Posts Tagged ‘Cast Iron’
…So I love candied pecans. I have never actually thought to buy any, but I enjoy them a whole lot when it comes in salads or garnishing french toast etc. Then, I encountered a candied pecan recipe recently and thought to give it a try. It turned out alright, but I thought it could be even tastier, crunchier, and easier to make. After some tinkering, I’m quite happy with it, and wanted to share!
Ingredients:
- 1 cup pecan halves
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 1 tablespoon honey
- 1 tablespoon maple syrup
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- a bit of salt to taste
hardware:
- 9 inch cast iron skillet (this size fits 1 cup of nuts perfectly)
- spoon
- parchment baking paper
Direction:
- Pre-heat oven 350F.
- Melt butter in the cast iron skillet on stove top (low).
- Pour in pecans and stir around to coat in butter
- Add honey, maple syrup and sugar to skillet and mix well with a spoon.
- Sprinkle some salt to taste (I imagine you know how salty you like your treats better than I) and mix again.
- Put the skillet in the oven and bake for 7-9 minutes until toasty but not burned.
- Take the skillet out of the oven, spread candied pecans onto parchment baking paper to cool. [When it cools, the gooey candy becomes crunchy.]
- Enjoy!
Basically, using the cast iron skillet saves you clean up quite a lot. If you don’t have one, I imagine it would work ok to use a regular skillet to make butter/sugar/pecan mixture and transferring it into baking dish to bake.
I tried making this with just honey, honey + sugar, maple syrup + sugar, but found that combining honey AND maple syrup AND sugar produces best flavor and consistency. You need the regular sugar for the “crunch” factor and honey/maple syrup facilitates even coating for fail-proof baking fun.
The reason why I’ve been a little quiet here (and everywhere else really) is that we’ve all been sick! Todd brought home a cold 2 weeks ago and then Ashland, then I, and then Immi and then even Lucian got it. It’s been over a week since the rest of us got it, but we still have yucky cough and general lack of appetite and tiredness. This is the first time we’ve all been sick (even counting years before Lucian!).
Anyhow. I have been experimenting with easy bread baking. I have adjusted the method and recipe this time around to cut the rest time of dough to 2 hours (followed by refrigeration so that the dough can be used anytime in the following week). I know that 15 – 18 hour rest time is not an inconvenience to many people, but speaking for myself, I have no idea what I will be doing much beyond next hour so option to refrigerate gives me much better flexibility.
Amusingly, the resulting bread tasted exactly the same as the one I made from the original recipe. Though it looks somewhat better this time. I have some more experiments to conduct, I’ll let you know when I come to any kind of conclusive conclusion!
This is the antique (…as in old, very used and then neglected!) dutch oven I got for cheap and restored recently to bake bread in. The pot is fabulous now, I love the hammered texture. The slow slow cooked beef stew I made with it recently turned out quite well too.
Meat sauce (…it has too much tomato to qualify as bolognese, it also won’t have any cream in it) simmering in my *favorite* pan. It’s a 9-in skillet by Griswold from 1930′s. My mom and I found it while antiquing in Portland area.
I’ve been very fond of cast iron cooking since just shortly before it became trendy on cooking shows years back. I found a 6-in skillet manufactured by Lodge in the camping section of a tiny hardware store (now you can buy one at any kitchen shop) while living in NH and I totally fell in love because it was just so cute! I was surprised but very happy when it started popping up in virtually every show on FoodTV (…which I watched religiously back then) just a few months after I got mine. Since then, I’ve gotten several more Lodge items, and my super nice All-Clad stainless pans remain sadly unused (I still use the pots and saucier…). Honestly, I was never unhappy with quality of Lodge products…until we found this Griswold one. The iron cast is so much smoother which makes it almost comparable in non-stickness as tephlon pans (but with out being TOXIC) and is also a lot prettier to look at.
…I’ll add here that Cast Iron cookware isn’t just cute to look at. I’ve since found them to be durable, easy to use, adds trace amount of iron in your food (helpful if you are a bit anemic like I was) and everything tastes much better cooked in it.
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