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mindphlux
Jan 8, 2004

by R. Guyovich

GrAviTy84 posted:

this can all be done in a normal cast iron skillet or dutch oven, it does not require an enameled surface.

I don't care about enameled surface or cast iron or stainless or any of that - I was just mainly responding to your comments about heat capacitance and weight really.

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Steve Yun
Aug 7, 2003
I'm a parasitic landlord that needs to get a job instead of stealing worker's money. Make sure to remind me when I post.
Soiled Meat
Well, it is kinda nice to be able to sear beef in a dutch oven and then make beef stew in the same vessel. You can also do it separately with a skillet, yes, but a little bit of the fond gets left behind that way.

But yes in general a aluminum/steel pot will work the same as an enameled dutch oven in most functions. When Cook's Illustrated reviewed dutch ovens, the All-Clad steel stockpot tied with the Le Creuset for first place.

Mr. Wiggles
Dec 1, 2003

We are all drinking from the highball glass of ideology.
I agree that the enamel ware is useless. I do have a stainless skillet that I like, and my rice pot is a thick rear end cast aluminum job from the 70s. Also some big steel military pots for doing big things in. But most of the time, I use my cast iron stuff.

Also, as far as heat buffering and capacitance, cast iron is the only thing that works well when I'm using my woodstove as the heatsource .

Wroughtirony
May 14, 2007



Some foods will react with cast iron. It doesn't ruin the skillet necessarily, it just makes the food taste like rear end, especially if it sits in the pan for a long time. I remember totally ruining a lasagne layer I whipped up with mushrooms wine and ricotta. It tasted great when I took it off the stove, but a few minutes later when I was ready to use it it tasted like metallic poo poo.

Rule .303
Dec 9, 2011
(Instructions are just some other guy's opinion)
If we are looking for opinion, I like my cast iron without the enamel, but I like the better non-stick surface you get from a good seasoning.

I would hazard, however, that if you asked about the frictionless adamanitine pans that had liquid sodium cores for perfect heat transfer and N-dimensional heat capacitance that stored heat from next week, designed by Faberge and forged in the fires of Mordor, half a dozen voices would be raised saying, "We tried that one and it's crap"

I can't tell you how much I love you goons.

Kenning
Jan 11, 2009

I really want to post goatse. Instead I only have these🍄.



I love you all very much.

e: f, b

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
I don't feel like adding to this argument, but once I made a corn bread circuit by leaving my buttermilk cornbread in the cast iron for a few hours. My mistake was covering it with aluminum foil...holes were eaten in the foil with precipitate deposited onto the bread.

Happy Hat
Aug 11, 2008

He just wants someone to shake his corks, is that too much to ask??
I use Staub which has a glass surface, never had a problem with chipping from too much heat, as I have with le creuset on multiple occations - they retain heat beautifully, they do not ruin the taste of the food, they are durable and good in use too..

I do, of-course, have pure cast-iron too, mainly Skeppshult, which is really good - but I also use Mauviel for pots, and seriously, if I didn't have induction I would have a lot of copper ware from Mauviel instead, the ability to change temperature is crazy good.

Different weapons for different animals I guess...

Phummus
Aug 4, 2006

If I get ten spare bucks, it's going for a 30-pack of Schlitz.
Well, I didn't mean to light that fuse.

So I think for my dutch oven needs, I'll be looking at a regular cast iron job instead of enameled.

And just for the sake of argument, I use my copper clad pans when I need to vary temperatures during the cooking process. For example, if I'm searing meat, then sweating aromatics in the pan, then reducing a pan sauce.

I use my cast iron skillet if I'm doing something that requires only one temp, like making sawmill gravy or cooking a steak.

Rule .303
Dec 9, 2011
(Instructions are just some other guy's opinion)
You know, though, if you go to the thrift shop and see an emameled one for $15.00 you might pick it up just to try it to see if it meets your needs.

Wroughtirony
May 14, 2007



I have the stupidest apartment ever. It has a fire suppression system above the range, but it's not automatic, you have to pull a pin to activate it by hand. Where is the pin? Directly above the stovetop.

I cannot imagine a single situation where I would want to use a fire extinguisher on my range when I would not burn my entire arm reaching into the cabinet for the pin.

The Macaroni
Dec 20, 2002
...it does nothing.
That's like the perfect setup for a Rube Goldberg machine. Attach a long string to the pin, then tape the other end of the string to a piece of bread in a toaster. If you can just figure out how to start the toaster at a specific time, it can pull the string and trigger the fire suppression system while you're not around.

