3 Ways We Use Cast Iron

hello welcome to my kitchen i'm andrew and i really enjoy cooking one of the things i find most enjoyable about cooking is trying to improve trying to learn how to do the things that i'm doing a little bit better one of the best ways i've found to do that is to see what other people do and find out why it is that they do the things that they do with food in this series a group of us all make different dishes featuring one specific ingredient and then compare notes it could be a favorite dish of ours it could be something we've never made before but want to challenge ourselves a simple snack the point is to share things we're interested in chat about it and maybe we'll learn something although i can't guarantee that last part in this episode it actually won't be a specific ingredient but a specific piece of cooking equipment the cast iron pan alvin inca and i all made different dishes using our cast irons and now we'll discuss hello alvin and inco hi andrew hello so we've all already made our recipes we don't know what each other has made but adam has compiled the footage for us to watch so alvin why don't we start with you i made a upside down apple tart which is a take on the french tart tatang a sweet i was not expecting a sweet there's a lot of apples in this i decided to go with honey crisp because i read that the best sort of baking apple there's a lot of structure so you're just peeling a lot of apples and i'm not very good at this so it's taking me you know quite some time and i had a lot of apples to get through so as the engineer oh no no what are you doing alvin i went to columbia for engineering uh didn't really finish it but is that what they do there this is holy moly that works so well though it is right but it's so scary so i found this nice little video on youtube.com because i was like i do not want to peel 30 apples and it works sometimes all right i just gotta say for kids who are watching this like please yeah please be careful please be sanitary i made sure to clean and wipe down everything before i did it you saw the juice spray on that last one oh this is so scary i like that bravo alvin i think this is just there's a little higher risk here and that's why i think i like i'd be i'd rather just take my time and peel my apples but that's that's me yeah also you got a sticky drill at the end i'm sure please don't try this at home it's probably not the safest thing to do i'm just a very lazy person so that's why i did that but the rest of it is pretty traditional you know taking out the core and this is my cast iron this is a 10 inch lodge cast iron i got it for like 10 bucks it's been with me for a while fun fact i really enjoy cleaning and taking care of it at the end so every time i'm cooking with it i'm more excited to like clean it and like polish it up and then i don't know if that's weird that's probably really weird that's not weird that's great so i like using cast iron for a lot of things in this case i'm making a caramel brown sugar water waiting until this is a nice shot here's my question though do you have a hard time judging if the sugar is at the burning point because you're doing it in a dark pan that is a very good question i've made caramel toffee sugar i've dealt with this so many times that personally i kind of know it tells me when it's ready but i agree that if i was in a dark kitchen it would be very very hard to judge but the thing with this caramel is that i'm adding water so it's really helping me have that safety net of not going over and there's butter to kind of bring it all together oh but if you're making this at home i would say that either use a candy thermometer or just like be slower on the heat i've just made this so much that i'm pretty aggressive when i cook this kind of thing wait i'm i'm really curious is there a difference in flavor of caramel when you cook it in cast iron versus another pan i have no clue it might taste like whatever you cooked the night before in it also what if i cooked steak in that before well i guess that's why you clean it but okay this is kind of where things take a long time this is like 15 entire honey crisp apples you cook them in the caramel and the sugar from the caramel starts to pull out all the water from the apple so it starts to bubble and get juicy i could just eat this straight it's so good but the thing is it takes an hour for all the water to sort of come out reduce and condense and you get this really delicious apple caramel and because the cast iron is only so big i could only do half at a time so i literally spent two to three hours just like babysitting and turning babysitting apples do you think the heavy nature of the cast iron helps with that long cook time i think cast iron is great for these long slow reduction sorts of things because it holds heat but it also doesn't get too hot at the bottom of the pan because it's thicker if i were to do this in an aluminum or stainless steel pan i would be stirring it like so many times because the bottom is so thin that the heat would go through really quickly and probably burn with thinner pans you're like chasing that temperature range and it's like oh too hot gotta turn it down oh too too low it's not doing anything yeah and i think cast iron is also great for caramel because if you're seasoning it properly the sugar doesn't stick it's almost like its own non-stick thing when you're cooking things like caramel or sugar it looks so good though i would just put vanilla ice cream on that and eat it straight out of the pan there's like five of them missing because i was just snacking the whole time all those apples really condensed because every single one of those 15 apples fits into this cast iron which is funny because it took me two batches to get through all of it in the same