I mean if you used chicken stock it’d be wonton soup. Which would be fine, frozen pot stickers are just more available than wontons. Why water? Does some one fear flavor?
ETA: there’s also nothing wrong with boiling that sort of dumpling. I’m rather partial the the same type of dumpling (Jiaozi) boiled or steamed, and both are pretty damn traditional. They’re marketed as potstickers because of the popularity of that prep-method in the US/West.
The problem here is this is not how you make broth.
I have an induction stove top and notice my cast iron pan does heat up more evenly now than when I had gas or electric burners.
Does anyone know how the physics involved are different between the 3 types of heat and their affects on the various cookware?
Induction heats the metal directly through magic and fairies. So it’s not dumping heat into a contact patch, it’s gonna heat anything in the magnetic field pretty evenly. And full sized electric and induction burners tend to be a lot wider than gas burners to begin with. Any burner besides induction will be hottest in the center.
So I think that’s just a bigger, more even hot area across the bottom of the pan to start. I’ve heard on at least some induction burners a pan that heavily over hangs the size of the burner will be less even, as in the part that over hangs will take longer to heat up or even out. And that’s approximately how things work out with standard electrics. I just hear it less with induction, more in terms of a 12" skillet on a hot plate being an issue than something you run into with a range.
I think the main issue between gas and standard electric is that gas is just hotter and can change it’s temp faster. So it’s going to pump more heat in than a coil, even if it’s more concentrated. There might be some difference between the radiant heat of the burner, and the conduction of the coil but I don’t know how much impact it has given the rather big difference in raw heat produced. Induction tends to produce heat in much the way gas does. High heat, easily changed. But it’s throwing wizards around instead of transferring heat in.
On the last stove I had I could see the pattern in shimmering oil it was so distinct even after it was hot for awhile. Depending on what I’m cooking I’ll heat the cast iron up in the oven to get it evenly hot, then cook with it on the stove.
I know you qualified it with “once it’s heated up,” but you can test heating patterns yourself pretty easily. I’ve seen parchment paper and flour used to find hot spots.
One of the advantageous side effects of using induction with cast iron is that all of the heat goes directly and evenly to the bottom of the pan, so it takes a LOT longer for the handle to heat up. Many times, I don’t even have to bother with a pot holder or silicone sleeve.
Kk. Enjoy your magic pans. They’re still not a replacement for good technique.
I don’t know, on my Fagor hobs, boiling water in cast iron (even easier than using parchment paper) results in a ring of bubbles. It’s nowhere close to being even heat.
@ MANY: I’ll concede the point on the uneven heating.
(Also, nothing really magic about cast iron, it’s just been around for a century or two.)
Used as cooking pots, it’s been few thousand years for China, and since the 16th century for Europe.
Does tend to reduce cases of anemia!
For cast iron. There were wrought iron pots of various sorts in Europe well before the 16th century, though they may not have neccisarily been common. In neither case would they have been skillet, which were a pretty early kind of pot, but mostly earthenware with a side line in copper or bronze if’n your a fancy lad.
If memory serves in terms of metal cookware; wrought iron or hammered steel was more common, earlier for woks and skillets. And there’s not a whole lot of difference between a wrought iron and a carbon steel pan. So despite the reputation carbon steel skillets are probably older than the cast iron we think of today.
Cast iron is pretty easy to make pots from, which is probably why that’s what they were doing in China thousands of years ago. Did they also have earthenware and carbon steel? Sure. But I was correcting the claim that the use of cast iron pots in particular for cooking is only a few hundred years old.
But cast iron is not particularly easy to work with. It can’t be hammered out as it’s too brittle, and it takes higher heat than most early charcoal fired furnaces can produce to melt. So for a big chunk of history it was more of a waste product of iron smelting/steel production. At most broken up and added to ore, or worked into wrought iron to produce steel.
The Chinese had a furnace design that could melt it or decarburize it into steel. But they sort of abandoned turning it into steel after a brief period as it was too fuel intense. And IIRC it was mostly used for decorative objects there after when used at all, for similar reasons. Not becoming particularly common until more modern blast furnaces were re-introduced from Europe.
IIRC wrought iron was more common with metal pans and early woks there as well. Cast iron objects in general just make a particularly early appearance. Steel is pricey and it doesn’t really seem too big in non-cutting household goods or tools anywhere until the early modern period.
What I’m saying is it isn’t neccisarily as old as people say either. Though iron in general sorta is.
It’s easy to cast pans from it, once you can cast iron. It’s cheap to make pans from it, if you have cheap, abundant iron and cheap fuel.
There’s other factors as well. One of the reasons cast iron is so much more available and much more of a thing in the US than Europe is we had abundant sand. Appropriate sand for casting, in the right places to make use of excess cast iron from our big steel industry.
I really am trying to remind people that cooking with cast iron existed long before it was a thing in the Western world.
There’s more than one timeline in human history.
I think most people overthink their cast-iron cleaning process.
My process: After cooking, take a look at it. If I cooked something simple like fried eggs, it probably doesn’t need anything but a wipe with a paper towel and then back on the shelf it goes, or if I left it on the stove or in the oven to cool off, my wife will probably put it on the shelf with whatever crud I left in it. (bacon grease and all). If I happened to cook something in the oven with it (best place for bacon), then I’ll just stick it back in the still-hot oven when done. If there’s a lot of crud, use a stainless scrubber on it to get the crud off, wipe it dry, (perhaps heat it back up to ensure dryness), and then drop a couple teaspoons of oil in it and give it a coating using a paper towel, and then back on the shelf (or in the still-hot oven). Whenever I cook something wet, (instead of greasy) then it gets a wipe-down and coating of oil before going on the shelf. I never worry about it being “clean” when stored, I just worry about it being dry and oiled.
I rinse and/or clean it prior to every use, not after (unless it’s particularly cruddy). If there’s bacon grease (or steak-sandwich grease) sitting in the pan after cooking, the most it’s gonna get is wiping off the worst of the excess with a paper towel before heading for the shelf.
I don’t worry about “seasoning” my cast iron, as I’ve found that I use them often enough that they just have a natural coating of seasoning. Even the occasional tuna casserole or marinara sauce doesn’t really bother it. The real secret is to not try to store it “clean”. You want to store it “oily” to keep the moisture off.
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