and aluminum cookware has received, galore of us are searching for healthful non toxic cookware. It doesn’t make any sense to buy healthful whole foods and then cook them in toxic pots and pans. Although stainless steel cookware has been considered a safe alternative, it does have one drawback. Stainless steel cookware is made with a combining of stainless steel, chromium and nickel. None of these are destructive in little doses, but a great deal of humans are allergic to nickel. If you are allergic to nickel, you must refrain from using stainless steel cookware. Another concern that some persons are not conscious of is that a heap of glazes used on crock pots have little amount of lead. The recommendation is to use terra cotta crock pots without the lead glaze. The best cookware which is healthful and non toxic is anodized aluminum cookware. The procedure used in making the hard anodized aluminum seals the aluminum with an exceedingly hard surface coating which is non-reactive and prevents any aluminum from leaching into the feed we are cooking. The following three companies have splendid hard anodized aluminum cookware sets that are healthful and non toxic: Calphalon is the leading manufacturer but a great deal of other companies are now developing cookware sets made with the hard anodized aluminum. Calphalon cookware cooks evenly on lower heat and is stick-resistant. They have stainless steel handles which will stay cool for the duration of stovetop cooking. The pans and lids may be employed in the oven and broiler. Cuisinart has introduced a line of non-stick cookware called Cuisinart Green Gourmet Hard Anodized Cookware. They work just like the Teflon cookware, except they don’t emit any of the toxic fumes that Teflon pans do. Just like the Teflon pans, they concede you to cook with less oil and they are likewise energy effective and eco-friendly. This Green Gourmet cookware set is oven and broiler safe. KitchenAid has their own set of non-stick anodized aluminum cookware called KitchenAid Gourmet Essentials. This cookware set features stainless steel handles coated with silicone grips. The lids are break immune glass which makes it nice to see what you are cooking. These pots and pans are oven safe up to 400 degrees. All three of these companies cookware sets are highly commended healthful non toxic sets. I use the Kitchen Aid Gourmet Essentials cookware in my kitchen. It is the best value out of the three.
Most helpful customer reviews 6 of 8 people found the following review helpful. Now sure, Lodges “pre-seasoning” isn’t as great as some of the cast iron I own, passed down in the family with a half-century of seasoning. But it’s a darn good start. To keep your cast iron seasoned- never, ever wash with detergent or in the dishwasher. Rinse (or even soak) with very hot water, sometimes even boiling if needed. Dry on a stove burner, on high, watching like a hawk. When it is dry, put a tad of bacon grease or oil on there. Then take it off the heat a minute later, before the oil starts to smoke. Be aware, the handle is cast iron too, so it gets hot. Careful! This cookbook has over 200 mouthwatering recipes “collected from notable chefs and authors, including Rose Levy Beranbaum, John Currence, Julia Reed, and Allison Fishman”. Heavy into “comfort food” of course. Have I tried them all? No, but I have used and gotten raves about Lodges “Camp Dutch Oven Cooking”. My Dutch Oven Camp Roast is a real group favorite. Get your hands on some good cast iron, treat it right, and then treat your family to some of these family favorites. 4 of 6 people found the following review helpful. CONTENT – The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook is paperback, but it has a thick strong cover and binding with a nice matte surface that I think will hold up well in the kitchen after many years. I get my cookbooks pretty dirty, but I think grease should wipe off pretty easily from it. The book is about 80% cast iron recipes, with a lot of short stories from employees and cast iron enthusiasts talking about their love for cast iron or sharing a special memory from cooking with it. There are also a lot of cooking tips scattered throughout that will help ensure your recipes are a success. A few of the stories are mildly interesting, but most I could do without and seem like testimonials that I could just read on the Lodge web site. A lot of things like “I can remember inheriting my grandma Sally’s 40-year old cast iron pan and I make her famous peach cobbler in it every year…” But a lot of people who use cast iron develop a somewhat emotional attachment to it, so stories like this can be a nice touch and don’t seem to take away from the actual recipes. The book contains a total of 191 recipes plus a dozen or so recipes for sauces, etc. There are 92 color pictures, which I feel is a good ratio to the number of recipes. Maybe a couple dozen of