WHERE IT STARTED

Humankind has been cooking with cast iron for eons, well before there were cookbooks or even handwritten recipes. It’s an enduring material; it’s also a relatively forgiving one. Things have a way of turning out all right in one of those heavy, searing pans.

Maybe that’s because, as I reasoned, you don’t see anything too fancy or delicate being prepared in them—no foam, no fragile, paper-thin layers, no custards, no sugar sculpture. Cast-iron skillets are the workhorses of home cooking. Sweet or savory, the stuff you fix in them is as accessible as the pans themselves. That approachability is what made me take on baking, which, up until then, had been a source of intimidation.

In the United States, the cast-iron skillet is typically associated with rustic cooking—outdoorsy sorts take it camping—and with down-home grub such as biscuits and cornbread, probably the first things people think of when you mention “baking” and “cast iron” in the same sentence. But rustic needn’t be unsophisticated. And biscuits and cornbread needn’t be predictable or adhere to your grandparents’ recipes. You can fool around with the classics—maybe incorporate Fritos corn chips into your cornbread, or roasted butternut squash into your biscuits. And because cast iron is a globally utilized material, you can—and should—cull inspiration from multiple locales.

Since I was a little girl, I’ve been enchanted by cookbooks. I’d run my hand along the spines on my parents’ kitchen shelves. I’d pick up whatever volume my mother was cooking from and flip through it. But for a food writer, having so many expert opinions at your fingertips can have a negative effect; it caused me to start second-guessing myself. Every time I thought about combining flavors or trying a different cooking method, I’d question it. My sense of adventure and creative spirit were gone. Slowly, I stopped cooking.

I missed it, the way I remembered it. Writing a cookbook dedicated to baking on this metal surface provided me with an opportunity to sharpen my own skills, overcome some misgivings I’d had about certain culinary tasks, and, the real gift, get my confidence back.

Baking has the reputation of being rigid, not conducive to improvisation. There are pre-determined ratios in place—for wet and dry ingredients and for fat. But having those set equations frees you up to try out different flavors and ingredients, so you can make a scone or pizza your own without turning it into something unrecognizable or, worse, inedible. With fixed proportions, you can only go so far before you will come up against the limits of the baked good you’re trying to produce. The same is true of the vessel you’re cooking in; it provides you with some fundamental structure. With my trusty pan, I felt safe to mess around with spices and new types of flour. I could be more adventurous.

As I developed my recipes, I went back to some of the cookbooks I’d grown up with, and found guidance in a few newer sources. Sometimes, I’d ask chefs to collaborate with me. Working with the masters is always an opportunity to learn, and this time it wasn’t at the expense of my self-assurance; it contributed to my improvement and only made me want to spend more time at the stove.

I taught myself to bake so that I could, in turn, teach you. In the process, I reawakened the instinct I used to rely on when I was younger, engaging my imagination and logic to cook things I inherently knew would taste good. I’m convinced we all have that instinct, and my greatest wish is that Stir, Sizzle, Bake gets you in touch with yours. Even if your brownies are a bit overcooked, if you have fun making them, and if you start to think about how you might change them next time, maybe adding cinnamon or pretzel dust, I’ll have succeeded.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

I hope, like a well-used skillet, the copy of the cookbook you are now holding becomes a keepsake, one that you return to again and again. It’s intended to be the definitive guide to cooking on cast iron, with a specific emphasis on baking. It’s also a solid introduction to baking that can be used as a source of recipes and inspiration for practiced home cooks as well. Those who are new to—or daunted by—cast iron or baking can treat the book as a primer, to be read and worked through in order.

For the first chapter of recipes, “No-Bake Baking,” your dough never sees the oven. Each item is cooked on the stovetop. You’ll be dealing with a lot of flatbreads. But you’ll also get a few not-so-flat rounds out of it. Most of these are easy to make; they’re quick and don’t require loads of ingredients. The recipes in the following section, “Easy-Bake Baking,” move you into proper baking territory, that is the oven. These may require more prep than the items you made before, but then you can shut the oven door, set your timer, and leave the rest to the machinery. In “On-the-Rise Baking,” you get into yeasted dough, kneaded or not. Don’t worry. Mostly it requires patience—waiting for a rise, or two, sometimes three.