Mercedes Colomar
Nov 1, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
That...doesn't even sound safe or potentially legal. :stare:

Unrelated - Masala Dosa from Trader Joe's are pretty good. Their chili mango popsicles are pretty ehh though.

bongwizzard
May 19, 2005

Then one day I meet a man,
He came to me and said,
"Hard work good and hard work fine,
but first take care of head"
Grimey Drawer

Wroughtirony posted:

I have the stupidest apartment ever. It has a fire suppression system above the range, but it's not automatic, you have to pull a pin to activate it by hand. Where is the pin? Directly above the stovetop.

I cannot imagine a single situation where I would want to use a fire extinguisher on my range when I would not burn my entire arm reaching into the cabinet for the pin.

Use a piece of string and a small dumbbell to turn it into a deadman's switch. You can cook with one hand and hold the weight in the other. Or balance it on your head.

mindphlux
Jan 8, 2004

by R. Guyovich

bunnielab posted:

Use a piece of string and a small dumbbell to turn it into a deadman's switch. You can cook with one hand and hold the weight in the other. Or balance it on your head.

ahahah

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

GrAviTy84 posted:

I'm gonna call shenanigans. A good quality clad pan (with a copper or aluminum core) will conduct heat across the entire cooking surface, cast iron is more likely to develop hot spots since its conductivity is less than half that of aluminum and almost 1/4 that of copper.
And, as I said, the thermal conductivity is only part of the problem. A useful value for k for cast iron is somewhere around 55 or 60 W/m*degC, and aluminium is about 200. But just as thermal conductivity is only part of the overall problem, the thermal conductivity of the cooking vessel is only part of the thermal conductivity problem. If we look at Fourier's Law, we see that the heat transfer is directly proportional to the coefficient of thermal conductivity (k), the area of contact, and the temperature difference, and inversely proportional to the thickness through which the heat transfer is occurring. For transfer through two walls in series, this works out as:



As a simplifying assumption we're going to assume the geometrical factors are all 1. This will mean that we'd really have to re-write k into some goofy synthetic units, and this doesn't quite model what we're actually concerned about (a plane wall with a smooth thermal gradient across it works pretty well for the bottom of a skillet, but things are a lot more complicated in something like a stockpot or dutch oven, but gently caress modelling that in detail). We're also just looking at the thermal transfer between a wall of metal and a thickness of equal width in the other media (because we're assuming both are the same value, 1). Of course the food isn't going to be exactly as thick as the cooking vessel. But on the other hand we're just looking at the thermal transfer at a moment in time between the cooking vessel and the food. How well the heat is transferred within the food (that is, whether we're searing the surface or slowly cooking it all the way through) is a separate issue.

Anyway, beyond this, we've actually got to worry about two transfers. We've been talking about the transfer of heat from the cooking vessel to the food, but we also have to worry about the heat transfer between the cooking vessel and the environment. Since we seem to be implicitly accepting that we're simmering on a stovetop, we'll call the temperature of the environment 25 C and k for air 0.03, and the simmering food 100 C and we'll just the k for water, 0.60 (both still nominally in W/m*degC, with the caveats made earlier). Call the cooking vessel 250 degrees; this really doesn't make that much of a difference, as it's easy to see that the magnitude of what we're looking at is just going to vary directly with the increase in cooking vessel temperature, so if you think this is a silly number just calibrate accordingly.

For the cast iron to air transfer we end up with (200 - 25) / ((1/60) + (1/0.03)) which, unless I thumb-fingered something, is around 5.25 watts. For the cast iron to water (food) transfer, we get (200 - 100) / ((1/60 + (1/0.60)) = 59.4 watts.

For aluminium-air it's (200 - 25) / ((1/200) + (1/0.03)) = 5.25 watts (the only difference being at the fourth significant figure), and for aluminium-water it's (200 - 100) / ((1/200 + (1/0.60)) = 59.8 watts.

In other words there's less than a percent difference between the effective thermal transfer between equivalent food and equivalent cooking vessels if the only difference is that one is made of cast iron and one is made of aluminium.

So much for the thermal conductivity question. As I said earlier, we're also worried about the heat capacity. Fortunately, discussing this will take a lot less :words:. The specific heat of aluminium is higher than cast iron, about double: 0.91 kJ/kg for aluminium and 0.46 kJ/kg for cast iron. But the density of aluminium is about a third of that of cast iron: 2700 kg/m3 for aluminium compared to 7500 kg/m3 for cast iron.

