I have both some Le Creuset items and some less expensive competitors' items as well (Lodge, some other Chinese stuff). They all seem to work well. LC is great stuff, as is Staub, but you do pay a premium for those brand names. I don't know if in the long run the less expensive stuff will last as long, but right now I don't see much of a difference in the performance. Cooks Illustrated compared some of these a while back, and found they liked a $40 enameled cast iron pot from Target just about as much as a $200 LC item. All enameled cast iron (ECI) items are good at long, slow cooking. The cast iron holds heat well and isn't super fast at changing temperatures; that's why they're so good for unfussy slow braises. One of my favorite cold weather dishes (I've posted this several times, frequent readers please forgive the repetition) is a great application for your new ECI. This is a perfect dish for a day when you have a lot of laundry or housework to do. You have to be in the house anyway, so you may as well have a no-stress supper cooking while you're doing other work. You put it in the oven at lunchtime, and after seven hours you have some juicy and scrumptious lamb. Gigot de sept heures (Seven hour leg of lamb) 1 leg of lamb, about 6# 4 garlic cloves, sliced, plus 20 whole garlic cloves 1/4 cup olive oil salt & pepper 2 small onions, thinly sliced 4 carrots, peeled 1 bouquet garni 1 cup dry white wine 1 cup flour, 1 cup water Preheat oven to 300ÃÂ F. (If necessary, trim most of the external fat off the lamb. Some legs of lamb will come with a heavy fatty connective tissue, called the "fell", covering a lot of its surface. Remove as much of it as practical--leaving it on will make the dish gamier because a lot of the gamy flavor is in the fat and connective tissues.) Make many small stab incisions in lamb and place slivers of garlic in each incision. Rub lamb well with olive oil, season with salt & pepper. Place it in Dutch oven and add onions, carrots, bouquet garni, garlic, wine. Put lid on Dutch oven. Combine flour and water, make a 'caulk' and use it to seal the lid to the dutch oven. (Note: That's not necessary if you have a casserole or Dutch oven with a fairly snug-fitting lid.) Place it in the 300ÃÂoven and cook for 7 hours. Yes, 7 hours. NO PEEKING--leave it alone. A half hour before it's done, fix some noodles or rice or couscous to soak up the juices. Remove the Dutch oven and break the seal. You don't eat the cooked flour paste. That's it. About a half hour to an hour of prep, then you leave it the heck alone for 7 hours. It's nearly foolproof. Serve it with whatever else you want, and a medium bodied red wine goes quite well with this (say, a nice Zinfandel) but a dry white (such as the remainder of the bottle you opened to get the cup of wine in the recipe) is fine as well if that's your preference.

Cookie8: Here is a Pizza Dough recipe and baking tut for prebaked dough. If you want I'll put in a tutorial for a Calzopizza , " Stuffed Crust Pizza " A 12 inch round pizza will take from 8 to 12 ounces of dough. According to thickness you want. After the dough is made weigh it out and roll into balls. Oil the pans and place a dough ball in the pan and flatten slightly, working the dough towards the side of the pan, with the palms. Then let it rest a few minutes. Repeat this every so often until the dough reaches the side and up, enough for a crust about 1/2 ? inch. Let it raise slightly , pinch the dough all over, with a fork and put into the oven to bake at 400 deg. If it bubbles while baking pinch it with a fork again. When light tan specks show ,take them out onto a rack to cool fast. Then you can use them right away or freeze , to use later. When cooking the Pizza, place the Pre Baked dough back in the oiled pan , Or cook on your Stone. Put a latel of sauce on the dough and swish it around, sprinkle some Parmesan or Romano , put it in the oven for a few minutes. Take it out and spread the topping of your choice and the Cheese Topping. A good topping cheese is a mixture of Mozzarella and Provolone chopped and mixed. The provolone gives it a good flavor and doesn't get like rubber when it cools. I use all Provolone. A little trick for baking. Keep a cup of water and brush handy, to baste parts that are cooking too fast. If you can get new metal pans, (uncoated) they have to be cured in the oven, so they won't stick. Coat them with oil and bake them for at least 6 hours. Never clean them with soap and water. Just rinse with water & wipe with a paper towel. Dough recipe: 1 cup of warm water (not hot) 1 Package of Active Dry Yeast 1 tablesps sugar ,in a half cup of warm water 1/4 Cup of Veg. Oil 1 teasp. Salt About 3 1/2 cups Flour ½ cup of Whole wheat flour or up to 1 cup Place in a mixing bowl, the Water, 1 cup of flour, wheat flour , yeast if risen Add the oil and salt and more flour. Add enough flour to make a soft ball of dough, that doesn't stick to your hands. Knead until smooth. Put it back in the bowl , Smooth side up and Rub on some Veg. Oil Cover and set in a warm place to rise until it doubles in bulk. I put it in a warm oven, Covered with a damp towel and place a pan of hot water on the bottom shelf. It rises in about 1 hour. When doubled, punch it down and knead it well. Divide into Balls , about 11 to 12 ounces and place in oiled pans. 12" round Dough should be about 3/16 " thick on the bottom and about 1/2 in. around the edge. For Sicilian Pizza , I used most of the dough in a 11" X 16" pan ( a bit thicker ) Follow the previous instructions. Good luck, Lou

