Inspired by a comment on another thread with @justhach, I’d enjoy hearing about your cast iron journey.
How did you get started?
Where are you right now?
What are some of your favorite pieces, or most often used pieces?
What are your go to recipes?
And let’s be sure this doesn’t turn into a competition. I’ve been collecting and restoring for a decent amount time, but I’m just as interested in hearing from someone who’s just starting out as I am from an avid collector…everyone’s welcome! I’ll post my own in the comments.
Picked up a 26cm Le Creuset frying pan in a charity shop a few years ago and fell in love with cooking with it. Since then I’ve steadily gained more and more from charity shopping and luck, I think the current total is 8 various pans, casseroles, and frying pans. All Le Creuset as it’s pretty hard to find other decent brands in the UK (At least where I live).
Probably my favourite dish is a pretty standard potato hash, that or just bacon and eggs in the morning 😉.
I’m more of a carbon steel person but there’s no community for it yet from what I’ve seen.
I first heard about CI/CS through cooking youtubers advocating for them and was pretty much immediately convinced. Our first teflon pan got scratched because we weren’t careful enough. Our second one died because of high heat, which was frustrating because those were the best snow peas we’d ever stir-fried, so we refused to buy yet another shitty, shortlived pan. There was a time where we used mostly stainless but that was ultra-sticky. So when I heard about CI/CS, I did the research, decided on CS for completely subjective reasons and haven’t looked back on teflon.
We do keep a shitty teflon in our home in case guests come to cook and we don’t trust them with our pans.
More recently, we got two enameled CI dutch ovens and they’re absolutely lovely.
