Cast Iron Cooking

One evening I was making a pan of macaroni and cheese. Easy enough. Boil noodles, add milk, butter, and nasty cheese powder. Mix, and enjoy. As I was mixing, however, I noticed quite a substantial amount of pepper. I love pepper in my mac and cheese, but I hadn't put any at all in. The teflon from the pan was flaking off at a disturbing rate, and contaminating my dinner. In the garbage, pan and all. Get a new pan, and start over. At that point, I decided I needed to find a less toxic way to cook non-stick. So began my obsession with cast iron. This stuff is fantastic. THE original non-stick cookware. Properly seasoned, the surface will easily compete, and sometimes beat any other non-stick surface commercially prepared. My Mamaw always cooked in cast iron. My Mamaw Land (mamaw's mom-in-law) also cooked in cast iron. I remember going to Alabama and having southern fried chicken, southern green beans, biscuits, you name it. Breakfasts were sausage, grits, eggs, bacon, more biscuits. Mamaw cooked the same way. I miss those days. Anyway, I ended up with a lot of Mamaw Land's cast iron. Many of those pieces were well used and quite well seasoned. In addition to those pieces, I have collected a fair amount over the years, but never used it. Most of it has been in the garage for some time. Mamaw's stuff fared pretty well, but the others were in rough shape. One large griddle and a number 8 skillet were so rusted that I went after them with my Dewalt grinder equipped with a super heavy duty cup style wire brush. Once the cast iron was de-rusted, I took it all inside and washed it in hot water, dried it with paper towels, and put it in the oven for a short to thoroughly dry it. I then rubbed a moderate amount of peanut oil over all of the cookware, and put it in the oven at 500 degrees for 77 minutes. I had enough iron that I baked it in two batches. After the first treatment, I let it cool to the touch, washed it with hot water, and baked it again. Mamaw's stuff only got one treatment. The rusted stuff got two. It all came out very black, smooth, and ready for cooking. The griddle needs more seasoning, but that will come with use and time. Mamaw's iron is an absolute dream to cook on. Fried chicken leaves nothing which has to be scrubbed off, it mostly rinses out. Anything that happens to be left is easily removed with a Goody boar's hair hair brush I use specifically for cleaning cast iron. Everything is rinsed with extremely hot water while the pan is hot, brushed out if need be, dried, and given a nice coat of bacon grease. I no longer have to worry about ingesting that teflon. Seems as though those old folks knew what they were doing...