For more than 5 years up to now, I have started using clay pots in my kitchen. Quite soon they have become my favorite tools for cooking even If I am passionately using different other utensil types as you will be able to see throughout my website and blog posts.
I believe that most people have tried some dishes cooked in earthen pots, or have heard about the benefits of using them. In addition, you may have been wondering if your kitchen and diet can benefit from starting to use them.
In this post, I would like to reveal what can you expect from cooking in clay pots based on experience of myself as well as the experience of other clay pot owners that I have gathered. So, are clay pots a good tool for preparing different dishes?
Clay pots are a good choice for cooking especially when it comes to dishes such as stews, braises, roasted chicken and meat cuts as well as different bread types. Food cooked in clay pots is valued in kitchens around the world because of its special taste and nutritional value.
As I mentioned before clay pots had fastly climbed to the top of my favorite utensils, and that was not without the reason. In the following chapters of the text, I will show you more about the benefits of clay pot cookware that I have experienced in the years behind, as well as a few drawbacks to be aware of.
Additionally, I would show you the statistics of the most common benefits that other people observed while using the clay pots.
Finally, I have collected the opinions of people around different cooking forums and Facebook groups to bring the idea of dishes people love to cook In clay pots more than in any other cookware. So, you can get a better inspiration on what you can start preparing if you start your journey with clay pot cookware.
1. Are clay pots good for cooking?
Since I was a child, I have enjoyed the traditional dishes prepared by my grandparents coming from bare clay pots. I started to cook more seriously as I got older. However, at one point, most of my cookware was based on stainless steel and enameled cast iron.
That turned me to thinking of introducing the Cly pots to my cooking for the first time and trying the dishes from my childhood. At that time I dint know how to maintain such cookware or could I reproduce the awesome taste of food from clay pots from my memories.
However, Short after I bought the first unglazed clay pot, the process of learning to cook with clay cookware went so natural and smooth. I started by preparing stews and braises and observed that I never have experienced the serious burning of the food as it can happen in metal cookware. Additionally, the moisture circulation properties of bare clay allowed me to keep the dishes full of juices and took me away from constantly adding up more water to my dishes.
Finally, after years of cooking in non-glazed clay pots, I can say that taste of certain dishes like braises, stews and beans, from these pots is very special. However, to not be biased by sharing with you just my experience I have searched for the impressions of many other people on the cooking forums and Facebook groups and gathered the statistics of the most common benefits that people experiences with clay pot cookware.
Unsurprisingly the moisture retention properties, even heat distribution and taste of the food were among the top benefits that other people experienced while using clay pot cooking.(See the data in the next chapter)
There are benefits of clay cookware that could not be judged through the experience of users but require more solid scientific experiments. Examples can be the health benefits of cooking in clay or the inertness of clay vessels in the interaction with the food. However, to talk more about these benefits I am preparing the article to summarize the research publications on the topic.
Finally, if at one point you will be interested in how to choose the clay pots for your kitchen, I created a post where I of what you can expect from a few internationally available brands of pure ceramic cookware and what should you be aware of while choosing the clay pot for your kitchen,
Now, Let’s see what the experiences of other people say about the benefits of clay pot cookware
2. What advantages you can expect from starting to cook in clay pots?
To answer this question apart from personal experience with clay pots, I gathered the experiences of other people and their stories. I have analyzed the comments on the questions about the clay pot cooking benefits from the cooking forums such as Discusscooking or Reddit subdomains dedicated to cooking such as r/Cooking.
In gathering the data I have excluded the comments that included links or promotions to avoid accounting for the biased answers related to content promotion. This left more space for the opinions of people who were eager to share their personal experiences about clay pot cooking.
Additionally, I have only included the answers that mention the benefits measurable directly by the user experience. For instance, this can include the observations like good heat distribution during cooking or the absence of food burning in clay pots. However, the claims of the people about the clay cookware benefits that need more solid scientific proof than the experience from daily cooking haven’t been counted(e.g. claims about the mineral exchange between clay pots and food).
Here are the results
Looking overall after gathering more than 20 experiences of people, several benefits have been observed by the majority of the people including the capability of clay pots to slowly and evenly distribute the heat, and keep the dishes warm for a long time after cooking. Such material behavior prevents the dishes from burning easily, which was also one of my main impressions when I just started to cook with clay.
