Cooking with Salt & Fat

Salt & Fat is a lovely food blog maintained by two guys, Neven Mrgan and Jim Ray, who spend their days developing software and web products and every other moment, apparently, thinking about food, and the making and eating of it. The name tips you that this isn't going to be a one of those oppressively good-for-you food-blog experiences. It's also not one of those sites that paints cooks as a kind of priesthood and cooking itself as something rarified, distant and difficult. In fact, as Ray noted in an introductory post on the day he and Mrgan started the site three months ago,

...people think cooking is too hard. Or takes too much time. I'd say the biggest marketing message is that we're constantly being told we're too busy (not necessarily too stupid, but I suppose that's an implication in all mass marketing) to bother to cook a meal, here's a meal-in-a-box full of sodium, preservatives and saturated high fructose whatnot. Let's put a stop to that.

Today's entry on the cast-iron skillet is a good example of what the site does so well -- deliver a large quantity of useful information in a way that's brisk and sensible. There's a food-lovers' maxim to the effect that if you want to judge a new restaurant you shouldn't order the most complicated thing on the menu, you should order the simplest, because a kitchen that can turn out perfect scrambled eggs probably has its house in order. That's the sense you get from reading Ray's post on the iron skillet, which is the scrambled eggs of food blog topics -- the sort of basic entry that underpins everything else. When Ray answers, once and for all, the question of how to clean your iron skillet (and debunks the "Grandma never cleaned hers, not once, and she lived to be two hundred" myth) you know you're in good hands.

Full disclosure: I clean my skillet just as Ray advises. It's a huge, hulking, heavy thing I bought at Target, because there's another old maxim -- I've seen it attributed to Michael Ruhlman, but haven't been able to confirm that independently -- that anybody who pays more than 12 bucks for a skillet is a freakin' idiot.

• [Beanolini]

  This is good, but the post they link to on the same subject is even better.

  Mentioning scrambled eggs is dangerous in this context- you’ll end up breaking all the cleaning rules if you make them in your cast iron pan.

• [Teller]

  God, I miss Phil Hartman.

• [SamSam]

  I clean my now-ten-years-old cast iron pans in much the same way, except: 1) those Dobie nylon sponges work very well on cast iron, much better than the paper towel recommended, and 2) the damage that a little soap does to a pan is often greatly over-stated, e.g. stated in all-caps as in the article. Actually, if you’ve got a thick layer of grease from deep-frying your pomme frites, a couple drops of soap with plenty of hot water will get rid of it much faster than going through ten paper towels, isn’t at all bad for a well-seasoned pan if used sparingly, and prevents pans from getting that rancid-oil smell I’ve noticed on some people’s pans who don’t wash them properly. To be sure, soap is generally not needed, but there’s no need to be fetishistic about it.

• [DanielZKlein]

  Content aside, that is one beautifully designed site. I do approve. I wonder, though, why they’d use short-hand for the byline and then swap it out with javascript? The code being:

  if(document.getElementsByClassName){
  bylines = document.getElementsByClassName(‘byline’);

  for(var i=0; i bylines[i].firstChild.nodeValue = bylines[i].firstChild.nodeValue.replace(/mrgan/g, “Neven Mrgan”);
  bylines[i].firstChild.nodeValue = bylines[i].firstChild.nodeValue.replace(/jimray/g, “Jim Ray”);
  }
  }

  There’s got to be a good reason for this!

• [thebelgianpanda]

  Hey, they have the same sausage stuffer I use, and it looks like they live less than a hundred miles away from me :)

  http://saltandfat.com/post/453931347/how-the-sausage-gets-made
  vs.
  http://cheeseaday.blogspot.com/2010/03/moar-sausage.html

  Specifically it is this beast: http://www.amazon.com/LEM-Products-Vertical-Stainless-Sausage/dp/B000SQDTRC
  I cannot stress how wonderful the build quality is. It’s a joy to use.

• [randalll]

  I’ve been tempted by those inexpensive Target pans for years but my cooking snobbery had convinced me that they were probably crap. I still am without cast iron in my kitchen. I should really just pick one of those up the next time I’m at Target.

• [Matt J]

  Because Tumblr has some fairly rigid template options. Basically, all customisation has to be done within the page’s HTML template, and there’s no dynamic way of showing longer author names.

• [Anonymous]

  Ignore the folklore. I wash it out with one single drop of soap, and every 4th or 6th usage, heat it on medium high for a few minutes, pour a teaspoon of peanut oil in it, fold a paper towel several times to avoid gettin’ burnt, wipe the oil around, then cook it for a minute.

• [Mobile Bacon]

  We bought one of those Target skillets almost 20 years ago. It is indeed huge, heavy, and hulking, and is still the best and most frequently used piece of cookware in our kitchen.

• [gabrielm]

  My cast iron just cracked. Thanks for rubbing it in…

  • [MrsBug]

    Oh lordy, that’s horrible. I’m having a moment of silence for you. I think if I lost my favorite pan (looks like your’s), I’d probably cry.

    I love cast iron. Love it enough to marry it.

  • [Anonymous]

    That pan appears to be very thin, from the picture. You will notice the 100+ year old pans are all very thick and heavy. Iron becomes very brittle when cast too thin, because the surface iron is different from the center, and on a thin pan there’s effectively no center.

    Get an old one for $5 at a yard sale and it won’t crack.

• [jetfx]

  I was just using mine this evening for making potato pancakes. I found it in my barn last year and have used it ever since.

• [bcsizemo]

  True that about the aluminum and tomatoes…if anything that would be more reactive than the cast iron. Well at least you wouldn’t taste the aluminum like the iron, but I’m sure it’s not good for you either.

  I use my cast iron some, but I do love my Calphalon try-ply stainless and my wife’s never ending collection of Le Creuset (which works great for those all day tomato sauces.)

• [Anonymous]

  All well and good, except for the part where they suggest that you cook acidic foods (i.e. tomato butter sauce) in aluminum. Given the known health risks of that, I really wouldn’t trust these guys to tell me anything that I don’t already know.

  • [Astin]

    They do have “(preferably anodized)” when talking about cooking acidic things in aluminum. You know, so the aluminum isn’t exposed to the acids?

    4 cast iron pans of various sizes, all cleaned similarly to their method (except I dry the pan by heating it on an element and then adding oil once the water is gone, quasi-seasoning it each time).

• [Anonymous]

  The family skillet was passed down to me. Legend says my great grandma’s parents brought it with them on the wagon when the family moved from IL to OK in the late 1800′s. All I know is it’s HUGE, heavy, and the exterior is encrusted from years and years of cooking over open flames. The inside is slick as any teflon pan, and it’s absolutely non-stick to use. Grandma’s advice – clean it with a dobie pad and a couple drops of soap. Clean it right after you get the food out, while it’s still warm, then wipe it down with oil. I can’t argue, she seemed to know what she was doing judging by the condition of the pan!

  I rarely use the pan, it’s too big for our family. I prefer my 12″ pan, which is at least 10 years old now and is the workhorse in our kitchen. I got tired of throwing away scratched up teflon pans every couple years, switched to cast iron and haven’t bought a pan since.

  • [bellhalla]

    My grandmother gave me one of her cast iron skillets that had been handed down to her. She didn’t know how old it was, but the name of the company on the bottom and the location give me a hint that perhaps her family bought it in Alabama before moving to Texas in 1855.

• [absimiliard]

  This site is awesome.

  -abs is totally bookmarking it once he gets home

• [Jerry Kindall]

  We’ve got two cast-iron skillets. One is the normal kind, the other is a grill pan. Very nice sear marks from that on meat!