hand oh wow i'm just a huge fan of like reduced flavors concentrating you know like bubbling down and condensed so i think i really like this dish because of that this is some butter puff pastry i love puff pastry i don't want to make it but the butter one is especially good because it's way more delicious like they literally say on the front butter puff pastry cutting out a circle to match it poking out some holes for ventilation perfect fit yeah how did you know that that plate would fit perfectly i i took the plate and i put it on top of the cast iron and i found a plate that matched the sort of the edges i like this sticking the spoon in around the perimeter that looks very satisfying it's also important because if we if you don't do that the whole thing just kind of spills out and the puff pastry kind of goes everywhere and i i've made mistakes like that before this also bakes for a very long time like i put this in at 375 400 for like an hour and 15 minutes because the water in the apples is still coming out it's still reducing and you need the puff pastry to get brown and rice so i was so scared i was gonna burn it the funny thing about this dish is that it's technically five ingredients it's apples sugar butter puff pastry maybe some salt but the time and the effort is really long it's a little amount of ingredients but the preparation takes a long time like the rest i rested this for like an hour and a half so it can cool down and this was very scary this is like the moment of truth very very very nervous light was fading no more time to shoot i was like alvin come on oh wow that looks so nice it's like a show-stopper oh my god it looks incredible it's like the best part of making this thing is once you reveal it you're like oh it actually worked it almost like created its own glaze you know usually we have to glaze it again but it's just like perfectly shiny yeah yeah it's crazy that whole thing is like it really is kind of just apples fruit is really incredible i want to eat it that looks great how is the cleanup on that pan i really honestly just scrubbed it out and seasoned it it was really easy because the water helps sort of take out the sugar so i really enjoyed cleaning that pan that sounds so weird so there you go that's my apple tart in a cast iron pan i'm gonna go next so guys i made brussels sprouts no and that that's pretty much it it's just brother's friends uh no not [Music] when you available cook a brussels sprout that part doesn't bother me i know some people trim it off i'm also paying attention to you know some brussels sprouts are not really perfectly round all the way around so i'm finding which side is wider and then i'm cutting along that wider axis so that there is more surface area in contact with the cast iron from what i understand brussels sprouts are things that american kids hate i'm just curious when did you start liking brussels sprouts probably after having them in restaurants and them tasting so good but the thing about restaurant brussels sprouts is that a lot of the time they're straight up frying the brussels sprout to get it so true like all golden and crispy like in the deep fryer where you would make french fries that's where they're doing that's why it's so good is that why it's so good anyway here's my cast iron it is actually i think the same one as alvin's it's a 10-inch lodge cast iron i've had it for i don't know 10 years or something like that so this technique that i'm doing here it's not something i do every time but i think this technique demonstrates what i'm ultimately after every time i'm cooking brussels sprouts in a pan and so that is to start it in the pan at a pretty low temperature completely dry so not adding any oil completely dry i'm just arranging the brussels sprouts that they're faced down in the pan so this is a technique that i picked up from my brother who is a professional chef the objective here is to take out some of the moisture from the brussels sprout initially so with it face down in the pan in a dry pan you're just kind of dehydrating that initial couple of millimeters in the brussels sprout there i'm just showing off my tongs there's these little tongs that i found in a uh japanese kitchen supply store they're like the perfect thickness and strength to like do this sort of individual brussels sprout flipping and examining i was going to ask about that it seems so surgical yeah it's my favorite thing i didn't think i needed it until i saw it in the store and then it was like harry potter in the wand shop i picked it up and like wind started blowing around that's the reason why i cook with chopsticks so much because it's the same idea like picking it up like that you know yeah i'm starting the brussels sprouts in a dry pan and this is ultimately to get that surface area as brown as possible and i think the two enemies of browning are moisture and also uneven contact with a cooking surface and so the other thing that a little bit of a slow dehydration does i think is it makes it so that the brussels sprout falls and rests evenly on that cooking surface instead of buckling the way that foods tend to do when they come in contact with something really hot i really like this because the way you're treating the brussels sprout reminds me of the way that people would treat a nice piece of steak or meat when they're drying out the surface with and sort of like you know making sure there's good contact with the pan so at this point it's like they're starting to get even a little bit brown there maybe a little bit brighter than i intended so i've i just dropped them back on the cutting board i remove any little bits that might burn once i turn the heat up introducing some oil and then i put them back in the pan i rearrange them so that the surface is now flush against the pan at a