New Cornbread Pan

[Vaughn McMillan]

Last Christmas LOML gave me a Lodge cast iron cornbread pan...the kind that makes corn-shaped sticks of cornbread. My dad had a couple of pans just like it, and LOML always loved having his cornbread sticks. Unbeknownst to LOML, I remember as a kid how long it took my dad to get his pans seasoned to the point where the cornbread would actually come out of the pan in one piece. (I'm talking years, here.) He had more epic failures with those pans than I could count. And he was an old hand at seasoning cast iron.

I, on the other hand, have never owned any cast iron cookware until last year when I bought a couple of cast iron skillets for searing my sous vide steaks. Those pans were purchased pre-seasoned, and they worked reasonably well. I did some Internet research and set about to seasoning my new cornbread pan. Over the past month or more, it has been through at least 4 cycles of getting oiled with canola oil and baked for an hour or two at 350º to 400º. (I did the baking in my gas Weber grill outside so as to avoid smelling up the house with smoky oil.) After these repeated cycles, the new pan had the rich, shiny black surface of a well-seasoned cast iron pan.

Today I made a pot of Texas-style chili and beans, and decided this would be a great chance to try the new cornbread pan. I had high expectations for the cornbread sticks...I wanted LOML to be impressed with my kitchen prowess (she doesn't cook at all), and I wanted to show her I was savvy enough to master this fancy cornbread pan right out of the gate.

The chili came out great. I used pre-packaged seasoning and canned pinto and kidney beans (so nothing fancy there), but cut up a couple of T-bone steaks for the beef, as they were on sale for more than a dollar less than ground beef, stew meat, or cheap round steak.

The cornbread was also out of a box...just a honey cornbread we've had before that I knew LOML loves. But that's where the good part of the story ends. I figured I'd share a photo I took of the cornbread sticks to send to my sister. LOML and I were both in tears from laughing so hard when I typed out the text message. In the message, I said:

Made cornbread in the new cornbread pan Kian gave me for Christmas. Came out just like Benny's used to!

Somewhere, my dad is laughing his butt off right about now.

 

[Ted Calver]

I hope you don't mind if I join in.

 

[Darren Wright]

Now scrape off what you can and burn it in there good without washing it and maybe it will work next time.

So did your dad use canola oil when he cooked them? Maybe save a little bacon grease or pickup a small (like there is such a thing) tub of lard and do real seasoning with one of those. With the keto diet we've been using more left over bacon grease to cook veggies and such with in our iron skillet and I've noticed they come out much easier and with a nicer crispness to them.

I know my mom used to try to alter my great grandmother's biscuit recipe to get them to taste the same. Of course the recipe was a smidgen of this and a pinch of that, no modern measurements. It wasn't until she switched from margarine to real butter that the light came on, she was able to make the biscuits she remembered at that point.

 

[Ryan Mooney]

You need more grease in the pan when you put the batter in, helps if the pan is hot first as well. For frying pan cornbread I'll put some butter in the pan, get it to dang close to smoking, swirl to make sure its evenly distributed, then pour the cornbread batter in and back in the oven. That almost instantly crisps the outside of the bread and pretty much puts paid to sticking. I'm betting that'll get you a batch that works.

On cast iron, I've fixed up a few dozen pans (I tend to rescue them and hand them off to other folks who'll appreciate them once they're cleaned up and seasoned). Based on my experience, canola doesn't polymerize super well, kind of but not great. Lard can be ok but its best if its from the leaner old style pork ("grass fed" or free range - the more complex feed mix creates more omega-3 acids in the meat because <reasons I don't understand>). I don't really like using bacon grease for initial seasoning, the salt seemed to do weird things (but haven't tried a lot so ymmv), it does seem to work pretty well once the base layers are down though. I've mostly used food grade flax seed oil (aka expensive linseed from the fancy side of the grocery store) which polymerizes at around 300-350 in about 30m. Much hotter than that and you're mostly burning it off. Some smoke is ok, because the carbon becomes trapped in the polymerized oil and it's harder than the oil so it'll also fill holes, protect the pan, act slippery, generally be awesome.. but to much and you're just burning oil. I usually do the first couple passes hotter and the subsequent passes just below the smoke point for a bit longer for this reason. I also pre-heat the pan to ~200F before applying the oil because the more thin coats the better so you ideally want each coat to be as thin as humanly possible. I usually take advantage of the BBQ pre-heat cycle to put another coat on any pans that need it, more or less like you're doing .