The more seasoned the CI is, the less metallic flavor you'll have. A fresh raw pot will leach more iron than a half-century old well used pot will. So once it's well seasoned, you can use it for acidic sauces if desired. Speaking of Texas, chili and iron pots: I ran across this chili recipe a few years ago on a chili website. I love it, but I'm the only one in my household that does. Chili is an American dish which originated in the Southwest but now has lots of regional variations. Cincinnatians, for instance, serve it with cheese on top of spaghetti. Like debates over cornbread, debates about what constitutes authentic chili border on the theological. If you want what some people say is authentic Texas chili, try this recipe by Sam Pendergrast. Note a few things: he specifies coarse ground beef. (Some markets sell 'chili grind' beef--the plate in the meat grinder has 1/2" holes.) Note also the absence of beans, tomatoes and onions, and note the HUGE amount of cumin. I love it, but some people don't; if you don't like cumin, don't make this recipe. I once made a batch of this using beef shin meat. The slow cooking finally tenderized the beef. Fantastic flavor: I was in cumin and capsicum heaven. --I've never seen powdered New Mexico chiles, but the whole dried New Mexico chiles can be found at any Mexican grocery store. It's easy to grind them up in a blender. For thickening, he uses cornmeal. You can just as easily use crumbled tortilla chips. Note that he starts by frying a pound of bacon just to have good bacon fat in which to brown the beef. That's dedication. I have reproduced this in Sam's words, unedited, and then made a few notes as to variations. Sam Pendergrast's Original Zen Chili 1 pound fatty bacon 2 pounds coarse beef, extra large grind 1/2 cup whole cominos (cumin seed--yes, one-half cup!) 1/2 cup pure ground New Mexican red chile Water 1 teaspoon cayenne Salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste Methods/steps Render grease from the bacon; eat a bacon sandwich while the chili cooks. (Good chili takes time.) Saute the ground beef in bacon grease over medium heat. Add the cominos and then begin adding the red chile until what you are cooking smells like chili. (This is the critical point. If you add all the spices at once, there is no leeway for personal tastes.) Let the mixture cook a bit between additions and don't feel compelled to use all of the red chile. Add water in small batches to avoid sticking, and more later for a soupier chili. Slowly add the cayenne powder until smoke curls your eyelashes. Palefaces may find that the red chile alone has enough heat. Simmer the mixture until the cook can't resist ladling a bowlful for sampling. Skim the excess fat for dietetic chili, or mix the grease with a small amount of cornmeal for a thicker chili. Finish with salt, pepper, and garlic powder to individual taste, paprika to darken. Continue simmering until served; continue re-heating until gone. (As with wine, time enobles good chili and exposes bad.) The result should be something like old time Texas cafe chili: a rich, red, heavily cominesque concoction with enough liquid to welcome crackers, some chewy chunks of meat thoroughly permeated by the distinctive spices, and an aroma calculated to lure strangers to the kitchen door. Variation: For cook-off contest chili, drink bad tequila two days before starting the chili; burn mixture frequently; sprinkle occasionally with sand and blood; serve cold to a dozen other drunks and call them "judges"; and keep telling yourself you're having a great time. * * * Arley's notes: you don't really need to cook a pound of bacon, of course; just brown the meat in oil or lard. Also, if you go to a Mexican grocery, you'll find a variety of chili peppers in cellophane bags. A 3 ounce bag of New Mexico chiles is just about right for this dish, once you cut off the stems, open up the pods and shake out the seeds, and run the pods through a blender, you get about 1/2 cup. The idea is that you need to establish a strong chile flavor without heat with lots of mild chiles (New Mexico chiles, a variety of Anaheim, are fairly mild) and then adjust hotness to your taste with a hotter pepper like cayenne or ground pequin chiles, which are even hotter than cayenne.

