Cast Iron Breakfast Potatoes

This was a special request by my oldest son. I made these for him last year and every so often he'd ask for them, usually when we didn't have time or potatoes.

We even made a trio of flavored ketchups: garlic, salt, pepper / everything bagel seasoning / habanero. Very delicious.

Cast Iron Jerk Chicken

Nostalgia is a tough thing to chase. And yet here I am.

The summer before I started college, my friends and I took a trip to Jamaica. A week in an island paradise to swim and listen to music and hang out. I wrote a short story that blatantly ripped off Fight Club even though I wouldn't recognize it for a while. But the thing that stuck with me the most has to be the food.

Foods that I tried for the first time and have never been able to relive the tastes since. Rice and peas, which are really beans. Fried plantains, which aren't deep-fried. Beef patties, which are empanada-like. And the crown jewel, jerk chicken.

That week I had jerk chicken at least three times from different vendors in the area. I remember one was very reminiscent of barbecue chicken, and another that was very different, unlike anything I'd had before. But they were all delicious.

Over the last 18 years, I've tried various Jamaican restaurants trying to experience those flavors again. Here's a typical result.

Since I've been on a cast-iron kick and getting more confident in the kitchen, I thought it was time to attempt my own jerk chicken.

(My junior year of college, I hosted a Jamaican dinner for friends. Jerk chicken and jerky potatoes for vegetarians were on the menu, but I just used a store bought sauce. A college-budget approximation of the dish.)

I knew my technique would be to use skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs like I did in this recipe. Get the skin perfect, flip and finish cooking the meat through in the oven.

So the question was how do I make the sauce?

I found four that looked good: Caribbean Pot, Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, and Spruce Eats.

One of the first things that I did was compare all the ingredients to understand what "jerk" really means. The common elements seemed to be allspice, thyme, scotch bonnet peppers, scallions.

I decided on Caribbean Pot, because it seemed likely to me that it was the most authentic. But then I figured it wouldn't be that much harder to make 2 marinades because they overlap ingredients. Based on looks, I picked the Spruce Eats recipe as well.

The snag I ran into is that I couldn't find scotch bonnets in Overland Park. I went to three stores and called a fourth. The fourth said he tried to order some but they were out of stock. So maybe I'll have access to them one day. The habanero is the closest so I brought those home.

So I made two batches of marinade in my food processor. In all pictures, the Caribbean Pot recipe is on the left, Spruce Eats on the right. Two chicken thighs in each bag.

Despite sharing most ingredients, they looked quite a bit different. The left one has half a cup of orange juice and half an onion. It was quite liquidy and made about twice as much. The one on the right was more of a paste and obviously much darker. Here's the phase cooking skin down.

Once I got the color I wanted on the skin, I flipped them...

and added the remaining marinade to each batch.

Then the pan went in a 425-degree oven for 15-20 minutes.

Here's the finished product. It looks really dark, but it didn't taste burnt. The marinades have brown sugar in them so they definitely caramelized and got a nice dark bark.

I even took a bonus shot of one cut open so you can see how juicy the meat is.

Both turned out very tasty. But it was easy to pick a winner in my mind. Once I saw the colors of the marinades, I though the Spruce Eats one looked like the right dark color. I kept an open mind and in the end, the colors of the final product were pretty similar. But the Spruce Eats one tasted better.

Here's the winning recipe in case Hoagie Central outlives the Spruce Eats.

First, the alterations I made. I threw in maybe a teaspoon of whole allspice berries, plus maybe a teaspoon more of ground allspice. Definitely not half a cup, because that seemed like a crazy amount. I used 2 whole habanero instead of the scotch bonnets. I used 5 whole sprigs of fresh thyme. I used 5 scallions instead of 2 bunches. I used 2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp black pepper. And I used 2 packets of soy sauce since I don't actually pay for soy sauce.

I think the main reason this one was better is for what it didn't have in it. No orange juice, oil, vinegar or onion. So the result was a much more compact paste. In essence, it didn't get diluted with liquids or vegetables like the other one. More concentrated. Perhaps the only ingredient that I like from the other one that I could add to this one is the fresh ginger. But it's not like I could taste it or its absence from this test.

Also, the whole allspice berries did not get crushed in my food processor, so if I'm going to used those again, I feel like I should make sure they get crushed.

This recipe calls for 8 tablespoons of allspice, which is like a whole jar. I think 2 tablespoons would be plenty.


- - -

Now the big question. Did it taste like I remembered? To be honest, even before I made it, I couldn't remember what the Jamaican ones tasted like. It's been 18 years. Biting into didn't take me back to that week, but I don't know that if was in Jamaica today that it would bring back those memories.

Or maybe if I had the scotch bonnets, it would have.

Or maybe it needs to be smoked over pimento wood.

I made a really good Jerk Chicken today. At this point, I either have to be okay with that or travel to Jamaica and test how fragile memories can be.

Cast-Iron Rolls

Saturday was a double bread in cast-iron kind of day. 

As I mentioned recently, this recipe is actually why I purchased this pan way back in 2010. And I think I made the rolls in it once and didn't use the pan again for 7 years. 

I figured since I use the pan so much now and our whole family loves the rolls so much, that I should go ahead and see what it's like when you combine them. 

I also was in the mood to mix things up. So I skipped the rosemary and instead made a cinnamon honey butter in the style of Texas Roadhouse to serve with it. 

I told Brit it was in the style of Texas Roadhouse, and the first thing she said just by looking at it, was that I needed to whip it. And sure enough, that's the one thing that I didn't do in the recipe. I just didn't feel like getting out the hand mixer so I just folded it together by hand. The result was a thicker texture, more buttery than airy. Tasted great.

