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Comment by nanomonkey | Hacker News Reader

Vegetarians use butter, but if you're smart you use a well seasoned high carbon steel pan, or cast iron.

The best seasoning for a pan is done with flaxseed oil, as far as I understand, as it has a low smoke point so the oil will polymerize and turn into a glassy surface.

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The flaxseed thing comes from a 2010 blog article [1], which purports to be a scientific approach to seasoning pans. As people have found out, it's unfortunately not a good idea.

Aside from the fact that flaxseed is ridiculously expensive compared to the traditional alternatives, it creates a brittle surface and flakes off after a while. It also requires a ridiculous number of coatings to get to the right level of smoothness. It's just not worth it compared to something cheap like canola or soy.

A lot of people have looked into it. Here [2] is a good Reddit post from /r/castiron.

But among all of the technical discussions about seasoning it's easy to forget that a pan generally only needs to be seasoned once, and most pans you can buy are well pre-seasoned, and using the pan for cooking is also a form of seasoning.

[1] http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-te...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/5owtnm/why_i_dont...

In my experience, you’ll eventually cook something in the cast iron that sticks really hard, and the only easy ways to get the burnt-on gunk out end up stripping the seasoning, so re-seasoning ends up being a roughly semiannual process in my house. Would love to know how to avoid this.

Scrub out any gunk with salt and oil and either a sponge or half a potato, depending on what you have. Then rinse with super hot water and dry well.

It has worked amazingly well for years for my carbon steel pan.

I usually heat up the pan directly after cooking and wash it under the hot water. Just heat enough so it makes a bit of steam when it hits the water, scrub with a wooden spatula.

Or while cooking, add water if it fits whatever you cook. Make a sauce out of what is left after the sunday steak is out of the pan.

Boiling water in the pan helps sometimes. Scrape a bit with a wooden spoon while it boils.

The best seasoning method I've found for cast iron and carbon steel is the method advised by Matfer-Bourgeat, which is the brand of my favorite carbon steel pan.

Clean the pan well, to get rid of the shipping wax if it's a new pan, or scrub it well with salt as an abrasive if it has substandard seasoning already.

Then saute the peels of two potatoes in a a generous (at least ½ cup each) amount of salt and oil, while moving the mixture around and using the peels to really rub the oil and salt on the metal, for around 15 minutes until completely crisp and dark. Clean out the pan and repeat the sauteeing steps, clean out the pan again with just hot water and dry it well.

No other method has come even close, and it just gets better with more use. My fried eggs just slip and slide around like a hockey puck. If gunk does get burned on, scrub it out with salt and a bit of oil, there's no need to soak or use soap.

The theory is that flaxseed oil (also known as linseed oil) is a polymerizing oil, which is supposed to help with the quality of the surface. Other polymerizing oils (eg Tung oil) aren't food safe.

I notice from the table that unrefined canola has a similar smoke point to unrefined flaxseed oil, so that would make an interesting comparison

Flax seed oil polymerizes to a very slick surface, but it’s relatively brittle, and there are reports of it flaking off of cast iron.

Really the best thing you can do is get a hundred year old skillet, because they literally don’t make ‘em Like they used to.

I keep my eyes open for old pans, but I was busy filling my kitchen with smoke with my modern cheap lodge pan while I wrote the previous comment and it works very well for me.

How could the quality be lower? Isn’t it just a cast piece of iron?

The pores are so much smaller and the skillets weigh noticeably less. I’m not surprised you can’t season a modern cast iron skillet, the surface is so horribly rough nothing can bridge it. I fought for years with seasoning skillets and did the flaxseed and the anodizing baths and everything between then gave up and bought a Griswold dating to just before the turn of the century - never had to do a thing after cleaning and oiling it the first time, it’s probably been five years or more.

I also gave up with my new pan. I took the sander to it and now it's nicely smooth and seasoned :-)

That is part of the reason why I bought a good carbon steel pan instead of a cast iron one.

The way they're produced (stamped from sheet steel rather than cast) ensures they have a perfectly smooth surface, rather than the pitted uneven surface of a modern cast iron pan.

Professional chefs have been using carbon steel pans for decades for a reason. In my view, they have all of the upsides of cast iron, with none of the downsides. And they're surprisingly inexpensive at kitchen supply stores.

> I’m not surprised you can’t season a modern cast iron skillet, the surface is so horribly rough nothing can bridge it.

Many sources recommend sanding before seasoning, and note that manufacturers that preseason don't usually do that.

Outside of some fairly intense misuse, I've honestly never had to do reseason after even boring old canola/soy seasoning without sanding, so I've never bothered.

> gave up bought a Griswold dating to just before the turn of the century

So under 20 years old?

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