We’ve arrived at my favorite chapter, “Make-the-Most-of Baking.” I think of these dishes as examples of “baking it forward,” because you’re using the items you made in the earlier chapters in tandem with other ingredients to deliver stand-alone dishes or, even, meals. Last but not least—this is the category of foodstuff I can’t live without—“Condiments.” Accompaniments for your breads, most of these, conveniently, are also made in your cast-iron pan.

Skillet Size

Before you get picky about the brand or age of your pan, you should ask yourself what size you need. All the recipes in this book were tested in a Lodge 10¼-inch cast-iron skillet, which is the average diameter of the pan, measured across the top. When you are buying vintage cast-iron skillets, you will see they are numbered according to size. Unfortunately—and confusingly—these numbers do not correspond to any recognizable dimension and were not standardized among manufacturers, so one company’s “5” pan may be slightly bigger—or smaller—than another’s. Despite these minor discrepancies, you can count on a vintage “8” skillet to be the reliable equivalent of a modern-day 10-inch pan (usually around 10¼ inches, like a Lodge).

ONE PAN, MANY POSSIBILITIES

British food writer Bee Wilson offers a tidy character sketch in her book Consider the Fork: “If well seasoned, a cast-iron skillet has excellent nonstick properties, and because it’s so heavy, it can withstand the high heat needed for searing.” That’s a good place to start; still, it only begins to scratch the metal surface.

Though cast-iron skillets take longer to heat than their aluminum or copper counterparts, they amass more thermal energy per pound and are able to get hotter and to stay hotter longer than those others. That intense heat is what makes them so great at searing (everything except fish, with its gentler flesh) and, when it comes to baking, gives you a crunchier, more satisfying crust. The more time you spend with your pan, the more you’ll not only begin to appreciate but also to manipulate its strengths to your advantage. You’ll even be able to bend some of the alleged rules and understand why some of them can’t be broken.

A FEW COOKING RULES

“The most difficult part of cast iron cooking is de-mystifying cast iron cooking.” —Mike Whitehead

1. Hot Is Cool

To reap the best results when baking in your cast-iron pan, almost all of the time—though there are a few exceptions—you have to preheat it. Although you might be tempted to try, you should not place your unbaked dough on a cool pan and then pop it in the oven. It will likely lead to sticking. I learned this the hard way when I tried to bake a Tibetan-style flatbread, on my stovetop, in my unheated cast-iron skillet. My bread was nearly immovable. The cleanup was misery; my cast iron endured, but not without a rather infuriating effort.

Preheating has a few other invaluable benefits. After all my recipe testing and cake eating, what I’ve learned is that the skillet’s concentrated heat can be an asset for many baked goods. The heat provides that extra caramelization on the bottom of a tart shell, bar cookie, or, which I adore, challah; it helps develop the slightly crunchy crust on cornbread, the almost jamlike roasted fruit topping—once flipped—of an upside-down cake, and it puts bubbly blisters on your naan. A dry hot skillet gives you a blackening char; adding fat to the pan is the way to a nut-brown finish.

Placing a small amount of cooking fat down on the hot cast iron and waiting for its temperature to climb not only greases the pan for the optimal “sear,” but also helps to build up the skillet’s seasoning, which, in turn, protects the pan and increases its nonstick capability. Dave Arnold explains in his indispensable post “Heavy Metal: The Science of Cast Iron Cooking,” published on his blog, Cooking Issues, that heat plus an unsaturated fat—of the kind found in some vegetable oils—yields a chemical reaction that changes the fat’s molecules to form a polymerized coating that repels water, which makes it nonstick. A new skillet (and sometimes an old one) must be properly seasoned before it’s used; when the pan’s ready for work, by cooking on it with more fat, you will continue to build upon that layer and increase its hydrophobia.

