So… You got a DO instead of a rondeau, or in addition?
In addition, I’m embarrassed to say. But I’ll use them!
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That’s hell on earth.
Flour and brown pot roast and brown in oil. Remove roast and brown ham lardons, onion, carrot sticks, and halved mushrooms. Put roast back in, add a bunch of thyme and ground pepper. Add beef stock, red wine, and a couple of tbsp. of tomato paste. Braise about three hours, turning several times. Remove thyme stalks and serve over egg noodles, rice, barley, or steamed new potatoes. Garnish with chopped parsley. It is basically an easy BB with a roast instead of pieces.
A vegetarian dish I make a lot in the rondeau: make a soffrito with olive oil; add a bunch of mushrooms, minced in an FP, and cook until softened. Season with ground pepper and toasted crushed fennel seeds and grated nutmeg. Add a glug or two of a dry white wine. Add a couple of whole, canned peeled San Marzanos, crushed in your hand. Simmer a bit. Add a glug or two of cream, crema, or creme fraiche. Serve over pasta of your choice (pappardelle from Gragnano is pretty hard to beat), sprinkled with freshly grated pecorino Romano and Parmigiana Reggiano. Adding crumbled walnuts at the mushroom stage is a fun option.
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To this day I still haven’t been able to get to a final conclusion of what the official shape a rondeaux has.
My personal opinion is that a rondeaux is a wide short sided pot with two loop handles. Same height as a sauter pan (if the sauter pan is tall) or slightly taller than a regular sauter pan.
The only two obvious advantages a rondeaux has over a sauter pan is that it can go into the oven more easily because of the two loop handles and that it can contain slightly more than a sauter pan.
Many thanks. They both sound delicious, and I can’t wait to make them.
I think that is mostly accurate. Nothing about a rondeau makes it inherently capable of holding more than a sauté pan of the same diameter. Most rondeaux are similar in height to sauté pans, and there is some variability for the height of the walls for both types of pans. I find the rondeau better suited to the oven, lacking a long handle, and most rondeaux come with lids but most sauté pans do not. Personally, having a small four burner stove, even on the stovetop I appreciate there being no long handle when multiple things are cooking at the same time.
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I think the classic rondeau geometry has slightly taller walls than does a saute.
Confusion now reigns, because many makers now make them the same proportional height, and just vary the handles. IOW, it’s hard to find modern rondeaux any taller than their stick-handled cousins.
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Sorry to bring this up again after so long.
But I’ve seen you, as well as others in different threads mention ECI heating uneven.
I’m not saying it’s wrong… I’m just saying that I can’t really recognise it. And I use a lot of cast iron.
Even my 30 cm LC ECI shallow casserole brown mest even on a 21 cm induction cooktop(with proper preheating)
Could it be that I use my cast iron on induction? And maybe problems with uneven heating is more prone to gas or ceramic ?
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There is an easy way to see it. Mix up pancake batter and, without thorough preheating, pour your pancake where it will overlap part of the ring of flame or the burner coil and the rest of the batter will lie outside of that. You should see the shape of the flame as a darker place on the pancake. That said, CI and ECI are pretty easy to work with. On the stovetop, preheat and, if needed, move things around. In the oven it makes no difference.
Agree. For me the only downside to cast iron is that it is a bit slow to lower or increase heat.
But that being said. Cast iron ain’t just cast iron. I have a couple of raw cast iron pans. A STUR that has a sanded smooth texture and skeppshult that’s a bit more rough, but still smooth
My last one is a lodge, and that is really rough on the surface. It’s also a bit wobly on the glass cooktop compared to the 2 others that are milled on the bottom so that they stand dead flat on the cooktop.
The STUR and the Skeppshult Sears better and heat faster(thinner sides)
For those reasons I mainly use the lodge on the grill. But it ain’t a bad pan. Just not as good as the two others. Witch is fair since it’s also really cheap compared to those two.
Personally I very much like carbon steel pans with long, sloping Lyonnaise handles. I find them easier to handle even though their weight is comparable to cast iron. I also like their flared rims. They seem to contain spatter pretty well. However, tonight’s dinner is beef short ribs, braising on top of the stove in the rondeau.
Me too.
I enjoy my cast iron. But I mostly use my De Buyer CS pans for non acidic food and Demeyere stainless for acidic.
I try to avoid any kind of non stick.
Short ribs are just wonderful. Perfect slow food for the cold seasons.
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I doubt it. Cast iron on induction is literally a worst-worst scenario for evenness. Have you tried caramelizing onions in it without stirring constantly? Do you use it for sauces?
I’ve stopped arguing with people who love cast iron cookware. If they like it, there’s no convincing them otherwise.
Why should induction and cast iron be the worst scenario? I mean cast iron is some of the most magnetic cookware you can put on induction. And if the coils is big enough. I don’t see the problem?
No i don’t make sauce in them. But browning onions and searing meat is no problem at all.
It’s worst because single induction coils are intrinsically uneven–basically just a “donut” ring of heat. It’s also the case that the induction field falls off very fast in a very short distance.
Cast iron is a very poor conductor of heat, and so the donut’s heat doesn’t spread laterally very well.
I guess the induction coil and it’s size has a lot to say.
Cast iron being a bad heat conductor is well known. That’s the same reason it holds its heat better too.
Maybe my skills are not sensitive enough to register the challenges you describe with cast iron on induction. But I don’t notice any problems.
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It matters some, but the only way to get around the torus-shaped field is to use multiple coils.
You are correct that cast iron “holds” heat pretty well, but it’s specific heat isn’t terrifically better than other metals’. Where it gets this reputation is that cast iron pans are generally made thicker.
You may not notice any difference between cast iron and pans made of more conductive materials. What and how you cook may mask the difference. For example, water has excellent conductivity, which means internal heat in thinner liquids tends to even out. Thicker liquids, e.g., sauces and stews, can be a problem because unevenness can cause scorching.
Hi Soren,
I still use and love my ECI pots from Le Creuset and Staub, but after many years cooking with them I know their shortcomings and therefore I pretty much only use my ECI pots for certain type dishes - and all these dishes include liquid, either as soups, stews/chillies or braises.
I will however say, that I also - from time to time - cook red cabbage in my Staub ECI braiser and the cooking result is great each time.
I do however avoid using my ECI pots for reduction sauces, because ECI is so slow to respond to up and down in temperature, even if you take the pot off from the stovetop it will still continue to reduce the sauce, so I prefer my 2.5 copper pots for my sauces.
But I also think people tend to exaggerate how horrible ECI pots cook.
Many people use them daily and make great food using them as there main cooking vessels. It’s just us cookware geeks, that has a knowledge of cookware, which normal people don’t.
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Cast iron cookware isn’t horrible, it’s just made of a very poor heat conductor. Glass cookware, now that’s horrible.
Tonight I used a cast iron wok to stir fry some paper-thin beef for a shabushabu. It worked fine, and there was some benefit to having cooler sidewalls.