Here's some pan history- Jan. 23 2011 Shortage of steel pans has Detroit-style pizza makers scrambling By Sylvia Rector - Detroit Free Press Restaurant Critic Here in Detroit, we all know what it takes to make a great Detroit-style pizza: dough for the thick but airy crust, absurd amounts of cheese and ladles of rich, long-simmered sauce. But the special ingredient most people don't know about is the pan -- a certain blue-steel industrial utility pan made for decades by a small company in West Virginia. Or at least they used to be made there, until the company closed its line about a year ago and moved the work to Mexico -- where it still hasn't been able to get production going. Restaurant supply companies here -- and apparently everywhere else -- have been out of them for many months. Pizza makers' orders for pans are stacking up by the thousands and causing problems for big chains and small independents alike. "You wouldn't even believe how many pans we have on back order" -- at least 4,000 small and medium sizes and 700 extra larges -- says Patti Domasicwicz at People's Restaurant Equipment in Detroit. She hasn't received a shipment since April. Other restaurant suppliers she knows are in the same boat. "All of us would have ordered a whole lot in before they moved, but they didn't give us a chance," she says. The pans get their name from the tint of the metal when it's new. The manufacturer, who didn't want any publicity, says they were never meant for baking; they were designed to hold small parts in factories. But somehow they became the pan of choice for nearly every big name in Detroit-style pizza. Domasicwicz, who has worked at People's for 38 years, says Buddy's started using them "many, many years ago." Today, she says, "you figure you've got Buddy's Pizza, Shield's Pizza, all the Jet's Pizzas" using them. Others include Loui's, Cloverleaf and Primo's. And then there's the growing number of Detroit-style pizzerias around the country, where transplanted Michiganders are introducing happy customers to thick pies with square, cheesy corners. Former Birmingham resident Jeff Smokevitch, owner of Brown Dog Pizza in Telluride, Colo., added Detroit-style slices to his line of thin pizzas in October to see how they'd do. "It's unbelievable the response I've had," he says. He wants to sell whole pies, but he doesn't want to buy additional pans until he can get the blue steels. Other pans simply don't yield the same kind of crust, pizza makers insist. The blue steels are "just like a great black skillet pan," says Wes Pikula, Buddy's vice president of operations. After they're seasoned, "they have a way of capturing the flavors in the metal" in a way that other pans he has tried do not. Buddy's isn't in dire need of more pans, but it has some on back order. Pikula was told to expect them in February. But a very frustrated Eugene Jett -- cofounder of the fast-growing Jet's Pizza chain -- is through waiting. After promised deliveries didn't come in September or December, he went into action. "We've tried other pans and (the pizza) doesn't come out as good," he says. So he had the original pans analyzed by a lab in Lansing, found a manufacturer, and is having them made -- right here in Michigan. He says the key, by the way, is the thickness of the steel. "They're cutting them as we speak," he said last week. And not a moment too soon: Two new Jet's are opening at the end of the month and he's totally out of pans, after giving each of his last three stores only 75% of what they needed. "The first thing is for me to get my pans," he says; the first run is enough for nine stores. If the manufacturer thinks they'd be profitable, it could put them into full production, he says. "It took me a long time to figure out how to get them done," Jett said. "But I decided then, I will build my own pans." Dover Parkersburg in Follansbee West Virginia made the originals and is not in business.