2. Go Ahead and Drop Acid

For a long time, acid (vinegar or citrus) was considered an unconditional no-no for cast iron. But food science expert Harold McGee dispelled this myth when I wanted to find out whether or not I could add a splash of wine to my skillet. “If the pan is well-seasoned, then contact with acids doesn’t matter unless it goes on long enough to breach the coating. Brief contact as in deglazing should be fine.” So a splash of wine to make a quick sauce of the rendered bits of fat left over from chicken thighs, say, would be hunky-dory. A spritz of lemon juice to bring out the tartness of raspberries being baked into a crisp is A-okay, too. I’m with J. Kenji López-Alt, of Serious Eats, who approves of a “short simmer,” but suggests you “avoid long-simmered acidic foods, particularly tomato sauce.”

Tomatoes are especially problematic. If you’ve ever prepared a marinara in a cast-iron pot, you may have noticed the sauce tasted bitter or metallic. But you can warm chopped or baby tomatoes in that pan. You can put them in a batter and bake them in the skillet. And, of course, you can pile them, solid or pureed, on top of dough.

3. Soaping Mechanism

Something else that’s surprisingly all right for cast iron, if you’ve treated it as you should, is most modern dish soap. I know, this sounds dangerous: Doesn’t Dawn take grease out of your way and isn’t that “grease” the barrier that protects your pan and food from each other? Yes and no. Once that “grease” has been polymerized, it’s not grease anymore. The Dawns of the world can’t hurt it now.

CHOOSING A SKILLET

Something Old

Before you can begin to think about the nitty-gritty of cleaning a cast-iron skillet, you have to own one and might need some help figuring out which to pick. America has a rich legacy in this area. The original makers of “hollow ware,” as they called it, were stove companies, cleverly selling vessels to use on the appliances. But not long after the advent of those machines, a number of major foundries positioned themselves as the primary producers of the pots and pans. Wagner (est. 1881), based in Sidney, Ohio, and Griswold (est. 1865), out of Erie, Pennsylvania, were, at one point, the world’s largest manufacturers of cast-iron cookware. By 1957, Griswold had been bought out and, soon after, its trademarks and name were purchased by Wagner. In 1969, the rights to both brands were sold to yet another company. That appears to have been the end for Wagner pieces, but those bearing the Griswold mark were being made until 1973.

Today, the market for vintage cast iron is competitive. Collectors are quick to snatch up the valuable items, while the rest of us dilettantes are growing more interested in owning an atavistic pan or two ourselves. It’s a seller’s market.

In many ways these pans are a lot like old blue jeans; they’re American icons that marry form and function. And the same way you can go out and buy yourself some vintage denim, you can find yourself an old skillet, too. Both objects usually require some refurbishment and breaking in. The more expensive ones may have already been cleaned up, as to be ready for use.

If you buy a real fixer-upper, keep in mind, serious effort is required. Grime and oxidation are treatable. A smooth, even-toned surface is ideal. What you should avoid are cracks and craters. If yours is more of a rescue purchase and is covered in egregious amounts of greasy gunk or rusted over, go to a local professional who specializes in cleaning metal objects. There’s a shop in New York City called Best Made Company known for its painstakingly crafted axes and knives. The company’s product director, Nick Zdon, teaches classes on the restoration of cast-iron skillets and will even strip down and re-season one for you for a fee. Or you can buy an already spruced-up pan from his shop’s website, bestmadeco.com.

Other outlets for purchasing vintage vessels include Etsy, where I found a Vermont-based outfit called SeaGlassPrimitives, which strips, cleans, and seasons pans organically. You could just as easily comb flea markets, or, as Sam Sifton suggested in the New York Times, stop by “junk shops in towns not known for antiques.” He found his “quarry” real cheap—in a church basement in Delaware—and his preferred cast iron–salvation method is a basic elbow-grease application, which, along with re-seasoning—the requisite follow-up—will be addressed in the next chapter.