higher temperature whoa that is a nice stove you have right here right and then so at this point with the oil in the pan it gets golden pretty quickly and i'm also really aiming for even goldenness and never hitting the burnt level i might have done it a little bit over in this video because i was trying to manage the camera at the same time as cooking but you're really in my opinion aiming for this deep golden brown where the brussels spread itself is getting caramelized and that's why when i cook it this way i don't need anything but like salt and some lemon juice do you think that the cast iron helps get this sort of even browning that you're looking for absolutely yeah i think it's that same thing of like you know if these go black if they burn at all or get any sort of like char on it then that just sort of takes over the flavor and so the heaviness of a cast iron helps you kind of like hit the appropriate temperature and not exceed it whereas in like a lighter weight pan you might accidentally overshoot that temperature and burn it too quickly it's almost like with a cast iron pan it's got inertia like if you're pushing a heavy yes shopping cart across the ground it'll take a second to get it going but you can hit your desired speed and keep it there you know instead of like something that's lightweight it's just going to go all over the place you might notice i'm poking my brussels sprouts here which is a habit i've developed across a lot of different cooking stuff and it's actually analogous to the meat cooking that you're referencing earlier alvin you know there's like this old chef's tip where you can tell the doneness of a meat by like comparing it to the tightness of your hand yeah and which like that works and it's a good tip but it's only a good tip after you've cooked a steak and like had the opportunity to get that sort of tactile reference point for yourself and so i've just started doing a thing where i obsessively poke food so that i can like learn what doneness it is based on feel i obsessively poke my food that's such a good lie and it's like you're not gonna know what is the right amount of doneness the first time but after if you do it like every time you cook a thing over time you'll develop your own database of squishiness yeah squishiness anyway so yeah i gave him a poke i thought that they were good honestly probably a little bit over in this case because i was filming and i and at this point i add salt because uh earlier in the cooking process i don't want to draw any additional moisture out of the brussels sprout because that would inhibit that browning and then i just kind of toss them around if they weren't fully to the doneness that i like at that point i might flip them over and let them cook on the other side and then there are these little bits that end up the kind of like leaves that separated from the brussels sprout that end up in the bottom of the pan that are so crispy and crunchy and are just like the best flavor to make that with flavor the little bit of salt in there it's so good this is how i like to eat brussels sprouts with just salt and lemon juice and brussels sprouts with lemon juice is really good yeah and really key is the flavor of the caramelized surface it's really that plus the other two that make it so good i think if kids grew up eating brussels sprouts that have been properly caramelized they were yes yes i was like this is the because usually people just boil them or steam them but now you have so much flavor on this there's no way it can't be good and the other thing i want to say is that doing the drying out step you don't have to do it to get a brussels sprout to this condition but i think that it demonstrates kind of what you're going after when you're pan roasting a brussels sprout like this okay last but not least we have inka inka what did you make i made i really feel like i'm in a presentation the class presentation right now i made my version of a sourdough margarita pizza i say margarita because it was like kind of margarita-ish but sourdough pizza oh your own sourdough yes so on the last day of 2020. a lot of people have been making sourdough the last year and i finally started making my own starter from scratch end of 2020 and the idea of doing a sourdough pizza was because when you're feeding your sourdough starter you have a lot of excess so i've been exploring oh what else can i do with all this leftover starter so pizza dough very easy it's just sourdough starter water salt and flour here i'm pretty much just forming the dough and i think the thing that's different when you're using sourdough starter you actually don't want to over mix it you just want to mix it enough for the flour and water to combine before you start what we call the auto lease process the what auto lace is basically just like a gentle mixing of flour and water and then you just let it rest this is kind of what allows it to develop flavor and it becomes a lot easier to work with later and then while that was resting this is just my regular actually pasta tomato sauce that i make it's my go-to so it's shallots onions garlic tomato paste and then i like to use fire roasted tomatoes and also a splash of red wine so you can see that i'm not gonna add too much liquid in this because i really am trying to reduce down the flavor alvin you're going to love this but this actually continued simmering over the stove top for like three to four hours before i cooled it so it was very very intense and then i just added one bay leaf do you guys think that bay leaf actually adds to a sauce no i feel like it's a conspiracy yes no i do but the bayley flavor i enjoy immensely my air pod fell out a little red pepper flake too yeah a little i like spicy so of course i had to add red pepper flakes and you see the little brown bits