It’s time to take the heat out of the kitchen and keep it outside. Cooking outside can be more than barbecuing. Especially if you are camping or at the cottage and have a lovely fire pit ready. (And be sure to check the NS fire ban status before you light it up!) Lodge Cast Iron started as cookware over open flame. Cast iron is tough, thick and perfect for open flame cooking. It’s slow to heat but then maintains even heat for a long time.
Fry pans are the most recognizable outdoor cookware but there’s more. A Lodge Camp Dutch Oven has built-in legs to raise it a bit above the fire. With a big stainless handle to grab, it can be suspended over a larger fire using a cast iron tripod. It’s the ideal chili-soup-stew pot for camping and is available in several sizes. The Combo set is a deep saucepan with a lid that flips over to become a fry pan. It is a good size for baking sourdough bread. The real show stealer is the Cook-It-All for dedicated campers and outdoor enthusiasts.
The Lodge Cook-It-All has three pieces, a top, bottom and a pair of handles. The top can be flipped to a smooth griddle, or on the other side, a large grill pan. The bottom can be used as a large cooking pot or a wok. Now here is the magic of the Cook-It-All; the bottom can become the top and vice versa so you now have a cast iron oven.
Using the smooth griddle side facing up, the Cook-It-All bottom becomes the top. It has a slightly raised ridge all around the base, with a smaller ‘tower’ in the middle. The ridge and tower are designed to hold hot coal or briquets so that the cast iron is heated from the top down as well as from below the griddle. It’s genius. You can bake bread, biscuits, pizza and anything else that strikes your fancy. A 12” pizza fits on the griddle. The large stainless handles cleverly hook into either the top or the bottom, and make lifting what is a heavy duty pot or griddle much easier. The coils around the handles help to dissipate heat that can travel up the stainless where it hooks on to the Cook-It-All.
Lodge Cast Iron comes fully seasoned. This means it is ready to go out of the box (after a wash to shake off any travel dust). Keeping it seasoned is easy; just wipe it with cooking oil after every use. I find it takes a bit of time to get the surface perfect, which is normal. The more you use it, the better it cooks.
Enjoy summer as much as possible. Cooking outside is a great way to do just that, especially with a Cook-It-All.
Did you know? Cast iron is a mix of molten steel and iron poured into sand molds. Once the metal cools, the sand mold is broken away to reveal the new cookware. It’s an ancient process.
Cathy