I’m a big fan of these vintage pieces, and not from a collector’s point of view; I love their rich patinas and the fact that, if anything, they improve with age and use. I was listening to A Taste of the Past, on Brooklyn’s Heritage Radio Network. The show’s host, Linda Pelaccio, devoted this particular episode to cast-iron cookware and interviewed two experts, an author/poet named Stacey Harwood and Joel Schiff, a historian who has extensively studied—and collected—holloware. He noted that Griswold’s production quality was “excellent,” but that most pieces from the early twentieth century—Wagner, Lodge, and Piqua—were “extremely high grade.” He advised listeners to “look for things that were finely cast” and described those as “almost lickably smooth; it looks like iron cream when it’s cleaned and everything.” I nodded with nerdy appreciation at that statement, because those old skillets remind me of cooled, poured molten chocolate, and when I see one, I always have the sudden urge to press my cheek to it. There’s nothing like a well-cared-for vintage cast-iron skillet.

FUN FACT: Power Tool

Did you know you can use your skillet to smash garlic and crush peppercorns?

Something New

Alternatively, there is nothing wrong with new pans. Lodge cast-iron skillets are ubiquitous, inexpensive, and most definitely serviceable. The company dates back to the tail end of the nineteenth century and, along with Griswold and Wagner, built one of the country’s most successful, recognized foundries. It’s the only extant brand name of the lot. But the products it puts out today reflect the current technology and economy. These cast-iron pans are preseasoned, allowing you to skip the standard initiation routine. Lodge’s website offers general care instructions and walks you through the necessary damage control should your preseasoning begin to peel away. It’s easy enough to remedy, and some intrepid project-lovers decide to strip the skillet entirely and start from scratch, sanding down the surface and re-seasoning it.

If you would prefer to invest in a modern-day heirloom and have the budget to spend on one, there’s good news: In the past five years, a couple of artisanal cast-iron outfits—FINEX Cast Iron Cookware Company, in Portland, Oregon, and Borough Furnace, in Syracuse, New York—have begun to manufacture some truly beautiful pans, in smaller quantities, and at higher prices.

A final option is the hybrid enamel-coated cast-iron cookware produced by French companies like Le Creuset and Staub, known for the fun, bright, shiny colors of their exteriors. Both offer skillets whose interiors are coated in dulled black enamel; but I don’t recommend them for any recipe that requires you to preheat a dry pan to a high temperature—or, similarly, has you cook something in a dry pan. At intense heat, and without lubrication, that pretty outer layer is prone to cracking. Although I suspect they’re better suited to braising, searing, and sautéing than to baking, you should be able to make a number of the recipes in the book with them; I’d avoid the flatbreads, though. I’d also do a slower, lower stovetop preheat. Best is to follow the respective manufacturer’s instructions and warnings.

A Little History

There is a reason that cast iron has stood the test of time and is used by so many different cultures around the world; it works, and it works hard. The flat circular comal on which tortillas are prepared is cast iron. Don’t forget griddles, like the Indian tava (tawa), or flattop grills, like the Spanish plancha. Panini pans and their cousins, waffle irons, are also wrought from that metal. The list goes on…

When you expose iron oxide to extremely high temperatures and combine it with carbon, you get what’s known as pig iron, an impure version of the metal that’s hard and brittle. Re-melting this substance yields cast iron. If you dig up examples from the early 1700s, you can see a residual, raised—usually round—“sprue” on the bottom of the vessels, marking the spot where the molten metal had been poured into its mold. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the shape shifted into an extended line, known as a “gate.” Either way, these entry points made the pots’ bases uneven. This wouldn’t have mattered when nestling a kettle into a hearth; once ranges were introduced, though, anything but a flat bottom became problematic.

The method changed to accommodate; a separate entry channel would be attached to the vessel mold so the liquid iron could pass through that “in gate” before filling the hollow cavity. Once the ensuing object had cooled, its attached gate could be hacked off without affecting the smooth, level base. By the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, there was cast iron aplenty in America: stoves were widely available, and flat-bottomed pans—or skillets—became the norm. Our tendency to refer to them as “frying pans” emphasizes that function. But you can do a lot more with these pans than fry.