I can’t decide between these 2 types of broiling pans. What do you think is best?
vs.
Granite Ware tends to be a quality product. My mother has a roast thing from them that she’s used for as long as I’ve been alive and never had issues with it. The other one might work fine, but it looks kind of cheap and crappy to me.
I don’t broil steaks and you shouldn’t either. Best way to cook a steak indoors is to sear in a extremely hot pan with a silver dollar of vegetable oil for 2.5m, then flip and roast in a 400F oven until it reaches the internal temperature you want (125F for medium-rare). Then rest for a full 5 minutes and eat.
I only broil vegetables when I’m looking for a char, to peel poblano peppers or for that charred roasty tomato taste for a sauce. I roast vegetables all the time, on the other hand, in the same 400F oven. Use an untreated aluminum half-sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Then take your vegetables and coat with olive oil, salt, and pepper, single-layer in the half sheet pan, and roast until tender. This works great with cauliflower (slice thin, looks like cross-sections of a brain, gets crispy like french fries!), brussels sprouts, asparagus, etc. Works for potatoes too but I usually just bake those dry. If you want to roast potatoes, use yukon gold fingerlings and slice lengthwise first, add rosemary.
Now a roasting pan you may need, for roasting large pieces of meat, like a roast beef or a chicken. But you don’t broil there. Roasting pans have a rack that keeps the meat off the bottom of the pan, so air can circulate, the meat doesn’t sit in juice and braise, and it cooks evenly. Personally though, I don’t have one. I just toss some root vegetables and quartered onions in the bottom of my large saute pan to keep the meat off the bottom and pop it in the oven. Works fine, and you get tasty turnips/potatoes.
I don’t broil steaks and you shouldn’t either. Best way to cook a steak indoors is to sear in a extremely hot pan with a silver dollar of vegetable oil for 2.5m, then flip and roast in a 400F oven until it reaches the internal temperature you want (125F for medium-rare). Then rest for a full 5 minutes and eat.
This.
On a cast iron skillet. Restaurant quality every time.
I use vegetable oil on the steak not the pan and a 500F oven, but this is basically the method I use (shamelessly stolen from Alton Brown).
So much better than broiling.
I nearly always steam veg (to keep the most of their nutrition value). Meat it depends, is their a nutrition advantage to broiling it? I generally pan fry steak, but we are not steak mad in the uk, so you Americans/Australians/South Africans will know the best i suspect.
Wow, talk about me being clueless!
OK Jon, can you suggest a cast iron skillet? Also, one thing I never understood. If you, well skillets are seasoned and you don’t clean them like normal correct? So you put crisco or oil on them or something and have them sit around like that. How in the world do people not get food poisoning from that? Doesn’t it go rancid at some point? If you don’t have a lot of space for storage, doesn’t it get all icky touching other pans?
You don’t glob on bacon grease and leave it sit for a week. Fat gets burned into the pan to form the seasoning and then you can lightly coat it with vegetable oil (which won’t turn rancid before you cook with it next) while you’re not using it. This will help protect the pan, and also gives the seasoning another layer the next time you fire it up. That step is pretty unnecessary though if you already have a good seasoning on it.
To clean them, it’s best to do so right after use when it’s still warm. That way it’s still easy to wipe and rinse off. If something does get dried out or burned onto the pan, do not scrub it or use soap. Instead, put water in it and put it on high heat. The boiling water should release just about anything stuck on there and won’t damage the coating.
So no soap to clean a seasoned pan? That idea is so foreign to me. So to clean - just wipe off and rinse with water, but boil with water if something is stuck in there? Can you keep these in a giant ziploc bag to keep them from getting other pans greasy or would that potentially give you botulism (no air environment)? Yea, I’m pretty dumb when it comes to this stuff but want to learn.
Did you mean flip and sear the other side for 2.5 min, then roast in oven
…or…
flip it over to roast at 400F?
The first few times it will be a pain to clean a cast iron skillet while it’s still getting season. And you’ll question is this really worth the effort. But after that it works great.
A cast iron skillet will get hot, very very hot so I don’t know how you clean it immediately after cooking as it’s too hot to even touch. I usually wait about half an hour or so when it’s cooled down to where I can safely handle it with my bare hand. It’s still warm/hotish and I rinse it with hot water and scrub it with one of these type of brushes for a bit to remove any food particle. If it’s really stuck on there, you can use a plastic scrapper or sometimes the brush has a scrapper on them too that you can use. Or put some salt into the pan and that works too. Afterwards I would dry it off with a paper towel and put it on the stove for a minute to make sure it was completely dry. Also I used to grease the pan before storing but I stopped doing that cause I gotten a bit lazy and I don’t think it made much of a difference.
