Round 2. Round 3 is in the oven.

I've got pics, but no one seems to care anymore. Five rounds, and these pans are awesome!

For Christmas, my SIL is getting into cooking a lot and does a little with cast iron. I'm going to buy her a couple of carbon steel pans and pre-season them for her using this method. I think she'll love it.

What are you talking about?

I do care. Mine will probably undergo the same treatment.

Pics or it never happened :p

So I did the ol' Cast iron steak....HOLY SHIT that's a lot of smoke.

I used olive oil and that may have made a difference due to the smoke point (I'll have to experiment), but 4 minutes of total cooking time was enough to absolutely fill the house with smoke.

Fortunately it was a tasty steakhouse smoke, so I didn't mind. Still, it was an amazing amount of smoke pouring off that steak. As soon as the steak hit the pan I thought "oh shit...I'm going to be in soooooo much trouble when the wife gets home..."

I do it and you are right, lots of smoke.

It tasted great, so I'm fine with it.

It's probably not a good idea to use olive oil in that scenario. Olive oil has a really low boiling point, and therefore it burns off faster than it takes for the meat to cook. And that's bad. I've heard that you shouldn't use olive oil at any temp over 250... That olive oil smoke is full of toxins....

I wondered why the recipe called for canola when it's...well it's a shitty oil.

I'm pretty sure I learned a valuable lesson there.

Peanut or canola. And if it ain't smokin' up the house, you're not doing it right. In order to get that great sear, you have to have a high temp. And if you've got the high temp, you're going to get a lot of smoke.

:thumb:

I could have put the leftover steak juice in a cup and poured it over my cereal.

It was spectacular.

Cast iron cooks much hotter. It's not that it IS hotter, but it doesn't lose heat due to its mass. Don't use olive oil and if you normally cook on medium-high, turn it down to medium. It definitely depends on your cooktop.

I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say "shitty" oil. Canola is a better option than olive oil, but for high temperature cooking I use soybean oil. When cooking with cast iron you're not looking for flavor from the oil, you're looking for performance.

That it tastes like crap. Olive oil doesn't. It seemed odd to put a heavy oil like Canola oil on your steak.

I didn't even give a thought to the smoke point until the next day. I just thought the cookbook was going cheap on me. Pretty much a brain cramp.

use ghee...highest smoke point, no impurities

Canola is a heavy oil?

Olive oil has its place, but not cooking steaks in cast iron. You want an oil that's neutral, like canola, that can handle the heat. Canola basically has no flavor as opposed to a fresh pressed olive oil. For some reason people are really confused about olive oil. You can cook in olive oil (which is refined to the hilt), but its smoke point is low. The other end of the range (Extra Virgin Olive Oil) is rarely used in cooking. It's more of a finishing oil.

And simple to make if you want that flavor.

Very simple. I make it using a couple of pounds of butter at a time! And it tastes amazing!