How I Restore and Maintain Cast Iron Skillets for Use On The Grill

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When I post pictures of my cast iron collection, I often get comments and questions about how I season and maintain them. As promised (ahem...months ago), here is what I do to keep my cast iron looking black, shiny, and beautiful. 

I'll start by saying this. Maintaining cast iron isn't about a magic product or special oil. Maintaining cast-iron skillets is a behavior. If you clean and spend 10 minutes reseasoning your skillets each time you use them, they will stay immaculate, non-stick, and last a lifetime. 

A second important point. Cast-iron is meant for use day-in, day-out. The best thing you can do to maintain your cast-iron cookware is to use it often.

Restoration

A good story starts at the beginning so let's start with the 1930's era Griswold #8 skillet that I restored earlier this year. 

When Do I Need To Restore A Skillet?

Typically, when a skillet loses its seasoning or gets a little flaky, the cast-iron just needs a thorough cleaning, reseasoning, and frequent use. But when a piece of cast-iron cookware has been abused and has built-up carbon or large sections of rust, the restoration will make it as good as new. Restoration is time-consuming, but you should never have to do it again if you maintain your cast-iron in the first place. Restoring cast-iron includes: 

• stripping/cleaning, 
• establishing a base coat, and then 
• repeated use to build up the seasoning.

This skillet definitely needed restoration. It was made over 80 years ago and had definitely seen better days. 

Gorgonzola and Bacon Burger

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The black and blue burger, a burger topped with blue cheese, is one of the classic burgers. You either love them or hate them. I'm a lover of these pungent flavored burgers, they make my mouth water like a car hitting a fire hydrant.  

I did a spin on this time-honored burger for happy hour tonight. Some folks are wary of blue cheese because of the intense flavor. Instead of the typical blue cheese crumbles, a thick, creamy gorgonzola sauce graced our burgers. The milder flavor works better on a burger for me.

This burger is bursting with flavor! The sharp taste of the cheese sauce, the smoky/salty bacon, and fresh ground chuck patty make this a spectacular burger.

I start off making the cheese sauce because I like to give it time to rest and thicken. That way it stays on top of the burger on the grill instead of dripping off into the flames below.

NMT Gorgonzola Burger Sauce

Steak and Cheese Sandwich on the PK Grill

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I haven't been posting much on here lately. That is because we have been busy on weekends doing home repairs. We are also renovating our basement patio, which we have never used much in 20 years, into an expanded grilling area. 

Here's a quicky that we did this past weekend when the heavy rains from Hurricane Delta's remnants kept us from working on projects. I made these super simple steak and cheese subs on the PK grill.

Normally, I will do these when I break down a whole ribeye, and I save one of the ends just for steak and cheese sandwiches.  I run it through my meat slicer on a near-zero thickness setting for shaved steak. I don't do that often because a whole ribeye is not inexpensive, and cleaning the slicer is a bit of a chore. 

The Hatch and Guac Burger

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We have made a boatload of juicy and delicious burgers this Summer, and this Hatch and Guac Burger is among the best of them. 

It's a 6-ounce beef patty cooked on a coal-fired griddle to get the grilled taste but with a flavor-delivering crust of which Maillard himself would be proud. We put it on a bed of mixed greens and topped it with fire-roasted Hatch chiles, a slice of Grainger County tomato, homemade guacamole, and fried tortilla strips.

But a great burger isn't just about toppings and condiments. For me, a phenomenal burger patty starts with two factors - 

1. the freshness of the grind and 
2. the cuts used in the grind. 

We used brisket and sirloin for the ground beef that we used for these burgers. Let's talk about grinding before jumping into the recipe.

The Daily Grind

Event: Last Year's Praise The Lard BBQ Contest

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It has been a weird year since our team hasn't competed in any BBQ contests this year and we have only cooked at one food festival. In case you are missing these events as much as we are, here is a look back at the 2019 Praise The Lard event.

Praise The Lard is one of the crown jewels in the BBQ competition realm for several reasons. 

• Praise The Lard is two BBQ contests in one, featuring both KCBS and MBN sanctioned events. 
• Praise the Lard also includes a steak contest sanctioned by the Steak Cookoff Association.
• Praise the Lard is excellently organized and well-executed by the legendary Mills family of 17th Street Barbecue.

This BBQ event has been on my BBQ event bucket-list for years. I finally got to compete in it last year with my friends at Flavor Anonymous. We have competed together at Memphis in May for years, but this was my first time with Flavor Anonymous in Murphysboro. Here are some of my pictures from the event.

The Cookers (aka Smokers)

I'm a gear junkie, I admit it. So the first thing I do after our team camp is set up is to walk around looking at all of the smokers. 

This was one of the first pits that caught my eye. It is a reverse-flow offset smoker with a transversely mounted firebox. TBH, I'm not sure what mounting the firebox that way does, but my guess would be they could get more volume that way without increasing length. Or, it does allow access to the firebox from the front instead of the side.

Leftover Special: Steak and Cheese Breakfast Hash

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We kicked off last weekend with a steak and scallop dinner.  Here's what we made with the leftovers.

We made our skillet potatoes au gratin on one of our Big Green Eggs. This skillet is one that we recently restored; it's a Griswold #8 from the 1930s.

We also grilled several Certified Angus Beef® Brand ribeye steaks from Food City. We dry brined them in our NMT Umami Steak Seasoning for about 6 hours and then grilled them about 4 minutes per side at 450°f.

We had steak and cheesy potatoes leftover. The first thing that came to mind was making steak and cheese breakfast hash. 

Half-Pound Cowboy Burgers on the Grill

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We get so busy "doing" on the weekends that we'll often eat lunch so late that we just combine it with an early dinner. Do you do that? That's what we did last weekend when we made these classic, big honkin' Cowboy Burgers for our lunch-dinner. 

This elbow-dripping burger starts with an 8-ounce patty of fresh ground beef and is loaded with smoky cheddar cheese, crispy bacon, bourbon-laden BBQ sauce, fried onions, and homemade spicy pickles.

As always, I have my cooking notes, tips, and more mouth-watering pictures below the recipe. Enjoy!

Cowboy Burgers

By www.nibblemethis.com

Published 08/30/2020

Ingredients