From the desk of Willie Delwiche.
A strange thought occurred to me as I was cracking eggs into a well-seasoned pan over the weekend: cast iron pans and technical analysis have a lot of similarities.
This might sound a little crazy, but the idea is worth pursuing. Bear with me while I give it a shot…
Growing up, my family didn’t often use cast iron pans. They had a reputation for being hard to use. On the rare occasions that I did use one, food would burn and stick to the pan. So I was stuck with inferior results and lots of cleanup.
We preferred Teflon-coated cookware. Teflon benefitted from great advertising and the promise of progress. They seemed miraculous at first. But the coating would chip over time and bits of it ended up in the food. Still, the cast iron went unused.
But our problems with cast iron had nothing to do with the material. It was how we were using these pans that caused our issues. We didn’t understand how we needed to season a cast iron pan with oil. Also, using too much soap on clean up destroys the finish you worked to build up.
Now I know the more a cast iron pan is properly used, the more useful it becomes.