*EZPZ* The Cast Iron Skillet and the Outdoor Burner: Taking Manly Cooking Beyond the Grill

It's fun for the whole family, and not even very dangerous!

As I’ve mentioned previously, at our house, we like to have delicious, fresh, home-cooked food that doesn’t require too much labor.  To that end, one staple we like to make sure we have on hand at all times is meat.  Big slabs of high-quality animal tissue.  If you aren’t into gnawing on the flesh of other mammals, the rest of this post probably won’t do much for you.

Have you ever gone to a high-end steakhouse and paid forty bucks for a nice porterhouse or New York strip?  Yes?  Then, you, my friend, are a chump. (Of course, I’ve done it too.)

A nice hunk of beef from the grocery store is not going to be super cheap either, but you can usually find something good on special in the meat department; especially if, like me, you think of “use by” dates as very rough guidelines.  In any case, if you cook it yourself, you can have a steak dinner that’s at least way better than Black Angus for the price of a sandwich at Subway.

I don’t mind forking out a lot of money for a great restaurant meal, but I want to know that there’s been a commensurate amount of blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into preparing that meal.  And the truth is that steak doesn’t require much work at all.  Any moron can prepare a decent cut of meat as well as the line cooks at Ruth’s Chris, given the right equipment.

And the right equipment is about as basic and cheap as you can get.  A cast iron skillet.  It doesn’t even have to be a fancy one.  I think it was in Cook’s Illustrated, where they usually don’t recommend any gear that costs less than a couple hundred bucks, that I read that a cast iron skillet is a cast iron skillet is a cast iron skillet.  So, really–the cheaper, the better.

Now, I know that a lot of people, especially men, who consider themselves experts at cooking meat, will protest, and claim that grilling is the best way to prepare steaks.  Nonsense!  That steak you paid an arm and a leg for in the dark steakhouse with the red lampshades?  It didn’t come off a grill.  It came off of an industrial version of a cast iron skillet.

So you might as well shell out fifteen bucks and get yourself one.

The one problem with cooking steaks on the cast iron skillet is that it makes a lot of smoke.  So you should probably do it outside unless you have a 300-horsepower exhaust fan.  If you have a powerful gas grill, or one with a good side-burner, you’re all set.  Or, you can do what we did, and buy an outdoor stove that you hook up to a liquid propane tank.  (Actually, my mother-in-law bought the stove for us so she could cook hundreds of egg rolls when she visits without making our house smell like a Vietnamese restaurant.  At her house, she cooks almost everything outside in the makeshift kitchen that has grown up around the outdoor burners on the deck.  And, like many of her ideas that seemed crazy to me at first, I have come to embrace cooking outside whenever possible.)

I understand the appeal of grilling, particularly to men.  I like to do it myself sometimes.  You’ve got the open flames, which are dangerous and thrilling, and then you’ve got the great out-of-doors.  You’re not cooking in some sissy indoor kitchen that may as well be an office or a beauty salon–you’re out there battling the elements.  Just you and your personal volcano.  It’s pretty primal.

And although the skillet and outdoor burner combo is slightly more refined than the grill, it has its own primitive iron-age appeal that can’t be denied, hearkening back to the days when a community’s survival was wrought from the fiery forges of the tribal blacksmith.  What I’m saying is that it’s pretty manly to cook on a red hot chunk of raw iron.

And “red hot” is the temperature at which you want to cook your steaks.  That’s how you get a nice sear on the outside, and keep the inside tender and juicy.

Now that I have totally sold you on giving up the folly of grilling, and instead embracing the skillet, allow me to give you the quick-and-dirty on how to fry up some restaurant quality steaks.

1. Crank up the heat up to 11 and get that skillet smoking
2. Rub the steak with some oil (I use olive oil)
3. Season the steak (coarse-ground salt and pepper, or seasoned salt, which is what I’ve been using lately)
4. Throw the steak on the skillet and leave it there for 2 minutes.  Don’t mess with it.
5. Flip it over and cook it for another 2 minutes
6. Leave the steak on the heat until it gets to the temperature you want (medium rare is 130 degrees), which you can confirm either by using an instant-read thermometer, or cutting into it and peeking, as I tend to do.  Some people suggest finishing the steak in the oven (skillet and all) after achieving the sear on both sides, which probably works well; but I usually just cook it entirely on the skillet
7. Let it sit for five minutes, lightly covered in aluminum foil 
8. Eat the hell out of it

Another charming feature of the cast iron skillet is the kind of care and maintenance required.  It’s pretty simple, but enough of a ritual that it reminds me of taking care of a tool or a weapon.

You don’t want to scrub your skillet completely clean.  Nope, they need to become “seasoned” by the oils that soak into the surface: this gives them non-stick qualities, and adds a little flavor to whatever you cook on them.  I just wipe mine out with some water and a scrub-brush, and dry it with paper towels.  Then I rub a tiny bit of olive oil onto it, cover it with waxed paper, and put it away until it’s time to do battle again.

Iron skillets aren’t just for steaks either.  I also cook pork chops and burgers in mine, and if I ever catch the possum that’s been digging in my garden, I might throw him on there too.

And here’s one more cool thing about iron skillets.  If you are anemic, it’s a good way to get more iron in your diet.  I’m not even kidding.