If you love cooking in a cast iron skillet, you might wonder if you can use butter for your recipes. You can indeed use butter when cooking in a cast iron skillet. It adds flavor to any dish you make, but you should not let the temperature get above 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Watch for the Smoke Point
Butter adds a lot of flavor to any dish and can be the perfect fat for cooking a lot of your recipes, but each fat has its own smoke point, which is good to remember. Butter’s smoke point is 350 degrees, which means if the temperature gets higher than that, you risk it turning brown and even burning, which of course affects the flavor of the dish you’re cooking.
But it isn’t just the taste you should think about. It’s also the fact that the fat can become carcinogenic if you cook it past its smoke point.
Cooking With Butter
When you use butter in cast iron pots and skillets, make sure you use a medium-high heat only. If it starts to smell or look like it’s burning, turn the heat down. You can cook a lot of different dishes with butter, including vegetables, thin slices of chicken and more.
Ghee, which is a product that separates milk solids from the fat, can be used instead of butter if you need something with a higher smoke point. The smoke point for ghee is 450 degrees.
The good news is, if you read your recipes closely enough, you’ll understand that cooking on high heat is rarely needed. People may like doing this, but it is rarely a necessity. This is good news for people who like to put butter in their cast iron skillets, because it means you can cook this way for most of your recipes.