How to Use a Cast Iron Skillet (6 Methods)

I'm gonna be showing you all the ways

you can use a cast-iron skillet.

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If you are used to only ever cooking

with a stainless steel skillet or a non-stick pan,

this is really gonna change the game for you.

You're gonna see really awesome color

on all the things you cook.

They're super heavy duty and sturdy

and they conduct heat really evenly and really well.

It's the most versatile pan you can own.

I'm gonna show you six techniques

that every cast-iron skillet owner should know.

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Cast-irons are great for searing

because they conduct heat really well.

The best way to get a good sear on your protein

or vegetables with a cast-iron

is to make sure you have a flat surface.

You want to be able to have lots of flat surface area

that can connect with the surface area of your pan.

The skillet is being heated over medium high.

It's important to let your cast-iron skillet preheat

for a significant amount of time,

longer than you would your non-stick

or your stainless steel pan because it takes a little longer

'cause of how thick this cast-iron is

for it to fully heat up and retain that heat.

So, I'm gonna add a little bit of oil here,

you can see it's really nice and hot.

So, you know your pan is good to go

when your oil is nice and shimmery

and when you can see that it runs really easily

from side-to-side.

So, we're just gonna season our vegetables

and then again, we're making use of this nice flat surface.

So you want to get that right onto the surface

of your cast-iron

and then you can hear that sizzle right away,

that's a really good sign.

This is vegetable oil, but you can use any type of oil here

that has a high smoke point

and then, I'm gonna do these onions as well

and then the key here is to not disturb it too much.

You want to give it time to develop that color.

It's gonna happen as it connects

with the surface of the cast-iron.

For the carrots, you can see the color changing up the side,

which is a good indicator.

The more you disturb your vegetables,

the more you interrupt that color that's building up

where it has contact with the cooking surface.

If you imagine trying to get grill marks on a grill,

if you move your piece of chicken around too much,

you're not gonna get those clean lines

and that's the same thing here.

Once the heat is inside of the pan,

it like, distributes really evenly across the surface.

You can really fill the pan from edge to edge

and not worry about one part getting super dark

and one part being less so.

Oh yeah, look at this, really nice,

beautiful char on this onion.

Once it hits this like char level that you're interested in,

you see kind of like these blisters along the way,

so awesome, and something you can only really achieve

on a cast-iron.

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Cast-irons are great for baking,

again because of the heat retention,

they're really good for that and they also just can stand up

to really high heats in the oven.

So if you are baking something that needs to go really high

and you don't want to use a baking dish

and you want this sort of like rustic-y, round look

that a cast-iron can provide,

it's a really great way to use it.

I am rubbing the bottom of this cast-iron skillet

with butter, and even though the cast-iron is seasoned,

you definitely want to prevent any stickage here.

We're gonna do biscuits today,

but you can bake lots of different things in a cast-iron.

You could do a frittata, you could do cinnamon rolls,

you could do a crumble or a crisp

or a cobbler with those drop biscuity topping

and it's really nice because when you start them

kind of like separated out like this,

you'll watch them puff up,

but keep contained in the circle of the cast-iron,

which gives it a really nice look at the end

and then, just to make sure that

they're nicely browned at the finish,

we're gonna brush them with a little bit of heavy cream.

The other nice part about cast-iron

as opposed to a dark colored baking dish is that,

you're gonna get really nice browning

on the bottom of your biscuits as well.

It'll just really evenly sort of golden brown

crisp up the bottom.

So, it's been 25 to 30 minutes

and we are gonna pull our biscuits.

Everything rose, but stayed in their really nice dome shape.

So now, that you've kind of got that, like pull apart bread,

slather it with your honey butter, it's really perfect.

You got really great browning on all sides

'cause of these high walls, see all the way down the side,

really nicely cooked and then nice crisp brown bottom

and then, super fluffy

where it was connected to its neighbors.

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We could sear our pork chop if we had a thinner pork chop,

but with something thick like this,

you want to start it on the stove,

so you get that really awesome crust sear on either side

and then finish it in the oven,

so that it cooks all the way through.

So I'm heating my cast-iron,

a little bit of neutral oil in there

and I'm gonna pat my meat dry.

What's great about a cast-iron skillet here

is it transfers to the oven really well.

There are some pans that you can't transfer to the oven

beyond a certain degree, and you really want one

that's gonna retain the heat

and really evenly cook your meat, so you get that great sear

and you get a perfect doneness in the oven.

All right, and you can see that oil is nice and hot,

spills really easy from side to side

and we're going to press our pork chop into the skillet

really firmly so that you have total contact

with the edge to this cook surface

and because we're gonna move this to the oven,

you don't have to worry about cooking through here at all.

This stage is purely aesthetics.

You want that like really awesome golden brown crust.

I mean, it's not just aesthetics,

but also tastes really great to have that crust,

but you don't have to worry about cooking it

all the way through, it's not gonna happen.

So instead, just worry about the crust,

turn it as needed to make sure you get golden brown

on all sides and then let the oven do the hard work.

You can tell what this pork chop that the areas

that are connected to the bone are a little bit more raised.

So, it's good to just press down on that area every so often

to make sure it's in contact with the pan.

