A few weekends ago Gary put the cast iron pan in the dishwasher.
Gary turned a blind eye to why you don’t put a cast iron pan in the washer, and according to him it was literally a BLIND eye because the day I spent reseasoning the pan caused acrid fumes to burn at his eyes.
Last weekend he washed it by hand. Foolishly, I thought he might be culinary enough that he could hear the dirty secret of how you care for a cast iron pan.
“YOU JUST WIPE IT OUT? That’s insane! What about the bugs?”
“They die when you heat the pan up for the next meal.”
“We are throwing that pan out right now.”
“Like hell.”
“I am burying it in the backyard.”
Our compromise: I am buying a ten-inch non-stick pan, and putting the cast iron pan away until he’s grown enough as a cook to appreciate it.
13 responses to “Gary says, Its Me or the Pan”
I never cooked with cast iron because I never figured out how to get it properly seasoned. My mother OTOH used several. We always washed them in dishwater and then quickly dried them. At least that is what I remember being the primary dishdrier in the house.
Zayrina -wipe with olive oil. Cook at 350. 2 hours. Let cool ,repeat for the entire day. The oil sends up making a hard shiny surface.
You can tell Gary from me that he is full of shit on this one.
Hattie – “bullshit on Hattie” is his response.
Hattie – and now he’s back pedaling.
A cast iron pan IN THE DISHWASHER? HERESY! He’s lucky he didn’t get it upside the damn fool head!
I have something in my head about new cooks not being allowed to touch cast iron that sounds a lot like the Tolkien line, “One does not simply *walk* into Mordor”.
Being right means never having to backpedal.
Allison – I know! And now it’s all reseasoned and I can’t use it, plus I have to pay for a new Teflon pan.
Tami – he brings me great shame. My god, what if I told him I got the pan twenty years ago at an antique store? “GOD KNOWS HOW OLD THAT PAN IS IT PROBABLY HAS CHOLERA”
Hattie – he says now he doesn’t dear the bugs, just the dirt. I wanted to argue that dust doesn’t taste like anything but I gave up.
Once upon a time I fired a housekeeper for putting my cast iron in the dishwasher (I’m from Alabama and this stuff has HISTORY.)
Amyalabama – you are hard core!
I fired my previous cleaning service for taking all the clean dishes off of the drying ma and piling them in the sink with the copious amounts of dirty dishes that had been left there by people who aren’t me.
If you’re not going to put away the clean dishes, then fine, don’t put away the clean dishes, but if you have the sheer nerve to make them dirty, again? That was the opposite of their job, g*#d*&n it.
Tami -the cleaning service I worked for loaded and ran the dishwasher as part of the service.