So how’s the divorce going?
Relevent XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1905/
god damn i love relevant xkcds
And this post will be exhibit A in the divorce proceedings
I knew nothing about cast iron pan care when I met my SO and I did his dishes for him one day and washed it with soap and water. I still hate the damn things and think they’re filthy and nasty.
It’s fine to wash them with modern dish soaps. The reason people say not to is because dish soaps used to have lye in them, which would destroy the seasoning. Just make sure you wipe the water off instead of letting it air dry or it can rust.
I just put it back on the stove on full heat for a minute to dry off the water.
I keep reading the word seasoning, and for non native speakers this is hard. What are you all meaning? You put some garlic, salt and pepper on the pan and let it be?
English is dumb. We got the term “seasoned” to mean like a veteran fighter, something aging properly and using salt and spice from the French “assaisoner” which means “to ripen / to improve with time” which we expanded upon by being like “when things become tastier” which is how we started applying it to using spices and salt…
In this case it means sort of speed running getting the oil sheen a cast iron cooking implement used to naturally get by just using it over and over when cooking over wood or peat hence “ripening” the pan. Way back in the day in England and France they didn’t really use soap for dishes. You washed them with water and left them outside in UV light to sterilize them so all iron cooking things tended to naturally develop that nice carbon coat. Time and use made them better hence “seasoned”.
Seasoning in this specific context means the residue of the food oil which forms a surface coating when heated up to a certain temperature. It protects the surface from rusting.
It does protect from rust somewhat(water can still cause rust if left on it) but the big deal is it makes the cookware non-stick without Teflon.
In this context, it means to coat the cast iron with oil and/or fat and heat it until the oils polymerize as a thin film stuck to the surface of the pan. This prevents the cast iron from rusting and presents a non-stick surface. It’s honestly more like varnishing the pan than “seasoning” it.
Oh shit I didn’t know that!
What if you have a new cast iron and accidentally let a wet dish sit on it in a drawer and it rusted? Hypothetically of course…
Steel wool to take off the rust and re-season
Thank you. Do you have any seasoning tips or recommendations?
That’s the cool part- no matter what happens to your cast iron pans, it can be fixed. You scratch or chip a non-stick coating and the pan is pretty much ruined.
Not OP, but the Lodge seasoning guide is a pretty good starting point. Cast iron being used forever is proof of how resilient it can be, there’s not too many things you can do that are irreparable.
Also, you don’t really need to baby it as much as most people say. Just keep using it and it’ll keep getting better.
There’s this old cowboy on YouTube that has a good video on restoring cast irons I forget his name though
Cowboy Kent Rollins? I like that guy.
It’s actually fine to use soap and water, otherwise it is in fact, filthy and nasty. Don’t believe the indoctrinated
It’s both true and not true. Using something like dawn or similar is fine, using a lye soap will fuck your shit up.
Thanks for the details on this, luckily modern soap doesn’t have lye anymore.
You’re not lyeing to us, are you? ;)
It forms a thin layer of ‘plastic’ when you season it. The oil polymerizes afaik.
MinuteFood on youtube did a video just yesterday talking about the science of cast iron, and why they’re not dirty like many people seem to think.
They don’t need the hell scrubbed out of them like stainless steel and they don’t cause cancer like Teflon. They also sear meats way better than any other pans.
Then as others have already said, it’s fine to gand wash them if you’d like. You just don’t grind/scrub off the carbonized oil layers.
I’ve never had to scrub the stainless steel ones actually, they are terrific.
Well what the ueck are you doing, because I sure have. We have a higher end ss pan and it’s way worse than our cast iron skillets. Cook scrambled eggs in it and you’ll need a power sander to get that thing clean.
Maybe it’s a quality thing. We bought these really high end ones the chef recommended. I only have to sometimes run the scrubby over a patch of food now and again.
Just burn it on the highest flame after every use. The grime will be all disinfected by the heat. You can stop when you smell the specific odor of burning rubber and see black fumes, this means your burnt oil coating is denaturating.
I wish you said it’s supposed to be cleaned before using. What good is it in knowing it was disinfected after it’s last use … 10 months ago?
You burn the grease after cooking so that your skillet won’t stink with rotten lard when you don’t use it for a year.
Reapplying the oil coating before cooking is a good practice, you’ll also burn all the dust. But you then need to let it cool to allow oil to polymerize and lock all that cancer below the coating.
As someone allergic to dust and averse to cancer, I’ll mute this cursed thread and sign up to a normie cooking sub 😂
Bruh.
Hey everybody posting advice, go liven up this community!
https://lemmy.world/c/castiron
!castiron@lemmy.worldThere’s a lot of answers here, but I don’t think anyone said the magic words. To reseason cast iron, you need an oil high in poly-unsaturated fatty acids. Those are the kind that can chain together, and form a good polymer coating.
The thing that trips me up most about this subject is that 140 years ago, pork fat was very good for seasoning cast iron. Today, it isn’t, because the composition of the fat has changed significantly.
The best seasoning coats will be thin, not appear or feel oily, give the pan a dark color slightly more glossy than an eggshell, and resist mild detergents, metal spatulas, and heat high enough to sear a steak on. If you have a layer of loose stuff in the pan, that’s just a layer of gunk, and is probably adding some weird flavors to anything you cook.
The thing that trips me up most about this subject is that 140 years ago, pork fat was very good for seasoning cast iron. Today, it isn’t, because the composition of the fat has changed significantly.
That sounds very interesting! Is it because of the way pigs are raised now compared to back then? They eat way fewer babies now, I bet.
