They look old-school and heavy, like something out of a pioneer’s covered wagon. But cast-iron pans still have a place in the modern kitchen, and many chefs swear by them. Some home cooks believe they need Teflon and ceramic nonstick pans to get the job done, but cowboy Kent Rollins uses cast iron to cook everything from seared steaks and bacon to fried eggs and biscuits, both indoors and outdoors.
Born in Hollis, Oklahoma, Rollins learned to cook from his mother when he was 9 or 10 years old.
“I‘d get in the kitchen with a bunch of old women after church and I’d watch them cook, and none of them ever had a recipe,” he said. The food was always amazing, and much of the cooking was done with cast iron. “It was a thing everybody grew up with.”
Rollins started guiding elk hunters in New Mexico in the 1980s, which required him to cook for groups.
“My mother taught me, she said, ‘You cook what you love for the ones that you love,’” Rollins said. He took this to heart even when he started feeding cattle ranchers. “When you stay somewhere six, seven weeks feeding three meals a day, 70 miles from the nearest town, you become family with the people you feed.”
In 1992, he bought an 1876 Studebaker chuckwagon—a covered, horse-drawn wagon decked out to function as a kitchen on wheels—and in 2015, he published “A Taste of Cowboy,” the first of his three cookbooks. Currently, he and his wife, Shannon, host Cowboy Kent Rollins, a popular YouTube Channel, where he cooks exclusively with cast iron.
Why Cook With Cast Iron?
It’s durable. “It’s been around forever, and if you take care of it, it'll outlive all of us,” said Rollins. His oldest pan, which was his grandmother’s, is at least 120 years old.
It’s better for you. “Cast iron is the healthiest thing you eat out of. There are no foreign ingredients in there,” Rollins said, referring to risks of chemicals in Teflon, and leaching metals in copper or cheap stainless steel pans.
But the biggest surprise for the uninitiated is that cast-iron pans are nonstick when well-seasoned and used properly. In fact, complaints about cast iron often come down to improper care.
“I’ve been places where people cook something in a new piece of cast iron, and you‘ll get a metal taste, and they say, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ And I’ll say, ‘It’s a [pan] that isn’t seasoned proper,’” Rollins said. “And people say, ‘Well, I taste food that was cooked in it before.’ I say, ‘Well, that’s a skillet or a [Dutch] oven that wasn’t cleaned proper.’”
He told us how it should be done.
How to Properly Season a Cast-Iron Pan
When oil is heated in a cast-iron pan at a high temperature, it adheres to the surface in a hardened, blackened layer that’s difficult to remove. That’s good, because you want it there: This “seasoning” creates an effective non-stick surface.To create it, preheat the oven to 400 to 450 degrees F, and place a wire rack flat on a cookie sheet on the middle rack. Wipe down the entire pan—inside, outside, and handle—with an oil with a high smoke-point, such as grapeseed or avocado oil. Then place the pan upside down on the wire rack, and let it “bake” for an hour.
Rollins recommends repeating this two or three times. Let the skillet cool to room temperature each time before wiping it with oil again. It may not turn solid black right away: “It’s going to have some bronze to it, it’s going to have some splotching in it, but eventually if you keep [seasoning it] and you use it properly, it'll be a golden glossy black finish that will let you be the best cook in the world,” he said.
Many new pans come pre-seasoned, but the cooking surface is rough.
“They claim the roughness of the cast iron to start out with will help the seasoning adhere to it better,” said Rollins. If he gets such a pan, he sands it down a bit to polish it—“not to where it’s down to bare metal, just to sort of get the rough off”—and follows his own seasoning process as usual.
After the initial seasoning, continual use builds up that seasoning layer.
“I can slide an egg out of any cast-iron skillet I got,” said Rollins. But this is the shocker: “And they never see soap.”
To Soap or Not to Soap?
Soap is an emulsifier; it allows fats and oils to mix with water—something they don’t normally do—and be washed away. Since seasoning is a hard layer of oil, soap can potentially weaken it, especially when combined with scratching and scraping brushes. “Back in the day,” Rollins said, soaps could be much harsher than modern ones, but he still plays it safe today.Start cleaning by wiping out any excess grease and bits of leftover food. Then use a wooden spatula to scrape out any stuck-on grime. Pour steaming-hot water into the pan, scrape it around, pour it out, and rinse it one more time. Repeat if you need to.
