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 secondguessing 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 predetermined 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, “Makethe-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 modernday 10-inch pan (usually around 10¼ inches, like a Lodge).
Copyright © 2016 by Charlotte Druckman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