I don’t know what causes the difference, I just compared the first nutrition breakdown of rendered pork fat I could find to a recent USDA publication. I’m under the impression that we mostly grow different breeds of pork, on bigger farms, using a more consistent food blend, so pretty much everything has changed in that time.
What changed about pork fat?
i would also like to know
To reseason cast iron, you need an oil high in poly-unsaturated fatty acids.
In other words: Linseed.
Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say “need”. Linseed works much better, builds a nicer patina very quickly, but pretty much any fat works. In practice mine is getting seasoned with olive oil because that’s what I have standing around in the kitchen.
Proper technique is much more important in practice: First and foremost heat empty, then add oil and fry, then clean, ideally without degreasing (boiling water and a spatula do wonders), then (if necessary) add a drop of oil and try to rub it off with kitchen tissue, then put back on the stove to dry and maybe polymerise a little. Always have that thin layer of oil otherwise the pan is going to rust.
You can have a perfect patina, if you don’t heat up the pan before putting stuff in there things are still going to stick. You can have practically no patina, if you bring up just a single thin layer of any fat up to its smoke point and after that add oil (so the thing isn’t completely dry) things aren’t going to stick.
Be careful with linseed oil as it spontaneously combusts! My friend used it on something and left the rag in the garage, and it literally burnt their house down.
Not an issue once on the pan: Linseed oil oxidises quite quickly when exposed to air which is where the heat is coming from and it’s certainly exposed to air on a pan, however, the pan is also an excellent heatsink and not flammable. Rags are a combination of even more exposure to oxygen (because the oil soaks into fibres and then has lots of surface area) combined with the rag being flammable, those are very specific circumstances. Bottles of the stuff also don’t spontaneously combust in the fridge, they only spoil within a week or so (for culinary use, that is, it’s still perfectly fine to season pans with it, and is still food-safe. Just starts to taste like ass quite quickly but that doesn’t matter when you burn the stuff anyway)
But yes I should probably have mentioned that I flush my kitchen tissues when working with linseed oil.
Linseed has an awfully low smoke point though, wouldn’t seasoning built with it burn off when trying to cook at higher temperatures?
Scrolled past this before reality set in after a few seconds
The best thing to season a cast iron pan with is blood.
Btw, copper sponge is really good for such things. Hard enough for cooked-in stuff but soft enough to not scratch.
I find the scrub daddy brushes to be the perfect fit for cleaning my cast iron as well.
coat that sucker with avocado oil and bring it up to 200°C for a few minutes. Allow it to cool, repeat until the sides don’t hold any oil, then switch to crisco solid shortening for a few rounds.
I love that everyone is showing up to give real advice to this post.
What does the avocado oil base do? I’ve never seasoned a cast iron pan from scratch before.
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Did you mean to say avocado oil there? I love the stuff.
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I only go to Reddit for two things: cast iron and pf2e. Slidey eggs never gets old
I only go to lemmy for two things. Tasty memes and to see people talk about Reddit.
And Linux
And people moaning about people that like Linux.
And people informing me they use arch btw
I use mint btw
The linux people here are the worst. I’ve blocked all major linux communities but they still seep into other communities
And I’m all out of bubblegum.
I love my cast iron pan, but I really cannot get the perfect sheen that everyone else seems to get. The bottom of mine is non-stick now, and I season regularly, but the sides always seem to chip away eventually. Once the chipping starts, I have no idea how to stop other than to strip it entirely and start again.
The amount of disgusting freaks that don’t know you need to wash this and reapply the seasoning with oil in the oven is insane to me.
First of all a properly seasoned cast iron pan can and should be washed with modern dishwashing liquid. If the seasoning comes off with 'hand friendly ’ soap it was garbage seasoning anyway.
Second, this looks perfectly ready for seasoning. Nothing wrong with that. Just get the outdoor grill going grab some short chain oil and get to work.
Are you sure, I thought if a single molecule of soap touches my pan it would instantly look like this?
Short chain oil!? At first I thought you were bs’ing about seasoning a pan with gear oil.
That sent me down a novel rabbit hole. Thanks for your input!
I don’t get the joke. I just tried Google and it had nothing for seasoning cast iron with chain or gear oil. Is this a thing?
The chains being referred to here are molecular chains, not mechanical ones.
Thank you. That joke/wordplay went straight over my head.
I’ve got one that I need someone to do this to so I can start over. It’s older than I am and was poorly taken care of for several years before I got it.
The cast iron I bought for myself is all in good condition. That one means a lot because of where it comes from but I don’t have the patience to scrape all that shit off. I wish someone would do it for me so I could enjoy the pan my grandaddy cooked me bacon in.
Just put it in the oven on cleaning mode if you have a self cleaning oven
My oven uses some weird “eco-friendly” self-cleaning process that involves pouring water into it and steaming the dirt off, which doesn’t sound like it would be good for the pan. Got any alternatives? I found a Griswold at the thrift store a few years back and I’d like to be able to restore it without damaging it.
Drill with an abrasive scubbing pad on it will sort it out real quick.
That really depends on the condition of the pan. I’ve had some where power tools were insufficient.
I have yet to see any kind of powered abrasive that WON"T get to the bare metal in a right quick manor. It’s kind of what the stuff is made for…
Right, that is your experience. And I’m telling you that there are cast iron fry pans that can defeat wire brushes, both manual and ones you attach to your power drill. (Of course it’s up to you if you want to believe me. There’s no particular reason to believe some random stranger online, but then again, there’s no obvious benefit for me to lie about it.)