“The best time to clean the pan is as soon as you slide your food out of it, when it’s still quite hot,” said Rollins.
Once you’ve cleaned it, re-season the pan: Wipe it dry and place it on a hot burner until it’s hot and completely dry, then wipe it with oil.
“I can have that skillet cleaned and re-seasoned in five minutes,” Rollins said, “before everybody can get set down at the table.”
He re-seasons every time he cooks: “I don’t care if I fry a piece of bacon in there or make a piece of toast.”
Rollins does make one exception for his no soap rule, advising only to ever use it with a pan that is well seasoned: “I have one [cast-iron] Dutch oven that I fry fish in. It’s probably 80 years old. I bet there’s three-quarters of an inch worth of seasoning in that old pot.” He has rinsed it with really hot water and soap. There’s no way a bit of soap is going to take that off—but scratching might.
It’s OK to serve food from the skillet with a stainless steel spoon, but never clean it with metal: “You’re just scraping away your seasoning,” Rollins said. Use a wooden spatula or heat-safe plastic.
Note that certain acidic foods, such as tomato paste or BBQ sauce, can be hard on cast iron, especially if the pan isn’t well-seasoned. Rollins still cooks acidic foods in cast iron, but only in pans that have been seasoned and polished for many years; don’t do it on a brand new pan.
The Best Places to Buy Cast Iron
Rollins’ wife tells him he has “enough cast iron to sink the Titanic.” For the average home cook, Rollins recommends two essential pans: Get a 12-inch skillet and a shallow 12-inch Dutch oven, “and you can cook anything you want to,” he said. Dutch ovens are great for casseroles or pies, and as he pointed out, they fit 20 biscuits.Rollins likes looking for the old stuff first at flea markets, estate sales, and antique shops.
“I‘ll always go to the cast iron first and look. Sometimes people don’t know what they got,” he said. Other times, “people say ‘I’ll take $1,200 for this skillet’ and I always tell them, ‘It’s not lined with gold.’” He’s paid anywhere from $25 to $80 at a flea market or an estate sale, and a bit more at an antique shop.
Look for a smooth pan. Avoid warped pans or ones with hairline cracks, but rust is not a deal breaker.
“I’ve bought pans for $2. I bring them home and I clean them. Some of them don’t have a crack in them; some of them were so rusty I couldn’t see the crack,” he said.
Bringing an Old Pan Back to Life
Say you find that rusty $2 hidden gem at a garage sale. It’s time to restore it.Rollins recommends starting with a rotary brush on a drill to polish it to see what’s underneath. Some people use electrolysis—an effective and common process of running low voltage DC current to remove rust from iron suspended in an electrolytic solution—but not Rollins. He doesn’t want to mess with the chemicals.
“When I’m trying to bring it back to life, anything that I put in that skillet is also something that I could have cooked with,” he said. He uses a lot of coarse salt, vinegar, and baking soda to remove rust. A self-cleaning oven cycle also works for a pan in very bad condition. But he warns that you should put it on a wire rack over a baking sheet, “because that stuff flakes off and gets in the bottom of the oven”— a hard-learned lesson that earned him “some of the best scoldings I ever got from my mother.”
Tips for Cooking With Cast Iron
If Rollins is frying potatoes, he adds oil to a Dutch oven or a skillet. If he’s frying eggs, he uses a bit of butter. For steaks, he uses a bit of butter or a bit of olive oil, or both. He cooks a nine-minute filet that’s three minutes on one side, and three minutes on the other. For the last three minutes, he uses tongs to grip the filet and hold the edges of the meat to the pan to sear the sides.
“I always have a little brown butter in there, a little bit of garlic, sometimes some thyme, and you just keep spooning that back up on that meat,” he said.
“It’s not rocket science work or I couldn’t do it, you know what I mean?” he said, laughing.
“I just want to tell people if this was good enough that people used it from the 1880s till now, and it’s still on the market, this has got to be some of the best stuff ever.”
