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.
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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 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.
It's more like like a seasoned veteran, not cooking seasoning.
You aren't throwing garlic on the pan and then putting it in the cupboard. You build up layers of polymerized oil on the pan as you cook on it.
Oil is placed on the pan and then it is heated to form a non-stick coating. This layer can have small holes in it, so the process is repeated many times. The holes do not line up, which makes the path for water to get through much longer or blocks it. This means water can not easily make it through all of the layers. That also means any water that gets in can't easily get out, and it can cause rust to form if it makes it through the coating and is left on there.
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.
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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...
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.
Avocado oil is really good, and it's important to have a super thin layer of oil. Just put a little in the pan and then evenly coat it with a papertowel and wipe out as much oil as possible.... and then wipe it out some more. It will look like there's nothing there and thats how you want it. Place in the oven on its highest setting like 450+ for 45min, let it cool a bit and then do it again. You should do this 3-4 times for a nice seasoning.
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.
There's this old cowboy on YouTube that has a good video on restoring cast irons I forget his name though
I too watched the MinuteFood video on this yesterday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0R1jVN3LaY
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It's actually fine to use soap and water, otherwise it is in fact, filthy and nasty. Don't believe the indoctrinated
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It's both true and not true. Using something like dawn or similar is fine, using a lye soap will fuck your shit up.
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.
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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 used to think that was the way, but medium heat for longer is better. Less cancerous too.
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 😂
Then you simply wash with dish soap and hot water before you use it. This ain't rocket surgery.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Are you sure, I thought if a single molecule of soap touches my pan it would instantly look like this?
Nope. I often use dish soap and a soft scrub pad on my cast iron just like my Grandmother and mother did with those same cast iron pans and dutch oven. A decent seasoning on cast iron is probably more durable than non-stick coatings. Just keep it out of the dishwasher. The high temp hot water and caustic dishwasher detergents WILL damage your seasoning. But, then you just need to re-season to fix it all better again.
My lazy way to keep my cast iron and plain high carbon steel wok properly seasoned is to clean with hot water and mild dish soap then return to the stove top heat on high until hot, then shut the burner off and hit the insides with a light quick spray of cooking oil. Or I just use some plain vegetable oil and wipe on a thin coating with a paper towel. and leave it cool.
Nah this is more reduce a tomato sauce territory.
Modern dish soap is not acidic or a base so it's quite harmless to the patina, but it's also superfluous because you generally don't want to degrease the thing which is the only thing that soap is good for. Boiling some plain water in it cleans off anything that you want to get rid off. If you're terrified of bugs when not using soap for some reason get yourself a bonfire and heat your pan as hot as you want for as long as you want nothing will survive that. Just make sure to not melt it.
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.
What does the avocado oil base do? I’ve never seasoned a cast iron pan from scratch before.
You can use various different food oils, the important part is that it can leave a (food safe) polymerized coat that binds to the surface, protecting it from rusting as well as making it non-stick
There'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.
Don't know of the given info about the pans is correct. But animals nowadays are defintly way more "optimized" than they used to be. Both genetically and the stuff they eat.
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?
A good patina will contain a good chunk of burnt oil, it's not that the stuff vanishes when smoke gets produced linseed oil in fact produces very little smoke compared to say canola. Never getting to the smoke point of whatever you have on there will result in a non-black and not entirely unlikely also gooey patina.
It's not a good idea to go miles beyond the smoke point but hovering around it is pretty much optimal. You use oils with higher smoke points if you want a more aggressive sear without ruining the taste of whatever it is you're searing, the thin layer you smoke off when heating the pan, or that smokes off while the pan is cooling off quickly after adding oil+ingredients, is generally so miniscule that it doesn't really affect taste short of giving some wok hei which is generally a good thing. If the smoke alarm goes off or you need to open a window you're overdoing it.
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.
Needs washed, but you can just heat the oil on the stove if you've seasoned the thing in the first place.
I learned from a chef that an oven would work better due to the even heat applied all over but in a pinch or if you don't want to do all that, the stove top could be fine.
That's the main reason I do an oven seasoning once a year or so. With my electric stove, it'll get the bottom ripping hot while the sides won't ever quite catch up.
In the oven I can do an even, set 450-500 and hold it there as long as I like. Then I can shut it off and let the pan cool slowly and evenly.
Dude, you're not supposed to scrape off the seasoning every time you wash the pan. I reapply a bit of oil maybe once or twice a year. I normally just wash it some soap and water after cooking.
I don't use soap, I just use a bit of hot water with the kitchen faucet sprayer and I have a flat metal spatula to scrape off any stuck on bits... wipe with paper towel and that's it.
That's perfectly fine, I use soap because I eat meat and my gf is vegetarian so I don't want to leave any grease. Also I find soap just makes it a bit easier to clean.
Hey everybody posting advice, go liven up this community!
https://lemmy.world/c/castiron
!castiron@lemmy.world
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The linux people here are the worst. I've blocked all major linux communities but they still seep into other communities
I think they meant the guy that seasoned his pan like 200(?) times before cooking in it on Reddit. That thing was SHINY when he was done
I didn't go that crazy, but I did use an orbital sander on a cheap Lodge cast iron pan, and it's much more non-stick now.