So, it has a better chance of browning evenly

as compared to the parts that are closer to the bone.

So, we're gonna flip this bad boy

and you can see this really nice crust,

golden brown all along here.

Yeah, look at that, so nice, so even.

Don't forget two mitts because it's hot on both sides.

We're just gonna transfer this straight to the oven.

What happened in the oven there basically

is we had our really nice sear

and now it's perfectly cooked all the way through.

It's not overly hammered, which is what would have happened

if we cooked it all the way through on the stove

and it has that nice golden brown crust,

which it wouldn't have gotten

if we cooked it all the way through in the oven.

Now, we're gonna use our cast-iron skillet

as an implement for crushing things.

This is the first of two of our methods

that we're going to cover today

that takes advantage of the cast-iron's weight and heft.

We're not gonna cook with it,

we're just using how heavy and sturdy it is.

We are gonna use it for peppercorns,

really like rock your skillet back and forth

to crush your pieces.

You can hear it happening underneath there.

Just crushes your peppercorns

into little smaller, broken bits,

but not broken down so much that you have ground pepper.

You could also use your cast-iron as a crushing implement

for other things besides spices too.

Like, if you wanted to make crispy smashed potatoes

and you boiled the potatoes

and then you wanted to flatten them all,

you could use your skillet for that.

If you wanted to flatten a piece of protein.

There's a lot of things that you can just kind of crush

in one fell swoop, using the heft of your skillet.

This is just a way to make use of a tool

that you probably have in your home already.

If you don't have a spice mill,

don't have a mortar and pestle,

this is a great tool to use instead.

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This is a chicken cutlet, which we pounded earlier

and you could also use the bottom of your cast-iron skillet

to pound, if you wanted.

This is a great option of something to shallow fry.

Basically, the difference between shallow fry and deep fry

is you guessed it, the depth of the oil

and a shallow fry means that

you probably are going to have to flip

whatever item it is that you're frying,

as opposed to dunking it, submerging it all the way in oil

as you would with a deep fry

and so, that means it's great for things that are thinner,

like a chicken or pork cutlet.

It's also a little bit more manageable than deep frying,

if you are a little nervy about a giant vat of oil.

So we've been heating this oil over medium

and you want it between like, 350 to 365.

Oh yeah, so nice.

Oil can reduce in temperature

when you start to add your things to it.

So, if you want to be frying something at 350,

as soon as you add things to it,

the oil temperature will reduce,

but because the cast-iron skillet retains heat so nicely,

it will keep that oil at a steady temperature

and raise it back up to the temperature

that you need it to be all the way through

much faster than if you were to use a different vessel

and you see that edge start to go golden brown,

you know that's what's happening underneath.

Because you're in this pan that's inherently shallower

than like a large Dutch oven or a big heavy bottomed pot,

you don't want to fill it all the way to the top with oil.

You want to keep it,

so that there's enough of this wall here,

so that any splatters are pretty contained within this pan.

Look at that,

it's like a giant chicken nugget of your dreams

and it's really the oil that's cooking

and not the surface area of the pan, as opposed to the sear

where that is the most important part.

So moving it around is okay.

Yeah, oh, that looks so good, we love.

The other thing you do is, immediately after you fry,

deep or shallow, is you season

because that's gonna make it,

so that the crispy outer layer will soak that salt up.

Can you hear it?

Perfectly cooked, and it's got this nice,

super crispy coating.

Because we had that little layer of oil,

we got to cook through this chicken perfectly in rapid time

and also managed to get crisp golden brown outside crust.

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A cast-iron, as I have said, is extremely heavy

and that's really useful if you need to smoosh

something down slowly with a lot of weight.

We're gonna do that with a panini

and so, any sandwich that you want to press,

this is a really good method.

You can also use the same heft and weight of your pan

as a press for things like tofu,

if you wanted to press all the water out of tofu

before you cook it, or for non-cooked, but pressed sandwich,

like a muffaletta or like a picnic sandwich

that you want to press before you pack it.

All right, this is our stainless steel skillet

that we're gonna be pressing our sandwich in,

and the oil is nice and hot.

So, we're gonna add our sandwich

and now, we're gonna add our cast-iron as a weight.

If you want even more weight,

you can like put things in your cast-iron,

but I think this is gonna be good, and so every so often,

if you want to just come over and press this down,

make sure it stays evenly on there.

What this is doing is sealing all those layers together,

helping the cheese to melt

and getting a nice crispy edge on the bottom of the bread.

If you were just heating the sandwich in the pan

without the press, it wouldn't compact in the same way

and that's what we're achieving with this weight.

I'm a notorious bad flipper, but this is gonna be fine

and we're just gonna replace the cast-iron

to evenly weight the other side.

I think we might be done here.

We're gonna pull our sandwich.

Perfectly flat, like a panini,

which is exactly what we're after.

Oh yeah, look at that, so nice.

Now, you've got this nice melty sandwich

that's pressed to perfection.

All the ingredients are nice and melded together

and the bread is nice and thin and crisp.

I hope you learned a new cast-iron trick today.

There are a lot of ways to use this versatile tool

and you should definitely have one in your kitchen.

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Everything okay? [laughs]