Additionally, preventing the loss of moisture and keeping the food juicier were commonly experienced. Preservation of the moisture within the pot keeps food from sticking so people experienced the lack of need for extra oils or fats on top of the ones existing in the food.
Apart from these main impressions, some of the benefits that have counted in the ,,Others” part included making the food more tender and neutralizing the acidic Ph of the dishes.
If you are interested in the experiments that I have done to Proof/deny some of the common beliefs about clay pot cooking, so you will be able to find them soon in one of my upcoming posts.
3. What do people love to prepare in clay pots more than in any other cookware? (Statistics from more than 20 clay pot owners)
To get inspiration about clay pot cooking I performed a survey on several forums to ask the people about the dishes that they especially love to prepare in clay pots.
I receive some great ideas from the forums and Facebook groups where I participate( Discusscooking, Subreddit r/Cooking, and ,,Healthy cooking” Facebook group) that Inspired me to start with some new dishes in my clay pots.
Additionally, I gathered more than 20 answers and visualized them on the graph below. So, you can maybe also get in love with your clay pots while preparing some of these dishes.
People have enjoyed using clay pots for preparing dishes from around the world. Some of the stew dish inspirations that I get included recipes like: mole, Moqueca, chile Verde, mole de olla, Beef Okra stew Mediterranean style
Some aspiring chefs enjoyed clay pot dishes from the oven like baked ziti or cornish hens, others have been proud of their clay pot-based cassoulets, while many of them enjoyed the tastes of Far east Asia including bibimbap, goong ob woon sen and Vietnamese clay pot pork/chicken.
In the end, If you have wondered, does food really taste better in clay pots, soon you will be able to take a look at experiments that I have performed here.
It is really amazing to mention the versatility of the dishes and tastes that can be prepared in clay pots. The same is true about the cooking methods that can be applied with clay pot cookware.
Unlike the common beliefs, It is great to know that clay pots can be used on most stovetops as well as oven types. If you are having doubts about whether can you use the clay pots on stoves that you have at your home, read my upcoming article here and get to know better about what clay pot cooking can provide to you.
4. What are the downsides of cooking in clay pots to be aware of?
Cracking- Even the clay pots are prone to scratching by different utensils, they can crack due to non-gentile dropping or heat shocks. From my experience, it hasn’t been such a common event, since It happened with only one of the several clay pot utensils that I had during the last several years. I believe that propers seasoning and choosing of the pots with the thicker walls help with cracking prevention
Handwash of nonglazed clay pots– Bare clay is a porous material it is good to avoid using soaps or especially putting it in the dishwasher. However, does not easily stick to bare ceramic cookware, so it can be easily cleaned by water. Additionally, clay pots are scratch resistant so you can apply any kitchenware to easily scrub the walls of the vessel.
They keep the aroma to some extent- From my experience, you would experience this only in case you prepare an aromatic dish(e.g seafood-based stew), or fish and you want to cook something neutral after. In that case, you can bearly feel the flavor of the previous dish. However, I haven’t noticed this effect in most of the other cases. Moreover, you will be able to find some interesting results of the experiment that has tested this in my post here.
Maintenance- To get the best properties from your ceramic vessel you need to put little extra care into it. Before the first use, the bare ceramic pots commonly need to be seasoned. However, once when it is done this process doesn’t need to be repeated. See more in my video tutorial on how to maintain your new clay pot and prepare it for its first use.
Additionally, some of the clay pots(if indicated by the manufacturer) give the best results if they are soaked for a short time in the water before the first use. In this article, I provide more info about which brands require soaking, and which do not as well as why that is important.
5. Conclusions and final thoughts
Nowadays more and more people are turning back to clay pot cooking, because of the natural and healthy cooking style that comes with them.
Personally, I have enjoyed clay pot dishes since my childhood, and such a way of cooking
In this article, I have to bring some of my personal experiences of what you can expect from clay pot cooking. Additionally, I gathered impressions from a lot of other people so you can get an even better view of what you can expect.
Finally, I tried to link different informative articles that cover different questions that you may have before taking clay pots into your own hands and experiencing all of their benefits by yourself. In the upcoming months expect some new articles and videos about clay pot cooking where I will gather interesting data from my personal experience with clay pot cookware, experiments that I performed, and conclusions from scientific literature related to clay pot cooking.
