Fats have a “smoke point”. This is relatively low for unrefined fats like your steak has (it’s higher for refined beef tallow, but still not all that high).

You run into this more with cast iron because you have a lot of thermal mass. You throw a cold steak into a thin frying pan, and the termperature of the whole thing plummets. As the burner brings it all back up to temp, you notice when the steak starts to smoke and you turn it down, getting a near-instant response because (1) you’re barely at smoke point and (2) you don’t have a lot of thermal mass.

Cast iron is less forgiving… you throw a cold steak in, and the cast iron’s thermal mass means it *stays* at that too-high temp, and even turning the burner completely off isn’t gonna help because you’ve got too much energy in the system already. Best you can do is yoink the food off, turn the burner off, and wait. With your baking soda at hand, because “smoke point” and “grease fire” are really good friends.

Especially at first, you’ll tend to get the thing way too hot up front, because you’re used to having to compensate for that big initial drop. Once you get used to that, it’s nice because you *don’t* have sudden temperature changes. It’s not “SEAR wait wait wait to get back up to temp OKAY COOK AGAIN.”

Nana

Did you get a picture of the fire truck in front of your house? That would be one to hang on the wall.