You Need a Dutch Oven—But It Doesn't Need to Cost $300

There was a moment I knew.

I knew my Dutch oven was as necessary in my life as my collection of seasonally-appropriate bathrobes.

The moment was when I started using it to make weeknight pasta. It’s when I realized that the heavy, cast iron beast pot with scratched enamel coating wasn’t just for special long-cooking meats and other weekend projects—it was for Tuesdays!

I keep my blue Lodge Dutch oven (a housewarming gift from mother-out-of-law, Cathy, thanks Cathy!), in this hideous wooden cabinet next to the kitchen that my cohabitator will NOT let me set on fire. The cabinent looks like something Paul Revere would have put in his driveway with a sign that said “FREE! PLEASE, JUST TAKE IT.” Every day I think about how it would flicker, burning into ashes, but for now, it holds a lot of gin and the Dutch oven. So it remains.

Anywayyyyy, enough about that stupid, stupid cabinet. I’m here to try to impress upon you just how much you need a Dutch oven, and that—equally important—you need to store it in easy-reaching-and-using distance from your stovetop. Let’s see what I can do.

You will use it when you make pasta. We all (now) know that the key to glossy, better-than-restaurant pasta is adding starchy-salty pasta water to your sauce, and then cooking your noodles right in there so they soak up all that sweet, sweet ambrosia. I used to try to do that in a regular old frying pan, and the pasta would always go everywhere, which is where the Dutch oven comes in—it’s the only vessel in my kitchen that will easily fit a pound of pasta plus whatever you’re doctoring it up with. Sizzle a bunch of garlic in plenty of olive oil, throw some cooked pasta in there along with pasta water and a good knob of butter, stir it all around enthusiastically, and you’ll be sold on this whole Dutch oven thing after one bite.