the recipes are reprinted from other cookbooks. Two of the recipes are reprinted from Simply Suppers: Easy Comfort Food Your Whole Family Will Love. Some of the recipes are reprinted from A Skillet Full of Traditional Southern Lodge Cast Iron Recipes & Memories. Four recipes are reprinted from Griswold and Wagner Cast Iron Cookbook: Delicious and Simple Comfort Food. This book has a strong focus on outdoor cooking (almost a fourth of the book). They give tips and details on cooking over a campfire and bean hole cooking (digging a hole in the ground and cooking your food in a pot surrounded by hot coals). I like that they have a table for specifying the number of coals you should have when using a bean hole to ensure the proper cooking temperature. It can be easy to just dump a huge pile of coals on top of your oven and overcook your food, which I have done many times with peach cobbler. Table of Contents: Pg. 7. Welcome to the Family’s Table – H. Lee Riddle discussing his great great grandfather Joseph Lodge RECIPES – I have tried around fifteen of the recipes so far, including several of the Cooking Outdoors recipes, which the book contains a lot of. Overall, the recipes are very easy to follow and work well. They are not too complex and I feel that most of them are for cooks at a beginner to intermediate level. The recipes don’t contain a lot of exotic ingredients that you’ll have to go to several different stores to find, which is a plus. For the most part, they are all very traditional, southern recipes that I feel will have a lot of mass appeal. CONS – The main problem with this book, is that it seems like Lodge decided they wanted to make some money on a cookbook, and/or promote their products, so they just gathered a bunch of the best cast iron recipes they could find and threw them together with little effort for cohesion. I don’t have a problem with the cookbook not being entirely original, but I do have a problem in that in order to make all of the recipes by following the instructions, you are going to need to buy about 40 different pieces of cast iron cookware. Lodge’s main sellers are their 12″ and 8″ Skillet. They should have looked at all the recipes, and modified them so that they use a few of the most prominent pieces of cookware. However since the recipes come from different books, they all call for different pan sizes. There is no reason to have 10 recipes using a 10″ cast iron pan, and 10 recipes using a 10.5″ pan. Realistically, it will make little to no difference if you are using a 10″ or 10.5″ pan, but you will see that this problem becomes even more prominent as you look at all of the recipes. Several recipes call for a 7 quart dutch oven, and several just call for a “large dutch oven.” So what is a “large” dutch oven? If I was the editor, I would have modified all of the recipes to say “10″ or 10.5″ skillet,” or included a page about different sizes. Unless you are a complete beginner, you can figure out which pieces of cookware will work as a substitute, but I just think it would have been nice to spend a little time (literally a few hours) and modify the recipes so they all flow together well. Since they didn’t, I will try to below. The following is a listing of all of the different pieces of cookware mentioned in the book, followed by the number of recipes that use them. When a recipe specified that you could use one or the other type of pan, I attributed it to the most common. If a recipe calls for a generic type of cookware, I have added my own recommendation in parenthesis beside it. 5″ Skillet (2) As you can see, they really need some consistency in this book. You don’t have to have all of that cookware, but you will need to know what to substitute. For the cornbread recipes, it’s important that you use the specified size, otherwise your cornbread will be too thin. I would say to make the majority of the recipes in the book, you should have a 10.5″ or Lodge Logic 10-Inch Chef’s Skillet, a Lodge Logic L10SK3 12-Inch Pre-Seasoned Skillet (if you can only get one, go for the 12″), Lodge Logic L8DOL3 Pre-Seasoned 5-Quart Dutch Oven with Loop Handles (the 5 quart), and Lodge Logic 8-Quart Pre-Seasoned Cast-Iron Camp Dutch Oven (if you want to do any of the outdoor cooking). This will give you enough flexibility to handle most of the recipes. Overall, while I think the recipes in the book are fairly solid, it could have used better editing. If you like making cornbread or cooking outdoors with cast iron, this is the book to get. But if you just want a starter cast iron cookbook, I would recommend the The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook: Recipes for the Best Pan in Your Kitchen over this. |
The wolf reviews a cook book
Could use better editing and feels a little rushed, but decent if you want to make cornbread or cook outdoors – 3.5 stars
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