So if you've heated up two equivalent heating vessels one degree C each, then you've stored (0.91 * 2700) = 2460 kJ per cubic meter of material if it's a aluminium, and (0.46 * 7500) = 3450 kJ per cubic meter. This is a difference of 16.8% between the two.

So, in summary: the abilities of aluminium and cast iron cookware to transfer heat to food are roughly identical, but cast iron has a significantly greater ability to function as a thermal reservoir.

If you're arguing that if you can keep dumping heat into the cooking vessel (and otherwise control the environment around it) that they'll probably perform effectively identically, you're probably right. If this is not the case---if you're cooking using a conventional oven (I usually throw my dutch oven in my conventional oven, just because it heats up the kitchen less) then this will be useful in evening out temperature variations due to the oven's duty cycling. Wiggles talking about using a wood-fired stove is more or less the same thing---throwing wood on a stove and then having it burn down is another kind of duty cycle. You notice the same sort of thing in using a smoker or grill. Or a campfire. All places where you might expect to see a dutch oven.

I have spoken.

Kenning
Jan 11, 2009

I really want to post goatse. Instead I only have these🍄.



SubG I feel like there's nothing you don't know about. Have you considered becoming a sage?

Wroughtirony posted:

I have the stupidest apartment ever. It has a fire suppression system above the range, but it's not automatic, you have to pull a pin to activate it by hand. Where is the pin? Directly above the stovetop.

I cannot imagine a single situation where I would want to use a fire extinguisher on my range when I would not burn my entire arm reaching into the cabinet for the pin.

My mom came up to visit this last weekend and she pointed out that I was keeping my fire extinguisher on a shelf above the stove, which was a really stupid place for it to go. I moved it because she was right.

therattle
Jul 24, 2007
Soiled Meat

SubG posted:

I have spoken

gently caress me. Well, I think that argument is over. :golfclap:

i shoot friendlies
Jun 25, 2007

SubG posted:

A lot of really good stuff.

Yeah, but he's ABD on a Physics PhD so...

Wroughtirony
May 14, 2007



The Macaroni posted:

That's like the perfect setup for a Rube Goldberg machine. Attach a long string to the pin, then tape the other end of the string to a piece of bread in a toaster. If you can just figure out how to start the toaster at a specific time, it can pull the string and trigger the fire suppression system while you're not around.

I took a second look and it's not quite as phenomenally stupid as it looks. The pin is already pulled and you activate it by pulling on a wire that runs around the inside edge of the hood. So the likelihood of burning the gently caress out of yourself trying to activate it is just "very very high," not "certain." I now realize it's not a system for suppressing fire, it's a system for punishing me when I accidentally catch a sleeve button or the handle of a pasta basket on the wire.

I have an actual practical fire extinguisher under the sink.

therattle
Jul 24, 2007
Soiled Meat

i shoot friendlies posted:

Yeah, but he's ABD on a Physics PhD so...
What is ABD?

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA
May 29, 2008

therattle posted:

What is ABD?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_but_dissertation

mindphlux
Jan 8, 2004

by R. Guyovich
sweet, I have an ABD PhD in philosophy/cognitive science and I didn't even know it. :clint:

Vlex
Aug 4, 2006
I'd rather be a climbing ape than a big titty angel.



It looks like it's somewhat equivalent to what some UK universities would call an MPhil.

therattle
Jul 24, 2007
Soiled Meat
I have an ABD in taint.

Free Living Froglet
Apr 11, 2007

The raspberries are screaming again, aren't they?

therattle posted:

I have an ABD in taint.

What university is that from?

On a serious note, is foodchat down for anyone else?

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
Server migration, be back up in a bit, if you're using the applet. You can always logon using an IRC client, though:

irc.synirc.net / #foodchat

Free Living Froglet
Apr 11, 2007

The raspberries are screaming again, aren't they?
Thanks, mediaphage!

GrAviTy84
Nov 25, 2004

SubG posted:

:words:

So, in summary: the abilities of aluminium and cast iron cookware to transfer heat to food are roughly identical, but cast iron has a significantly greater ability to function as a thermal reservoir.

If you're arguing that if you can keep dumping heat into the cooking vessel (and otherwise control the environment around it) that they'll probably perform effectively identically, you're probably right. If this is not the case---if you're cooking using a conventional oven (I usually throw my dutch oven in my conventional oven, just because it heats up the kitchen less) then this will be useful in evening out temperature variations due to the oven's duty cycling. Wiggles talking about using a wood-fired stove is more or less the same thing---throwing wood on a stove and then having it burn down is another kind of duty cycle. You notice the same sort of thing in using a smoker or grill. Or a campfire. All places where you might expect to see a dutch oven.