The other trick with cast iron is that while seasoning it you also want to make sure to rub out any nibs in the finish (this should all be sounding real familiar somewhere around here ), otherwise you'll end up with bumps and hollows. For frying pans I'll scrape them with a flexible spatula between applications. I think for this perhaps a wire brush or medium sanding scrubby or maybe a brass scrubby might work.

 

[Vaughn McMillan]

Thanks for the tips, guys. I think a lot of the problem was not greasing or pre-heating the pan before I put the batter in it. I also overfilled the slots bigtime. I didn't expect the batter to rise as much as it did. I must say, though, that the cleanup was much easier than expected. I soaked the pan in hot water (no soap, of course) for a few minutes and it only needed a light going-over with a stiff plastic bristle brush and some running hot water to make it come clean. Another potential contributor to the problem was the sugar/honey in this store-bought cornbread mix. My dad made his from scratch, and I'm not sure if anything was measured, but I'm pretty certain it didn't have any sugar added. I think he did write down a recipe at some point so my mom could make it. He did the same with biscuits. He could never get the exact quantities of ingredients from his grandmother (from whom he learned to cook biscuits), but eventually he got the proportions right, so he wrote the recipe down. Then when we moved to high altitude Los Alamos (7300 feet), he had to start all over because the old recipe didn't rise enough. We ate a lot of buttermilk hockey pucks while he tweaked his recipe, lol.

Darren, my dad used bacon grease for pretty much everything, including lotion on chapped hands. He drew the line at his hair though...that was what Brylcreem was for. The morning he groggily mistook the Brylcreem tube for Colgate toothpaste has gone down in family history, lol. Anyway, he always had a metal bacon grease container next to the stove to use for cooking oil. I don't have a handy source for bacon grease, since LOML prefers that I don't cook bacon in the house...she loves bacon but hates for the house to smell like cooked bacon. I do it on the gas Weber outside instead.

Ryan, the guy in the most legit-looking video I watched about seasoning cast iron was also a proponent of flax seed oil. I priced it at the local "natural" market and decided to try canola first. (I was having a hard time justifying spending more than the cost of the pan for a small bottle of oil to season it with.) I'll give your other suggestions a try on the next go-round. Regarding the suggestion about nibs, I agree on a regular cast iron cooking pan. This pan, though, is essentially nine troughs made entirely of nibs. I don't have enough sandpaper or time to handle THOSE nibs, lol.



Thanks again for the suggestions. Kian and I had a great laugh over the whole episode, which will undoubtedly be continued, good or bad.

 

[Ryan Mooney]

Yeah that pan is pretty nibby I've never actually used one of those but the appeal of more crispy outside bits is kind of tantalizing (I've had cornbread from them.. just never made it in one myself). I don't think the bottle of flax oil I bought was super expensive (its been a number of years and it did quite a few pans..) but we're also not to far from a couple of the major wholesalers of that sort of thing so it likely varies a lot.

Looking through my list of oils, I see Soya, Sunflower, and grapeseed are not to far off on the iodine value (method used to measure polymerization rate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_value - generally anything above about 140 will polymerize when applied in a thin layer in just the air and things above around 100 will polymerize with enough time & heat) so they should all work somewhat well. Both actually have a higher smoke point than flax to... I might be re-thinking some things Ditto Tobacco seed oil, but I'm thinking that might have some .. other problems.. I'm not sure why I even have it on the spreadsheet . There's more to it than that of course as some oils (e.g. tung) form more water resistant polymers or some have tougher polymers.. but I ain't figured all those details out yet.

 

[Bill Arnold]

We have a set of cast iron skillets we bought when we married and seasoned them much as you described. They work well, but our best buys over the years is cast iron pans for cornbread that we purchased at flea markets. All of them must be older than we are, were already well-seasoned and, in some cases, a bit rough looking but we cleaned them up and made sure they were ready to go.

When making cornbread, I normally use muffin pans, but occasionally use the corn stick pans like you showed. Regardless of which type of pan I use, I add canola oil to it before putting it in the oven. The pans go in the oven when I turn it on to preheat to 450° and stay in there until I start smelling the oil. Remove the pans from the oven and pour or dip the batter into them. By the time the pans are placed back in the oven, the bottom of the cornbread is cooking quite nicely! Remove the pans when the cornbread is a golden brown. Let cool a few minutes and the cornbread basically falls out of the pan.

