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This might be obvious to everyone, but it unfortunately did not occur to me
until I had been sick for a few weeks.  You might want to be careful of food
cooked in cast iron cookware unless you know the history of the pan.

My favorite piece of cookware is a Lodge (www.lodgemfg.com) cast iron
skillet that has, through years of fastidious care, been turned into a
perfectly seasoned cooking machine that is blacker than pitch and more
slippery than ice.

The thing about cast iron is that you can't really wash it.  Soap and
abrasion will strip off the seasoning which provides the cooking surface.
So when done cooking, you rinse out any leftover bits of food and wipe it
down with some oil. Over time, oil works its way into the surface and
provides a natural non-stick surface that's better (for most foods) than any
commercially-available chemical non-stick coating.

I figure I've removed all gluten-bearing grains from my kitchen, and I'm
careful about ingredients I buy.  But the last few weeks, I've been feeling
really icky, and I couldn't figure out why.  Finally, I realize that the
significant change is that I've been doing a lot of cooking with my cast
iron pan.  And then it dawned on me that the seasoning is basically
wheat-infused oil at this point, given that most of what I'd used it for was
making quesadillas (flour tortillas) and fried chicken!  D'oh!

They don't make my pan anymore.  There's nothing wrong with the new-fangled
replacements (in fact they have a nice loop handle to help move the rather
heavy pans around) but I hat the idea of throwing away this pan.  So last
weekend, I took some steel wool to it and scrubbed of all the seasoning, all
the way down to the metal, and re-seasoned the pan (twice).

Now, this is just a hunch.  I don't know for sure that particles of food can
get lodged in the seasoning of a cast iron pan.  I don't know for sure that
my general ickiness of late has been food-related.  But since I'm finally
starting to feel better, I am leaning towards thinking my hunch was correct.
And I will be adding "cooked in cast iron" to my mental database of
potential food hazards.


-Theron Trowbridge
^

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