Seasoning A Skillet With Clarified Butter

I've been infatuated with my new cast iron combo cooker lately. It does so many things so well that I'm starting to question the wisdom of using anything else to cook with. I suppose it would be difficult to make salted caramel in it, though, and since there are no Puritans around here, I guess I'd better hold onto the other cookware.

The cast iron is also teaching me a degree of responsibility. Every time I use it, I clean it immediately, dry it, and rub it with canola oil. But yesterday J and I decided to make a big batch of clarified butter for all the Indian cooking we hope to do in the near future (just got the gigantic new Phaidon Press cookbook--India the Cookbook), and we immediately thought of the cast iron. Not only is cast iron heavy and thick enough to promote even melting and rendering of the butter, but we would be seasoning it simultaneously.

Clarifying butter gives it a toasty, nutty flavor, and if you do any amount of Indian cooking (and don't just limit it to Indian cooking--clarified butter can be used in any cuisine), doing a big batch at once is the way to go. It also preserves the butter indefinitely, which is the original reason for clarifying butter at all--just think: the heat of India combined with dairy products? A conundrum indeed. Thus, clarified butter was born, and a propitious birth it was.

The process is easy. Take a pound (you can do less than this, but it just makes sense to do a lot at once) of butter and melt it slowly over low heat in a heavy bottomed pan. The pan can be cast iron or enameled cast iron or something like All-Clad, just as long as it is thick and heavy so you don't burn the milk solids in the butter. Let the butter heat over low (never raise the temperature), and it will begin to foam. When the foam subsides, you can start skimming the white milk solids that precipitate out of the butter. Feel free to leave it alone for half an hour at a time, coming back every now and then to skim it. Keep skimming until all the milk solids are gone. This may take one hour or three hours, but be patient. This is definitely a Sunday afternoon sort of project. After skimming, strain the butter through a fine sieve or cheesecloth or a single layer of paper towel. Allow to come to room temperature and refrigerate. You may also wish to freeze the clarified butter in ice cube trays so that you have individual portions already prepared for use. Keeps indefinitely.

The Holy Grail of Bread

Once again, I must apologize for being a lazy blogger and not posting as often as I should. But usually when that happens, you should know that it means I have been kicking butt in my real life, getting things done and being busy otherwise. I've got a crock of sauerkraut fermenting and smelling downright stinky, which is how I like it. I've got a "ginger bug" going for a future batch of ginger beer--more on that later. I have seeds sprouting on the kitchen counter, and a sourdough starter bubbling away happily on the butcher block.

Which brings me to the good news, brothers and sisters. I have cracked the code of bread. You probably remember my bellyaching about how sourdough starters are a waste of time and result in only slightly better bread than a poolish or leaven. Well, it turns out that I just hadn't found the right recipe yet.

I've been baking yeast bread since I was fourteen, or something like that. My beginnings were humble--for a long time I used the whole wheat bread recipe on the back of the King Arthur Flour bag. It was a good place to start, but anyone who is passionate about good bread rarely stays put. I've done white bread--the only kind of bread that plain old tomato sandwiches should be made with (don't doubt, just believe). I've made ciabatta--the long, wrinkled loaf that immediately calls for the good olive oil that you hoard in the back of your cupboard. Then there was the occasional challah for special occasions--burnished and golden with egg yolks and butter. I can also think of a delicious cracked wheat loaf, struan bread (the best toast you'll ever eat), cinnamon raisin swirl bread, and these little Norwegian raisin buns that are so redolant of cardamom that the whole house smells like Christmas. There have also been occasional forays into pastry, but too few to really talk about.

So I've baked a lot of bread. The only problem was that none of these breads was my ideal bread. I wanted sour, but not overly sour. I wanted a deep brown crust as thick as a half-dollar coin. I wanted big, beautiful air pockets in the dough--perfect for forming pools of butter and catching runaway honey. In short, I wanted the effect that a wood-fired oven gives, but without the wood-fired oven.

I pored over baking books, searching for the answer. In most of them, the sourdough chapter is presented in such a way as to make it seem daunting. The smoke was fanned and the mirrors were polished to make sure the home baker felt intimidated. At least, that's how it seemed to me. But I tried anyway, feeding the starter religiously, keeping it warm, judiciously measuring everything by weight and not deviating one iota from the recipe. When it came time to bake the bread, however, the loaf that resulted was unimpressive at best. To have spent so much time and effort (and the better part of a bag of flour) on something so lackluster was pretty depressing. Let's not paint any rosy pictures about that.

But I'm a naturally inquisitive person, and so I continued to read about bread, biding my time until I felt up to the sourdough task again. My theory was that there had to be a reasonable method out there somewhere. After all, sourdough is the essence of rustic. I don't see paintings of pioneers carrying around heating pads and scales for baking their weekly sourdough bread, but I know they sure as hell made sourdough. As a baker, I despise the scientific baking method. The meticulous measuring by weight (in a commercial kitchen this actually makes sense, but unless you're making something really finicky at home, there's a good chance that using a scale will make you nuts), checking temperatures (of water, of flour, of the starter...), and generally making recipes more difficult than they need to be really riles me. In my opinion, those of us in the cookbook world should make baking more accessible and reasonable, not talk about another piece of equipment that you MUST buy to achieve success. Ok, the soapbox is safely stored away now.

Then John bought me a bread book. I had heard good things about it, but as with all cookbooks that double as eye-candy, I was skeptical. Then I started reading it. Beautifully written and photographed, Tartine Bread will inspire in you the immediate desire to bake bread. Every day. In fact, I seriously considered writing a letter to the author of the book and asking for an apprenticeship. No joke.

But the proof is always in the proverbial pudding (or pain, if you will), and so I tried to stave off enthusiasm while I worked on cultivating a starter. The book encouraged me to be patient. There was no time frame--feed your starter once a day (if your kitchen is very warm, twice a day) until it rises and falls predictably. The starter will rise after you feed it, climax, and start to fall slowly. By the time of the next feeding, it will smell vinegary. I gave my starter lots of time to develop. For several days nothing seemed to be happening, but I would pour off the brownish liquid that covered the starter and feed it again. Ultimately, my starter took.

I gave it a few days to strengthen and develop even further before using it. The day finally arrived. By 3:00 in the afternoon, I had two absolutely perfect loaves of bread. No, really. Perfect. Crusty, deep brown, heavily air-pocketed, gently sour loaves that rose like phoenixes in the oven. Magic, I swear.

The trick is the cast iron combo cooker. A combo cooker is a Dutch oven with a lid that doubles as a frying pan. You get the pan hot in the oven (both parts of the pan), turn the dough into the frying pan part of the cooker, cover it with the Dutch oven part, and bake it for 20 minutes. Then, you remove the Dutch oven part and let the bread brown for another 20 minutes. The Dutch oven captures the steam from the bread and results in a dramatic oven spring. The bread essentially steams itself. Taking off the cover gives the bread its crust. I am utterly stunned. I have found the Holy Grail of Bread.