Obviously I wouldn’t do it if it were scorching hot, but I do have these things called oven mittens that allow me to grasp hot things without getting the hot on my skin. With this tool, I can clean the pan while the handle is still uncomfortably warm to bare skin.
And yes, a dish cleaning brush is what you’d use.
If you really don’t want to deal with the seasoning you can get an enameled cast iron skillet instead like these “9” or 11". They are way, way more expensive though.
You can also get a pre-seasoned cast iron skillet which is comparatively rather inexpensive.
Here’s a couple links outlining the differences:
http://www.derekoncastiron.com/2009/02/article-enameled-cast-iron-vs-bare-un.html
http://wagnercastironskillet.com/enameled-cast-iron-vs-cast-iron/
One thing you can use a broiler for … awesome pizza. Turn over a cast iron skillet and leave it under the broiler for a whiles. Leave about 3-4 inches between flames and skillet bottom-surface. Slide your za onto the bottom and about 2 minutes later it’ll get the nice crust of brown goodness crispness and yet chewiness. I’d been making my own dough for about 3 or 4 years and kept hitting a wall. I was cooking my pizzas too long using a pizza stone on the bottom the oven. Was about to build a clay oven in the backyard.
Watch out though. The broiler will probably burn off any seasoning on the skillet :( so maybe this isn’t a good idea if house poorly ventilated. I’m going to get a separate cast iron griddle for 10 bucks just for this use (oh no, uni-tasker). I think the broiler would get a pizza stone too hot and it would shatter.
A few months ago I learned the trick of using a cast-iron skillet for reheating pizza. Wow, what a difference that makes. I warm up the skillet 5 minutes to get it nice and hot. Then I toss on the Pizza slices and cover for 10 minutes and it comes out just terrific.
That’s pretty much the pan I have. Although it says preseasoned it kind of really isn’t or it’s just really shitty. You really just need to cook and use it yourself to get it to that nice black seasoning that is desired.
The broiler is supposed to be great for making pizza at home, if you’re really into doing it right.
I don’t bother with a cast-iron pan. I used to have one and got rid of it. They’re a pain in the ass to maintain, and new cast iron is “bumpy”, not like the really cool smooth griswold pans. Sear in a heavy stainless steel saute pan with dual-wall construction (stainless/aluminum/stainless) and a metal handle. Put in the oven immediately after flipping. You still get a decent amount of maillard crust on the second side and your smoke alarms won’t go off.
Do not use a non-stick pan. The coating isn’t stable above 450F. It can vaporize and is poisonous; it can actually kill small birds. Last thing you in particular need.
After taking out of the oven, I often remove the steak, toss in a couple mushrooms (white buttons are fine) and shallots to brown, then deglaze with inexpensive red wine and stir in a bit of cold butter to make a pan sauce. Tasty stuff. If you don’t have any wine on hand, cheap (ie, not aceto balsamico tradizionale) balsamic vinegar works great too, reduces to a delicious glaze.
Ugh, yes. I got one of the new-school “bumpy” cast iron pans a couple of years back. I’ve seasoned with veg oil (actually terrible to do initial seasoning with–it polymerizes at high heat and turns into sticky residue rather than solid black coating) and shortening both, multiple times, and cook bacon and/or sausage in it every weekend, alongside sauteed chicken in butter or olive oil about every two weeks. There’s definitely black stuff in the pan by this point, but the bumpiness of the iron is still very evident to the fingertips, so meat residue tends to stick and burn on during cooking, necessitating regular cleaning with a kitchen brush or paper towel + kosher salt (better than regular salt for the cleaning task, BTW).
I would never dream of doing something legitimately at risk of sticking to the bottom like eggs or even bake in it, since the bread would tear to all high heaven on the way back out.
It’s great for applying high, even heat quickly and efficiently, so I keep it around, but I’ve given up the notion of ever getting a real slick-as-snot seasoning on it.
Stusser, I’m stuffed from dinner, but your last post has made me super hungry. I want to cook that ASAP including all the vegetables the way you wrote. Wow I am so excited!
Ok so on those all-clad steel pans. Do they have seasoning or flavor built in or you season them? Or that that just for cast iron skillets.
That’s just for cast iron. All-clad steel does not need any seasoning. I think they recommend giving them a wash with warm water and detergent when you get them and then you’re good to go. Most (but not all) of the All-Clad collections are also dishwasher safe, so much easier to deal with then cast iron.