We prefer a basic Southern cornbread as published in "Fannie Flagg's Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook.

[h=1]Ingredients:[/h]

2 Cups Cornmeal 1 tsp Baking Soda 1 tsp Salt 1/4 Cup Sugar

2 Eggs beaten 2 Cups Buttermilk 1/4 Cup Oil

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450°. Place muffin pans or skillet in the oven after adding oil to them. Allow pans to heat until oil is very hot.

Combine dry ingredients and make a well in the middle. Combine eggs, buttermilk and oil, mixing well. Add wet ingredients to dry and beat until smooth.

Remove pans from oven and add mixture to them. Return to oven and bake until golden brown, about 25 minutes for muffins and 35 for a large skillet.


Note: LOML can't drink milk due to lactose intolerance, so we keep dry buttermilk and regular milk powder for recipes.

 

[Vaughn McMillan]

Thanks, Bill. I'll have to give that recipe a shot. That looks real similar to how I remember my dad making cornbread. (I need to go through my mom's binder of recipes that she typed up over the years. I ended up with the binder after my dad passed away. Pretty sure the family cornbread and biscuit recipes are in there.)

 

[Brent Dowell]

That's too funny!

I use crisco for seasoning on my pans instead of the canola. I keep a little metal can of it and after I rinse out the cast iron and dry it on a burner, just rub a little into the pan. Works pretty well.

 

[Ed Thomas]

Another vote for Flax oil. I'd tried veggie oil, olive oil, bacon fat, and Flax did the trick. I've a few cast pans, a hi-carbon crepe pan, and a hi-carbon hammered wok. The wok was a problem because the seasoning couldn't take the heat. IIRC, the flax oil is baked on at near 500ºF. Here is video of the process from The Wok Shop

Moto Kitchen

 

[David Johnson]

When much younger neighbors would do that to cornbread and put it in a glass of buttermilk, or clabber milk. Like Corn bread but not like that.
Vaughn practice makes perfect.
David

 

[Vaughn McMillan]

Back when I was a kid, desert was often a piece of leftover cornbread in a bowl of milk with sugar on it. My dad was an old-school Texan, and we usually had fresh biscuits or cornbread made daily.

 

[Carol Reed]

Saw a 'seasoning' video where the flax seed oil came from supplement capsules. Probably less money than a bottle? BTW, it was a pizza pan. He sanded it smooth and then reasoned it. Worked like charm.

 

[Mike Stafford]

If all else fails the answer for something that sticks is WD-40.

 

[Ryan Mooney]

Saw a 'seasoning' video where the flax seed oil came from supplement capsules. Probably less money than a bottle? BTW, it was a pizza pan. He sanded it smooth and then reasoned it. Worked like charm.

We recently (last year or so) picked up one of the high carbon steel pans. You season them just like you would cast iron but they react to heat changes a lot quicker. A lot of chefs like them better than cast because of the quick response time and lighter weight. They're also dirt cheap at the restaurant supply stores ($25 for a 10"). Of course like anything you can spend as much as you'd like but the cheaper one still seems like a pretty decent pan. I'm still on the fence between it and the cast.

 

[Brent Dowell]

I recently got sent a pretty decent assortment of those high carbon pans. I have to say I really like them. I've been neglecting my cast iron for them since I got them.

 

[Darren Wright]

I recently got sent a pretty decent assortment of those high carbon pans. I have to say I really like them. I've been neglecting my cast iron for them since I got them.

View attachment 106024

I've not heard of carbon pans, but makes sense. They do look to be a bit lighter.

 

[Ed Thomas]

I've not heard of carbon pans, but makes sense. They do look to be a bit lighter.

Mine certainly isn't that 'light'.

 

[Ed Thomas]

... flax seed oil. I priced it at the local "natural" market and decided to try canola first. (I was having a hard time justifying spending more than the cost of the pan for a small bottle of oil to season it with.) .

This is at my local grocery.



$6.79 CDN is about $5.10 for you. You got that pan for less than $5 ?

 

[Ryan Mooney]

Mine certainly isn't that 'light'.

View attachment 106043

Yeah but imagine what a cast iron in that size would weight, especially one of those new Lodge monstrosities