The smoother the surface you start with, the smaller the surface texture that the seasoning needs to smooth out, the harder it is for food to grip the surface.
I am tempted to 1200 grit random orbit a pan and see how good life can be.
Just get a carbon steel pan instead and save yourself some trouble. Once seasoned it is much more non stick than cast iron and It also is lighter so easier to handle.
Why not both? Besides, you can't make home made baked beans or a good stew or bake bread, cakes or pies in a plain high carbon steel pot.
If you push me to it. I will be happy with just my plain high carbon steel wok and cast iron dutch oven.
I think the max I used was 600, possibly 800, and it made a huge difference. If you use 1200 then that'll be one sexy pan!
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Btw, copper sponge is really good for such things. Hard enough for cooked-in stuff but soft enough to not scratch.
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.
Reading all this discussion and especially debate about how to take care of a cast iron pan. Idk, those teflon ones are just so convenient. Don't have to do shit and can just chuck it in a dishwasher. Worse product in a lot of ways but a lot more convenient.
Please elaborate. I thought the concern about teflon was for the plants making it and the old stuff they used in making it that hasn't been used in a while.
I was being semi-facetious. The potential for harm exists but the conditions are pretty extreme. It is true however that teflon manufacturing is very toxic to the environment and the workers.The campaign to quiet the risks is pretty extreme however, so I do not personally trust claims of improved methodology in manufacturing. If you look at the recent ban in Australia (I am 95% sure this is where this is taking place) they recently banned the use of "forever chemicals" such as PFAS, FOOF, etc EXCEPT for in the use of cookware because the lobbying got very intense. Additionally, if you look in to the debacle with microplastics and such, it doesnt inspire much confidence in regulation and risk analysis. Anyhow, the choice to switch cookware is a small one and the risks to your person and the globe is potentially very large, so I personally try to avoid them.
p.s. ask any chemist if they want fluorine around their food and you will probably get some negative responses as wel
You might be thinking of France. They had the ban and exception for cookware.
Anyhow, the choice to switch cookware is a small one and the risks to your person and the globe is potentially very large, so I personally try to avoid them.
I mean, the personal risk very large in the sense that the current studies don't show it but hey you never know. I just find that a bit eh. The environmental effects seem to be more real, but that's more of an industry wide issue than something really affected by personal cookware decisions. It's one of those things that if they banned them it'd suck but I guess it'd be alright, but I can't be arsed to switch myself.
How dare you have a specific, detailed, and nuanced takeaway from data that suggests specific, detailed, and nuanced risks associated with a given manufacturing process!
Don't you know that the only possible valid conclusions are "XYZ GOOD!" or "XYZ BAD!"?!
To add to the other responses, if you were to leave a teflon pan on the stove without anything in it (ie forgot to turn a stove off) as it gets hotter the teflon starts to break down & starts boiling those chemicals back into the air.
I mean that's obviously something you shouldn't do ever anyway. But yeah, it can cause "teflon fever" if you get it really hot (~450°C) and breathe in the fumes. Luckily, even if you fuck up like that, the "flu" usually goes away within few days. If you go turbo idiot and heat up it up ridiculously hot and stand there breathing it in for an extended amount of time then you can fuck yourself up. Though in that situation at least you don't have to worry about their brain because it's probably already messed up, doing something so idiotic.
Normal use, it seems modern teflon is fine. Usually the concern seems to be more about the environmental impact or factory conditions than impact to those using them as cookware.
Honestly as someone with cast iron it’s easier than Teflon. Teflon I have to be gentle with, cast iron I just have to keep dry
I haven't been particularly gentle with them. Other than using plastic or wooden utensils with them I guess, but that's what people use here overall.
With cast iron I use metal utensils and high heats. We also have enameled cast iron Dutch ovens where we trade the metal utensils for the ability to soak. And stainless steel is the best of both worlds if you’re willing to lose a little nonstick. But we’re in the process of quitting Teflon over health and environmental concerns.
Cast iron can be a real pain in the ass if you make it one, but it’s also amazing for the lazy cook if you let it be. A quick hand wash and dry and toss it back on the back stove burner.
I will admit though I haven’t used cast iron nearly as much since I quit eating meat. It was excellent for meat. It’s also great for other foods that love a good sear like Brussels sprouts
Laughs in enameled pan.
You can scratch as you wish and leave it wet, just don't hammer on the surface.
As OP, I bought a set of stainless steel pans at the recommendation of the chef Frank Prisinzano, and I think they're the very best option.
They do seem more convenient than cast iron with the same long life but also without the possible issues that teflon ones have
Teflon was banned in the United kingdom in 2005 because it is a carcinogen and toxic.
In 2005, the UK prohibited the use of Teflon in cookware goods that included perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and PFOA was outlawed internationally in 2019. Exposure to PFOA increases the risk of cancer and other diseases as well as probable infertility. Teflon and other non-stick cookware items produced in the UK after 2005 are free of PFOA.