from the fire roasted tomatoes yeah very good it's my little little secret is it like smoky what does this sauce taste like you know that flavor you get from roasted vegetables i guess it is the smokiness but like intensified and i definitely added more red pepper flakes after this um so i left that simmering on the stovetop and then after it was cooled down i just popped it in the fridge because we won't be using it today so this is across two days so back to the dough this is i think around half an hour to an hour later you can see that i didn't even mix that you see how stretchy it is already there is isn't lumpy or like firm so what i'm doing now is kind of starting the bulk fermentation process and i'm doing stretch and folds this is to help kind of make sure that the dough is like really hydrated throughout and also to give it strength this is the technique that i learned from my sourdough bread making process i think it's very therapeutic you just like pull it up stretch it over pull it up stretch it over and i did this like four times in 30 minute intervals it gets stretchier throughout and smoother basically it starts not tearing that's so satisfying it looks very satisfying yeah i've always wanted to do that but i've never had i don't know i've just never had the courage to to make bread it's really fun i think it's so rewarding because it really is something where you don't know what you're gonna get but what you guys were saying earlier about the touching the food and how it feels i feel like because i've started working with dough so much you really kind of have a sense of where it's gonna go and like when it's right it's all very fun uh next step was really to same day to split it put it in the containers and then i stored that in the fridge overnight day two i took the dough out from the fridge so at this point right because it rested in the fridge the dough is a lot harder to work with so basically i just took the dough out let it rest on the counter for 30 minutes then i shaped it into a ball and then i covered it with just like a kitchen towel and let it proof for 30 minutes and then this is my cast iron i feel like i'm not as well versed in cast iron as the two of you so i got this cast iron as a gift i only started using it like a month ago a month or two months ago i tried to season it you know at this point i think i've only made like 10 things with it i've always been very intimidated after i started making things with cast iron i've become like i don't know i believe in cast irons now do you know what i mean like i feel like yes the maintenance is hard but it's worth it yeah my cast iron pan is actually also enameled on the outside so i don't know if that like makes a difference right yeah that should protect the outside from rust and corrosion also people make such a big deal about cast irons and it's such a like it's a it's a cooking pan every anybody can cast iron it's a huge piece of metal you know like you can use soap on it it's totally cool i use soap online we'll get to that oh exactly whoa okay what i thought that was like you guys have no idea i like literally read so many articles on like how to maintain your cast iron i was like do not let soap touch this basically after i showed you that shot i put it over my stovetop over medium high heat and just let it get really hot so it's almost like a pizza stone you know i was just about to say that yeah here i am just lightly touching my pizza dough spreading it out so this pizza you actually start baking it on this stovetop first before you put it in the oven and you can see in this shot you can see the dough rising yes right so that's all that like the little bubbles you saw just now in the in the dough shredded mozzarella fresh mozzarella yeah i see two cheeses happening here yes oh oh pepperoni and pepperoni i love pepperoni pizza oh i lied about margarita pizza it was a pepperoni pizza i'm so sorry do we have to redo that that's funny it's only the broiler so it's basically to finish off the toppings make sure it's melted oh my god i can smell this pizza right now this looks so good it smells so good i didn't put pepper oh yeah i added black pepper i drizzled on some honey honey yeah which is like roberta's what they do here in this pizzeria here in new york city right it looks incredible and you see how like poofy the the sides are yeah that's all all natural that's the starter so is this your first time making a pizza like this it's the second time the first time was when i kind of really experimented with the dough i just wanted to see has some leftover stuff and i just threw it on there but i was really surprised by how how it came out so this was kind of me taking it seriously i think it's really cool how like for all of our recipes we utilize the functions of like how cast iron you can do things on a stove but you can also put it in the oven and i think that's one of the best things about what a cast iron can do okay so there was our cast iron video we had my brussels sprouts he could sourdough pizza alvin's start to tan we could just have dinner party right now yeah full meal if you have any suggestions on what we should make in the future let us know and for now that's the video

Channel: About To Eat

Views: 943,762

Keywords: Alvin, Andrew, Ilnyckyj, Inga, K_fe, Lam, Tasty, Ways we use, Zhou, apple tart, baking, breakfast, breakfast recipes, brussels sprouts, buzzfeed, buzzfeed tasty, cast iron, cooking, dessert, dinner, dinner recipes, easy cooking, easy recipes, eating, food, food porn, fun recipes, how to, how to bake, how to cook, kid-friendly, kid-friendly recipes, lunch, lunch recipes, pizza, quarantine, quarantine recipes, social distancing, sourdough, tart tatin, tasty recipes

Id: uxhgrd6HWVw

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021