Equipment

Is it okay to use extra virgin olive oil to season a pan?- Mary I wouldn't recommend using extra virgin olive oil, simply because you are paying a premium for the extra virgin part. That said, pretty much any cooking oil can be used to season frying pans. I use regular olive oil to season my cast iron pans, but you have to be careful... Read more →


Frying Pan Concern - Cleaning After Cooking Chicken


How do I clean a seasoned fry pan in which I've cooked chicken?-Diane I'm not really sure what this question is getting at, but I'll hazard a guess that since chicken is notorious for contamination from salmonella, enterococcus or E. coli (among others), what you are concerned about is cross-contamination of other foods by a pan in which... Read more →


When I was a kid, we used to make these wonderful bush pies. For those who don't know what a bush pie is, it is a sandwich made by compressing to pieces of bread, with filling in the middle, in a device which compresses the edges and which you then heat over a fire to toast the outside while heating the interior at the same time. My all... Read more →


Coming Clean


In your post on Seasoning Stainless Steel, you say to "wash in warm water with a small amount of dish soap and dry immediately." I thought that soap would dissolve the fat, so you would damage the coating if you use it. - Comment* Seasoning in this sense involves heating oil in a frying pan, or other cooking surface, to form a non-stick... Read more →


Being an incurable foodie and techie, I of course have been grabbing cooking apps for my iPad. Some apps are little more than shameless money grabs or self promotions. Others are poorly constructed technically or have little quality content. The exception, far and away, is Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything application. This is... Read more →


Steel of a Deal


What do people mean when they say that conventional butcher's steels don’t actually sharpen your knife. According to the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary, sharpen means to "make sharp or sharper." It seems to me that is why I use a steel, and the effect that it has. --Art OK, this is something that really bugs me too. It all boils... Read more →


Aroma Rice Cooker


The folks at Aroma Housewares Company kindly offered to send me an ARC-150SB rice cooker to try. Since I have always been a "stove-top rice cooking kinda guy", I saw this as a chance to see how well they work, and whether the technology could entice me from my old habits. Growing up, we cooked rice on the stovetop in a pot specially... Read more →