I have spoken.

So I read the first part hoping you were arguing against what I was saying and went downstairs to get Boas because iirc there's a thing on steady state temperature distributions as a PDE problem, but luckily I finished reading your post first. Yes, p much that's what I was saying. If you read my posts it was all re:enamelware. Like I said repeatedly, I was not arguing against using a cast iron dutch oven for cast iron dutch oven things (cobblering in a firepit, cornbreadding, ovening stews, etc) this was all whether or not an enamel castiron was necessary at all. AFAIK the only reason to use an enamelware pot is for acidy braises. All other applications can use a regular cast iron. If acidy braise, you can just use a stainless or aluminum or clad whatever. If you need to oven and are worried about thermal capacitance, you can bain marie. I just wanted a specific application for which you could not use either a standard cast iron dutch oven or a stainless clad pot.

This is all a dead horse now, so I say we just drop it because it seems like anytime you say "cast iron" in this subforum people react like you're attacking their firstborn, they just ignore anything you say and just jump straight to "OH NO YOU DIDN'T"

Kenning
Jan 11, 2009

I really want to post goatse. Instead I only have these🍄.



I feel like this sort of debate is what people assume GWS is like 100% of the time and that's hilarious.

Rule .303
Dec 9, 2011
(Instructions are just some other guy's opinion)
However, the enameled stuff is easier to color coordinate with your designer kitchen decor.

Black goes with everything but not as well as a chunk of cast iron tarted up like Fiesta ware.

Speaking of which, I keep running across Fiesta ware. The colors aside, are the sets at all usefull for real life use? My dish set is literally what is left over at the end of the garage sale and it may be time to get stuff that matches.

Happy Hat
Aug 11, 2008

He just wants someone to shake his corks, is that too much to ask??
So you just pussy out of the enamel discussion..

mindphlux
Jan 8, 2004

by R. Guyovich
a goon post you say...;;

Wroughtirony
May 14, 2007



Rule .303 posted:

However, the enameled stuff is easier to color coordinate with your designer kitchen decor.

Black goes with everything but not as well as a chunk of cast iron tarted up like Fiesta ware.

Speaking of which, I keep running across Fiesta ware. The colors aside, are the sets at all usefull for real life use? My dish set is literally what is left over at the end of the garage sale and it may be time to get stuff that matches.

I worked at a place that used fiesta ware. It's good stuff- very sturdy. Also, if you mix and match colors, you can very easily pick up additional pieces- no hunting for discontinued china patterns. It is worth mentioning that pre-1973 red fiesta ware is just a little bit radioactive. http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/fiesta.htm

Rule .303
Dec 9, 2011
(Instructions are just some other guy's opinion)

Happy Hat posted:

So you just pussy out of the enamel discussion..

I think enameled cast iron is best for bathtubs and those sink/counter combos from the 50's.

Happy Hat
Aug 11, 2008

He just wants someone to shake his corks, is that too much to ask??

Rule .303 posted:

I think enameled cast iron is best for bathtubs and those sink/counter combos from the 50's.

Ah - my comment weren't for your post - which was perfectly fine, and didn't hurt the least.

But I think that enamel ware is good for cowboy mugs too! And cowboy coffee pots...

Happy Hat
Aug 11, 2008

He just wants someone to shake his corks, is that too much to ask??
Also - is Rage a good game, because I just bought it, and it is downloading, but my wife wants to have sex tonight, and I am wondering if I should leave her hanging by finishing really fast, and then go play Rage...

Internets: I need your advice!

therattle
Jul 24, 2007
Soiled Meat

Happy Hat posted:

Also - is Rage a good game, because I just bought it, and it is downloading, but my wife wants to have sex tonight, and I am wondering if I should leave her hanging by finishing really fast, and then go play Rage...

Internets: I need your advice!

Make sweet sweet love to your special ladyfriend and play the game another time. Which will you look back on happily when you're older? Wait! Is she enameled? How's her taint? Pics pls.

Mr. Wiggles
Dec 1, 2003

We are all drinking from the highball glass of ideology.

Happy Hat posted:

Also - is Rage a good game, because I just bought it, and it is downloading, but my wife wants to have sex tonight, and I am wondering if I should leave her hanging by finishing really fast, and then go play Rage...

Internets: I need your advice!
:goonsay:

Not even Skyrim is that good. You have your duties as a man!

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Casu Marzu
Oct 20, 2008

Play videogames while giving it to her.

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