The rolls turn out great, but this is the first recipe where you don't really need the cast-iron pan. Some people might live for the pull apart form factor, but I think the quality is about the same as a normal sheet pan. Just as well, because on holidays I make 36 on two cookie sheets and this pan only fits 12.

Kind of ironic that the one recipe I thought I needed this pan for is the one recipe I actually don't.

Cast-Iron Cornbread

This was my first time making cornbread. It wasn't that I really wanted cornbread, it's that I'm looking to make all the things in cast iron. And cornbread is definitely one of the cast iron bucket list items. 

I thought about Jalapeno Cheddar, but figured for the first go round I should keep it classic. 

This was the recipe I used. Even though it called for a 10-inch skillet, it filled my 12-inch perfectly. The only substitution I made was using milk instead of buttermilk. 

It came out very moist and delicious. It was a little too dark on bottom, so I could try preheating less or trying to remove it from the pan after baking. 

Still, a success and something that I would make again. 

For the honey butter, I just mashed three drizzles of honey into a softened stick of butter, one at a time, just eyeing it until it had the color and smell I wanted.

1 1/2 cups cornmeal

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/3 cup sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon kosher salt

2 cups buttermilk

1 large egg

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and divided

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Place an oven-proof 10-inch cast iron skillet in the oven.

In a large bowl, combine cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.

In a large glass measuring cup or another bowl, whisk together buttermilk, egg and 3 tablespoons butter. Pour mixture over dry ingredients and stir using a rubber spatula just until moist.

Remove skillet from the oven and add remaining 3 tablespoons until heated through, about 1-2 minutes.

Working carefully, immediately scoop the batter into the hot skillet. Place into oven and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool 5 minutes.

Serve warm.

Cast Iron Cookboy

My favorite pan is my cast iron skillet. 

But it wasn't always that way. After graduating college, I was watching a lot of Food Network and I picked up that the best alternative to grilling in an apartment is cast-iron grill pan. I also picked up that you wanted it "ripping hot." What I didn't pick up is how to season a pan, how to clean it, or crucially that you need some fat/oil/butter, that a pan can be too hot, and that you should't make your burgers monstrously thick and expect them to cook through just because the pan is hot. 

The first time I used it was NFL opening day in 2006. Here's what I wrote about that experience: 

I was trying out, for the first time, grilling a raw burger on my cast-iron grill pan. And I had the Chiefs game on Tivo. Well, my cast-iron pan burned the outside of the meat, and left the inside raw. Our apartment filled with smoke, and it was about the worst burger I've ever tried to eat. When the apartment got smoky, I paused the game. Then later, on fast forward I see that Trent Green just got knocked out. It was not a good day. And I haven't used the grill pan since. 

By summer 2010, that experience had scared me off of cast-iron. As I wrote back then, I thought that cast-iron was too much work. 

But in November 2010, I bought a cast-iron skillet specifically for this single recipe: Rosemary Rolls.* I got a Lodge 12-inch skillet on Amazon for 18.97. So I bought the pan for the rolls, made them once and then kinda forgot about it. The pan was heavy and I didn't understand the benefits. 

Then in fall of 2017, I had been seeing and hearing great things about Kenji's Cast Iron Pizza. It's called foolproof, so I figured I could handle it. It was great. And in the process, I realized how nice it is to be able to go from stovetop to oven and back to stovetop if necessary. Since I had been watching Babish make burgers in his cast-iron, I figured I could do that too. And since my grandpa used his cast-iron for the Aunt Gerties (the thin pancakes) I thought I should try it that way too. 

And just by cooking a few things I discovered the real benefit of cast-iron: food just tastes better.

So those experiences led me to the castiron subreddit, where I finally learned about how to season it properly. And then you see examples of other good food other people are making and you want to cook more stuff. So you cook more stuff and it tastes good and you want to cook more. 

Then I'm on the subreddit and seeing people post these vintage Griswold or Wagner pans they're finding at thrift shops and talking about how smooth and black their pans are. So then I'm browsing eBay for vintage cast-iron. Brit sees what I'm doing and says to me, "You know who has an old cast-iron pan? Us!"

And you know what, she was right. I should use the skillet that I have more often. So I did. 

And the more I used it, the more I loved it. And I stopped worrying about how smooth or black it is, because every time it cooks perfect food. 

And now I have a greater appreciation for the tangible benefits: 

• it puts a great crust on meat
• it's super easy to cook thicker pieces through in the oven 
• it's easy to control
• pretty easy to brown deeply without burning
• food just tastes better

So then when I see a viral tweet like this:

It's funny. I understand because I thought this way for most of my life. And yet now I just feel bad for the guy. 

Yeah, it's heavy. But it's surprisingly easy to clean. And this $20 pan is going to last my whole life, while "non-stick" pans wear out after a couple years. 

*Ironically, the rosemary rolls recipe would become a holiday staple forever, and yet we make batches of 36 on two sheet pans at Thanksgiving so I don't even use the cast-iron pan for these. 

Cast-Iron Honey Garlic Chicken

Add some olive oil, then butter to a medium-high pan. Season the chicken thighs and place skin down in the pan. We're not trying to cook it through, so all you need to worry about is getting the perfect golden brown skin. Remove the chicken and add potatoes and carrots to the pan. Same idea, cook for 8-10 minutes to get some nice brownage on the veggies. Meanwhile, make a sauce and preheat the oven to 425. This time I did honey, barbecue, soy sauce, chicken stock, soy ginger vinaigrette. Remove the potatoes and carrots and add onions. Then add garlic and the sauce. Simmer for a few minutes then add the chicken and veggies back in.

Above is ready to go into the oven. It gets 15-20 minutes in the oven. Below is after it comes out of the oven. The veggies are tender, the chicken is cooked through. 

Plate with the sauce over top.