Back When? Cast Iron: Yesterday and Today A Cowboy and his Pans...

They look old-school and heavy, like something out of a pioneer’s covered wagon. But cast-iron pans still have a place in the modern kitchen. Cowboy Kent Rollins uses cast iron to cook everything from seared steaks and bacon to fried eggs and biscuits. Born in Hollis, Oklahoma, Rollins learned to cook from his mother starting when he was 9 or 10 years old. “I‘d get in the kitchen with a bunch of old women after church and I’d watch them cook, and none of them ever had a recipe,” he said. The food was always amazing, and much of the cooking was done with cast iron. Rollins started guiding elk hunters in New Mexico in the 1980s, which required him to cook for groups. In 1992, he bought an 1876 Studebaker chuckwagon—a covered, horse-drawn wagon decked out to function as a kitchen on wheels—and in 2015, he published “A Taste of Cowboy,” the first of his three cookbooks where he cooks exclusively with cast iron. Why Cook With Cast Iron? It’s durable. “It’s been around forever, and if you take care of it, it'll outlive all of us,” Rollins said. His oldest pan, which was his grand mother’s, is at least 120 years old. It’s better for you. “Cast iron is the healthiest thing you eat out of,” Rollins said, referring to risks of chemicals in Teflon, and leaching metals in copper or cheap stainless steel pans. But the biggest surprise for the uninitiated is that cast-iron pans are nonstick when well-seasoned and used properly. In fact, complaints about cast iron often come down to improper care. How to Properly Season a Cast Iron Pan When oil is heated in a cast-iron pan at a high temperature, it adheres to the surface in a hardened, blackened layer that’s difficult to remove. That’s good, because you want it there: This “seasoning” creates an effective non-stick surface. To create this effect, preheat the oven to 400 to 450 degrees F, and place a wire rack flat on a cookie sheet on the middle rack of the oven. Wipe down the entire pan—inside, outside, and handle—with an oil with a high smoke-point, such as grapeseed or avocado oil. Then place the pan upside down on the wire rack and let it “bake” for an hour. Rollins recommends repeating this two or three times. Let the skillet cool to room temperature each time before wiping it with oil again. It may not turn solid black right away. “It’s going to have some bronze to it, it’s going to have some splotching in it, but eventually, it'll be a golden glossy black finish that will let you be the best cook in the world,” he said. Many new pans come pre-seasoned, but the cooking surface is rough. “They claim the roughness of the cast iron to start out with will help the seasoning adhere to it better,” Rollins said. If he gets such a pan, he sands it down a bit to polish it—“not to where it’s down to bare metal, just to sort of get the rough off”—and follows his own seasoning process as usual. “I can slide an egg out of any cast-iron skillet I got,” Rollins said. To Soap or Not to Soap? Soap is an emulsifier; it allows fats and oils to mix with water— something they don’t normally do—and be washed away. Since seasoning is a hard layer of oil, soap can potentially weaken it, especially when combined with scratching and scraping brushes. “Back in the day,” Rollins said, soaps could be much harsher than modern ones, but he still plays it safe today. Start cleaning by wiping out any excess grease and bits of leftover food. Pour steaming-hot water into the pan, scrape it around, pour it out, and rinse it one more time. Repeat if needed. Once cleaned, wipe it dry and place it on a hot burner until it’s hot and completely dry, then wipe it with oil. Rollins does make one exception for his no-soap rule—when he fries fish in his dutch oven—advising only to ever use soap with a pan that is well seasoned. Note that certain acidic foods, such as tomato paste or barbecue sauce, can be hard on cast iron, especially if the pan isn’t well-seasoned. Rollins cooks acidic foods in cast iron, but only in pans that have been seasoned and polished for many years. Bringing an Old Pan Back to Life Find that rusty $2 hidden gem at a garage sale? It’s time to restore it. Rollins recommends starting with a rotary brush on a drill to polish it. He uses coarse salt, vinegar, and baking soda to remove rust. A self cleaning oven cycle also works for a pan in very bad condition. But he warns that you should put it on a wire rack over a baking sheet, “because that stuff flakes off and gets in the bottom of the oven”— a hard-learned lesson that earned him “some of the best scoldings I ever got from my mother.” Then he rinses it out well with hot water, puts it on a burner to dry, and begins the seasoning process. “I just want to tell people if this was good enough that people used it from the 1880s till now, and it’s still on the market, this has got to be some of the best stuff ever.”