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I have both and wanted to see what difference there was (if any) between them.
Banana Bread w/ dried cranberries and black currants.
Same recipe, same measures in both.
Ceramic pan has a blonde interior, cast iron is black ceramic.
Baked at 350° for 30 minutes, rotated left to right and front to back, then 30 minutes more.
The ceramic baked slightly taller. This may be a function of the loaf pan being just slightly narrower than the cast iron. 5" vs. 5 1/8" (127 mm vs 130.175 mm)
I THINK I shared this recipe before, but I find the pan comparison interesting.
At the 30 minute mark I caught our two youngest cats sitting on the stove trying to figure out where the smells are coming from. LOL. Was not fast enough to get that picture!
INGREDIENTS for blackcurrant banana bread:
3 ripe bananas
60g melted butter (1/4 cup or 1/2 a stick)
150g sugar (2/3 cup)
200g unbleached flour (1 1/4 cups)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon baking soda
150g of fresh or frozen blackcurrants (without defreezing before use) (1 1/2 cups)
PREPARATION of blackcurrant banana bread:
Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C)
If using dried cranberries or currents, soak them in cold water for 30 minutes, dry fruit sucks the moisture out of the bread otherwise).
Mash the bananas in a bowl
Add the egg and butter
Put all the dry ingredients together into a fine mesh sieve or sifter and sift into the bowl
Mix well with a wooden spoon
Bake in a buttered loaf pan until a toothpick stuck into the bread comes out clean, 55 to 60 minutes.
Slice and serve.
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Let it cool, still warm. Ceramic on the left, cast iron on the right:
Cast iron baked up sightly darker and tasted overcooked. Same oven, same temp, same time, rotated 1/2 way through, left to right front to back.
So, going forward, all ceramic all the time, or, if in cast iron, maybe reduce the time from 60 minutes to 50 or 55 minutes.
It continued to bake in the cast iron after removing it from the oven because cast iron stays hotter longer.
Which makes total sense as Ceramic has lower thermal conductivity.
When baking in a cast iron, you generally want to lower your oven’s temperature to get a more even cook without burning the crust.
Cast iron has a really large thermal capacity (I use it for searing, as an example, because once you get it hot it’ll sear food without noticeably cooling down).
This is generally a bad property for baking since you would, ideally, like to submerge most baked goods in uniform temperatures to produce consistent heating. This is why baking moulds are made of very thin metal. To work around it with a cast iron pan you’d want to partially preheat the pan so that the heat conductivity of the cast iron is as close to air as possible - that’d be extremely hard to do precisely.
It’s a neat experiment though so thank you for sharing it. We do use our cast iron for cooking some breads but they’re quite distinct. We use it for Farinata, Pupusas, and corn tortilla - and it works for these breads because they’re unleavened and using high thermal capacity cookware slightly simplifies the cooking process by making the heat transference more consistent.
I could see the cast iron loaf pan being perfect for a meatloaf. I’ve seen specific pans for cornbread as well, may be worth repeating with a cornbread as it’s a little more sturdy than banana bread.
Cornbread is amazing in cast iron, especially if you preheat first for a while, then put some oil in before immediately throwing in the batter.
You end up with a very nice crust.
I do it the same way as a pizza. Preheat pan on the stove, bake in the oven until it looks good on top, then finish on the stove till I’m happy with the browning on the bottom.
I do the same, except I preheat my oven to the highest temperature, and I just let the pizza cool on the already-hot cast iron. Perfectly crispy crust.
If I throw it on the stove after, it tends to burn.
Astounding; it looks like they both came out exactly the same. This challenges my beliefs about cast iron and that makes me uncomfortable.
Don’t like ceramic. Easier to get soggy bottoms and they can break. Just get used to using one or the other. I’m all metal with my baking and everything comes up great. Also I do not like silpat mats. Parchment all the way especially with cookies. I’ll use the silpat for rolling the cinnamon roll dough and that’s it.
Yeah ceramic makes me crazy. I had two old ceramic plates I took from my parent’s house more than 5 years ago and have been regularly using them to reheat leftovers ever since.
Last week, one of them shattered during the reheat. Same temp as always (300F), nothing special about the food I put on it (rice, so that was extra fun to clean up), it just decided 5 years in was the time to give up the ghost. Fuckin peesa shit.
At least it’s not correle plates, had one of those break once and it exploded found pieces of it 10ft away
It turns out, to make really durable glass and ceramic, you are really just bottling up their inherent rage. I mean, it’s even called “tempered glass”.
I see a lot of recipes that have different temperatures if the pan is black or nonstick. It makes sense that you’d need to reduce the temp for the cast iron.
Those differences are due to heat absorption. Ovens mainly heat by convection, but there’s also radiation. Light colored pans reflect heat from radiation while dark pans absorb it. Since these pans are roughly the same color on the outside, it shouldn’t make much of a difference on the inside.
Somewhat expected results. Hope you enjoy your bread! “blonde interior” 😄
With butter? Both are tasty! Will not be wasted!
I had some Aluminum (Nordic Ware) loaf and mini-loaf pans that were useless at browning, zero browning no matter what I did, even if you overcooked the top, the sides and bottom wouldn’t brown.
Recently switched over to Steel loaf and mini-loaf pans after reading some reviews (Chicago Metallic) and they’ve been great.
Nordic Ware makes a Carbon Steel loaf pan, so I might try that next and see how it compares “Nordic Ware Treat Carbon Steel Loaf Pan” though I’ll probably mess up the non-stick coating since I like using my pan grippers instead of oven mitts.
I can’t find any others that make an uncoated carbon steel loaf pan like these (not a pullman style dedicated to bread)
Was your Nordic Ware pan that Golden tinted color? I have cookie sheets that I don’t use for cookies anymore because they’d be burnt on the top & raw on the bottom…
I only have one of those golden ones, a non stick crisper tray.
Otherwise the ones I threw out were uncoated aluminum
Well?
