Food Safety – Is It Safe to Cook Wine or Vinegar in Cast Iron?

With enameled cast-iron, I don't bother to heat the pot before adding the oil. For something that's open-pored, like plain cast-iron or carbon steel (like an old-school crepe pan), it's better to preheat the pan. I can't see any chemical advantage to preheating enameled, as it's inert and non-porous. Of course everything DOES need to be properly hot before you add the meat.

I can take or leave letting my roast get to room temp when doing a braise. It's going to be in the oven/pot long enough that it's going to be cooked to 200+ degrees all the way through no matter what. The only possible advantage of letting it warm up on the counter is that it will take marginally less time to cook. And by marginally, I mean you probably won't even notice, on the scale of pot roast cooking time. For a steak or a rib roast where you want the middle warm without the outside being totally dry and charred, room temp helps a lot.

The only real tip I can give on pot roast is to use the right cut of meat. You want something from the shoulder, which usually means chuck. It has an excellent mix of rich meaty flavor, collagen/connective tissue (which makes that gelatin thats critical to the silky mouthfeel of pot roast and BBQ), and fat. You can also use something from the leg (shank) or tail, which also have loads of connective tissue, but they're usually a little low on actual meat. If you get the right cut of meat and cook it low and long enough to get that collagen rendered, it's pretty hard to mess up the rest of it.

The right way is simple and straightforward: preheat the skillet for about 5-10 minutes on medium, add a few table spoons of oil to coat the bottom, and continue cooking at this temperature. Flip regularly, to allow the sides to cook evenly, and wait for the middle to become fully cooked.

Now I will tell you all the ways NOT to cook a hamburger with a cast-iron skillet!

• Cook on "warm" for an hour or so. Then realize it's not cooking, give up, and go to McDonald's.
• Heat the skillet on maximum heat for a few minutes, and throw the burger on. Just leave it there; it's not fully cooked if there's any hint of pink or moisture left. After a while, your new charcoal-and-cardboard roofing shingle will be ready for use.
• Preheat the skillet. Don't throw in a burger or anything, just forget about it until the fire alarm goes off. Now you can learn how to re-season cast-iron!
• For the storming-a-medieval-castle experience: throw a mostly-frozen burger patty into a frying pan with a half inch of exceedingly hot oil. Dive for cover and a fire extinguisher as hot oil sprays everywhere. When the barrage ends, maybe the middle will be edible?
• Use pan as a bludgeon and steal a burger from an unsuspecting fast food customer. For particularly inept people this may be the only way to get a good hamburger using a frying pan.
• Heat a frying pan full of oil on high heat. When flames start, cook your burger over them using a metal spatula. Accept the wails of the fire alarm as a little light musical accompaniment.
• Microwave it. Yes, that includes the pan. When your microwave has finished burning, surely the burger will be cooked well-done! For additional paddies, repeat with fresh microwaves.
• Start cooking on high without preheating, realize the exterior is overcooking while the interior isn't done, then switch to low heat. It's still cooking too fast! Take cast-iron skillet off burner entirely, and remove burger. Allow pan to cool completely, and resume on low heat. After 20 minutes, wonder why it's not cooking at all and the pan still isn't very hot, and try jacking up the heat again. Ten minutes later, your burger is overdone outside and STILL raw in the middle. Congratulate yourself that at least you saved yourself time on all that preheating nonsense. Then look at clock and realize an hour has passed.

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