Morning Tech Deals Highlights
• Cast-Iron Skillets – Set of three cast-iron skillets from JC Penny for $15; free shipping for orders of $25 or more. [Slickdeals]
• iPod Touch – Decent discounts on iPod Touches that will be mitigated somewhat by paying the $20 upgrade fee for the newer software. 16GB for $360 at Amazon or B&H, though. [Dealhack]
• Dell XPS One – Dell's all-in-one widescren computer is on sale for a slight $100 drop for $1,249, shipped. This machine reviewed pretty well. [Dealnews]
• MP3 Player – Today's Woot! is a Sandisk Sansa 512MB Player two-pack for $25, shipped. Doesn't look like you can upgrade the memory, though.
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I find it amusing that new cast iron skillets are a "tech deal." Not only does cast iron date back 3 centuries or so, but also the well-seasoned antique cast iron cookware from your parents or grandparents is going to be far, far better than a new piece, even if it's "pre-seasoned."
I've been idly wanting new skillets for a while now, and was recently extolling the virtues of cast iron to a friend of mine...I'll keep one set and give him the other. Thanks again, Joel!
@Anonymous: Sometimes I throw in deals that aren't for "tech," per se, but just useful items. Also, I seriously doubt an ancient piece of cast iron is going to be better than a properly seasoned new piece, although as cast iron is nigh on indestructible, I'm sure it won't be worse.
New iPod touches come with the update.
iPod touches (those already in the channel) purchased after the announcement (and maybe after a certain earlier date) get the update for free.
@Joel, Cooks Illustrated, the geek's perfect cooking porn magazine, recently tried an unseasoned cast iron skillet versus a pre-seasoned one (Lodge Logic brand), versus one they borrowed from someone's southern grandma.
(Seasoning is a pretty complicated process whereby the cast iron of the pan takes up some grease from the food and forms a blackened coating that improves browning and reduces sticking. There doesn't seem to be any good science about exactly what the coating is, or how it works, but it's generally recognized that an unseasoned pan is a disaster for anything like eggs.)
Short answer: Preseasoned is better than unseasoned (duh), but the family heirloom is the best, by a lot.
Just to make sure, they cooked with all three for a few hundred dishes and then re-ran the test. Both the unseasoned and the pre-seasoned skillets were much improved, but the heirloom was still much better.
Unfortunately, most of their content requires paying to access, but they also are advertising-free (except their TV program, America's Test Kitchen, which has the typical PBS "sponsorship").
Cooks also publishes a line of cookbooks called "The Best Recipe," where they try dozens or even hundreds of variations on recipes to find out what's really the best approach. How can one get ideal smoked ribs in half the time? Does cooking a roast in a hot oven turned down at the end work better than a cool oven turned up at the end, or is it really necessary to brown the roast in a pan and then cook it "low and slow" for hours?
As I said, perfect food geek porn.
@Haineux: While I have no problem buying that a pre-seasoned pan doesn't perform as well as the heirloom, I have a lot of trouble believing that there is some process that occurs over time that makes the heirloom one more effective than one that's been used hundreds of times. Unless it doesn't have to do with the seasoning at all, but with something that happens to the surface of the pan itself. Maybe imperfections in the iron get smoothed down?
Cast iron metallurgy is a field much more complicated than a precursory perusal might indicate. Given the incursion of aluminium alloys into mainstream engineering, some of the things that used to be common knowledge about cast iron - at least within the smelting and casting industry - are now returning to something of a black art.
The crystal structure - and even the composition - of cast iron changes over time, and with heat. Many of the processes used to vary the ratios of ferritic cast iron to pearlite are time and energy consuming, and modern manufacturing has devised ways to work around these processes by using more advanced alloys, but in many cases these are the result of a tradeoff after considering the cost/benefit ratio.
An iron casting that has been heated and cooled thousands of times is almost certainly of a different grain structure and composition than a new casting, or one that has been in existence for only a few years which has been heated and cooled on a few hundred times. Whether this makes it superior for cooking is beyond my ken, for the time being, at least, but as a man who digs technical things, Joel, I think you'd be surprised and fascinated by a delve of a few days into old metallurgy books.