As the title says, this post will be mostly about what has been going on with the new house. But first, I have a question for the peanut gallery (that would be you): If you were, in some way, acquire a cast-iron skillet, and said skillet claimed to be "Pre-Cured" wouldn't you be surprised to learn (from the instructions included with the skillet) that before using the nice new skillet you needed to cure it?
I have been a home owner for a few hours over a week now. If you are a reader here you would have seen the pictures I took down below. Not much of what those pictures show of the interior is accurate anymore, at least not the main floor. The living room, dining room and back bedroom all have new sheet-rock hung, and most of the kitchen. We ripped down the acoustic tile ceiling in the bathroom, framed it in the right way, and have new rock up there too. Dad and I took care of the bug rot in the garage and we had a good friend make sure the wiring was up to snuff. All in all this is the best I really could have hoped for on this remodel. But, that doesn't mean there haven't been some hiccups. One of the more amusing stories follows below.
So last Sunday we are all working hard trying to get things done and make sure that Bob and his step-son Donny (they were there to make sure the electrical was all ok) finished what we had them out there to do. Around 11:30 we sent Mom and Sam to get lunch for everyone. During the time they were gone a lot of things started going wrong. After Dad and I screwed up trying to sister a new rafter into the garage roof I mentioned how shit tends to start going wrong around lunch time.
About that time Bob comes out bitching about having screwed up something or another and it was decided that it was beer time (for Dad and Bob at least). About that time I heard a yelp come from the house where Donny was still working. But when we asked if he was ok, he said he was. Just a few minutes later he comes walking out into the garage where the three of us are and he is rubbing his head. I swear it just looked like he just had his hair parted. But as he sat down I realized it was more than just a part in his hair. It turns out Donny was trying to get a whole drilled with one of Bob's specialty bits (they are in 4-6 foot long range) and he was having trouble. So he was really leaning into it and trying to get good downward force ton the bit. Then, next thing he knows his hair catches around the bit and the drill runs right down to his scalp (this, presumably, is when we heard him yelp). So, if you can imagine it, there was Donny, with the drill bit stuck in his hair, the drill well above his head, trying to thumb around and find reverse so he could free himself. I swear, the 2.5 inch groove down the side of Donny's head was so clean and neat it looked like he did with a razor. Mean though it may be, seeing Donny sit on the back of that truck pulling out little curls of his hair was far and away the funniest thing I have seen in a long long time.
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3 comments:
You know, I think the "pre-cured" skillet is a myth. I've also run into that, although I thought that maybe I'd misunderstood the word "cured."
The house sounds amazing! I can't wait to see updated pictures (hint hint)!
New pictures of the house should be up sometime late tomorrow. I finally found what I did with my digital camera.
Originally posted by "Josh" on the Myspace version of this blog:
I totally lifted this from Cook's Illustrated and will most likely be sued for it. Many boffins died to get us this information.
The Lodge Manufacturing Company in South Pittsburg, Tenn., longtime maker of plain, old-fashioned cast-iron cookware, brought a new, preseasoned line to the market in late summer 2002. According to Jeanne Scholze, product manager at Lodge, this new line, called Lodge Logic, gives the home cook the equivalent of one to two years’ worth of “seasoning” in a brand new pan and makes it unnecessary for customers to give a pan its first seasoning at home. (As explained in previous issues of Cook’s, the more use a cast-iron pan gets, the more seasoned it becomes, the more its performance improves. Over time cast iron absorbs and transforms the oils and fats from cooking to produce a smooth, black surface that keeps food from sticking and cleans up easily. Lodge instructs home cooks to give a traditional pan its first seasoning by coating it with vegetable shortening and then baking it upside down in a 350-degree oven for one hour.)
The company preseasons each piece of cookware in the Logic line by spraying it with oil electrostatically, a process similar to that used in painting automobiles. After being sprayed, the pan goes to a very hot oven that opens the pores of the metal and thereby allows the oil to penetrate deeply—more so than is possible in a home oven, according to Scholze. Lodge won’t reveal the temperature at which the pan is seasoned; Scholze would say only that it’s higher than what can be achieved in a home oven. Likewise, Lodge will not disclose the type of vegetable oil it uses. According to Scholze, it contains no animal fat and is kosher.
To see if this logic about preseasoning applied in the kitchen as well as on paper, we purchased a preseasoned skillet and an unseasoned skillet from Lodge, seasoned the latter according to Lodge’s instructions, and compared the performance of both with that of a cast-iron skillet that had seen 60 years of use and careful seasoning. We seared steaks, pan-fried salmon, and fried eggs in each pan. The food browned well in all three pans, but the browning was the most even and thorough in the 60-year-old pan. What’s more, the food did not stick to this pan at all. The food stuck slightly to Lodge’s preseasoned pan and a bit more to the new pan we had seasoned ourselves.
To test the extent to which the pans would transfer a metallic taste to acidic foods, we cooked canned diced tomatoes in each one, checking the flavor every five minutes. (Acid dissolves some of the metal from the surface of cast-iron pans; a more seasoned pan will be more resistant to the acid because its surface has been better sealed with the oils and fats from cooking.) The newly seasoned pan picked up a metallic taste in only 10 minutes, the preseasoned pan in about 20 minutes, and the old pan in about 30 minutes.
Finally, we noted how easily each pan cleaned up after each of the tests. The 60-year-old pan cleaned up just as easily as a new nonstick pan would. Both the preseasoned and newly home-seasoned pans required equal amounts of elbow grease to remove all traces of food.
Based on our tests, Lodge Logic outperforms a pan purchased unseasoned, but it can’t hold a candle to the performance of a pan that’s been seasoned by generations of cooks. And while the Logic pan does release you from the responsibility of that crucial first seasoning, thereafter the company recommends spraying the cooking surface with oil prior to each session on the stovetop or in the oven, so it’s not maintenance-free. Preseasoned pans are more expensive than the old-fashioned kind, but not by much: A 12-inch preseasoned skillet can be purchased from the Lodge Web site (www.lodgemfg.com) for $29.95, whereas the company sells its 12-inch unseasoned skillet for $19.95. Lodge Logic is also available at Williams-Sonoma.
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