Cookware! Who wanta some?

[FooTemps]

Alright, all blatant references aside...

Who here uses cast iron or carbon steel cookware?

I have an 11", 8", and 5" cast iron skillets along with a 14" carbon steel wok. Just got them all recently and have only cooked using them a couple times. The skillets were easy to season and cook with, but that damn wok is a pain in the butt to get started... couldn't evenly heat it and I couldn't evenly coat it. Just made some fried rice and chicken. Down with non-stick coating!

[Carbon]

man...i live with the sheer terror of owning a cast iron skillet and an electric stove

[punkncat]

Long live the cast iron skillet!!!!

[FooTemps]

man...i live with the sheer terror of owning a cast iron skillet and an electric stove

lol, you're not the only one... my house I'm renting doesn't have a gas stove either... it's sad.

[CaliMagFan]

if you have to use an electric range it might as well be WITH cast iron cookware. anything else will just amplify the fact that you dont have even heat for the most part.

am i missing something about this issue?

[Hexis]

Electric also lacks the raw BTUs for real foodies.

[MoeMag]

Gas FTW. My gas cooktop is awsome. Its one of those downdraft grill top things. gas grittle cooked bacon eggs and panckakes. mmmmmm
Its great cause a friend of mine got me this really shnazzy handmade wok and I just remove one of the burner tops and put the ring the wok sits on around that and let the flames fly. Droole.

/really hungry right now.
//nothing to cook
///no one to cook for

[robnix]

Gas FTW. My gas cooktop is awsome. Its one of those downdraft grill top things. gas grittle cooked bacon eggs and panckakes. mmmmmm
Its great cause a friend of mine got me this really shnazzy handmade wok and I just remove one of the burner tops and put the ring the wok sits on around that and let the flames fly. Droole.

/really hungry right now.
//nothing to cook
///no one to cook for

I wish we had gas, but we don't. So we settled on a nice radiant cooktop. Cast iron hardware is so nice to have around.

[Lohman446]

Gas + good stainless steel cookware FTW

[FooTemps]

if you have to use an electric range it might as well be WITH cast iron cookware. anything else will just amplify the fact that you dont have even heat for the most part.

am i missing something about this issue?

like hexis said... need the heats to make the foods.

especially with a wok.

(like i said, the cast iron makes life easy... the wok is the one that's a pain in the ***)

[CaliMagFan]

like hexis said... need the heats to make the foods.

especially with a wok.

(like i said, the cast iron makes life easy... the wok is the one that's a pain in the ***)

well i get what you're saying, but most electric ranges hit the smokepoint of most cooking oils near their medium heat output... which leads me to believe that you're full of baloney... hehe not really, but if you're going to sear a cold steak, you can just turn the heat up. Somewhere in the 500 degree range, good luck getting an oil to go with you to that range. Maybe clarified butter or one of the "baller" pure expeller presses of a soy oil. i dunno. i can understand that cooking on a wok can be hard, but they're not supposed to be used on a range.. there is a special gas "stove top" for woks. would you use a cardboard tube as the barrel on your paintball gun and then complain about its poor perfomance? no... right tools, right job... nuff said.

[Carbon]

man...i want a wok badly!

[SCpoloRicker]

My moran of a roommate from Georgia got caught washing our wok with soap the other day.

[robnix]

well i get what you're saying, but most electric ranges hit the smokepoint of most cooking oils near their medium heat output... which leads me to believe that you're full of baloney... hehe not really, but if you're going to sear a cold steak, you can just turn the heat up. Somewhere in the 500 degree range, good luck getting an oil to go with you to that range. Maybe clarified butter or one of the "baller" pure expeller presses of a soy oil. i dunno. i can understand that cooking on a wok can be hard, but they're not supposed to be used on a range.. there is a special gas "stove top" for woks. would you use a cardboard tube as the barrel on your paintball gun and then complain about its poor perfomance? no... right tools, right job... nuff said.

I think where the original post on the heat topic was going was that electric burners don't heat evenly. However, the biggest reason for this is people using cheap, warped cookware that's simply not an even thickness throughout, not the coil. Gas is much more forgiving in this regard, unless of course you don't clean your burners regularly. The biggest advantage to gas is the level of control you get over your flame, and the speed at which it comes to temp.

A nice compromise is the glass top radiant stoves. We had one in our old house, and liked it so much that we bought one to replace a working electric coil stove in our new house. 4 burners, two with adjustable sizes, a warming burner, and a convection oven with a broil element that acts as a second baking element. They heat quickly, the temparture adjusts quickly, and it's super easy to the clean the surface.

[Hexis]

I needs me some dual fuel loving. Was going to get a nice range, damn medical bills.

Cooking aint cooking unless fire is involved somewhere.

Woks need to be nasa hot to cook the right way. They lack thermal mass, so even if the oil breaks a bit, as soon as you toss cold/room temp food in there, the whole things drops in temp. AB suggests using an outdoors turkey fryer burner for wok cooking. Not only are they cheap, but you are not putting all that thermal energy in your house (bad in Sumer, would be good in Winter).