Chemistry of Cast-Iron Seasoning (2010)
sherylcanter.com
sherylcanter.com
Keep a squirt bottle of oil on hand and make sure you're using enough. Using soap to clean your pans will make maintaining your seasoning easier, as you use less effort to clean them. See this if you're skeptical: https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/the-truth-about-cast-iro...
I had friends dedicate years to flax seed oil. They're not happy about it, as they've got flaking to deal with. I also had friends disbelieve me that soap was okay, and they've mostly come around after hearing me swear by it for years.
Another good method is outlined in this America's Test Kitchen video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suTmUX4Vbk
If you have a friend who runs a Chinese restaurant, you could always try this, too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGXGJD2xTzQ
I do this regularly and always clean my pan with soap after use.
The wok burner I have is this one: https://www.amazon.ca/Eastman-Outdoors-37212-Gourmet-Carbon/...
It’s a ton of fun to cook on, and useful for way more than just the wok. When I go diving and get crabs for example, this thing gets a huge pot of water boiling in no time and makes prepping a lot of crabs really easy.
And yeah, it’ll season any pan like nothing else. I was terrible at seasoning pans until I started throwing them on this thing.
You want oil soaked into the metal. This idea that you are trying to build a non-stick surface on top of the metal is just adding extra work that isn't needed.
Wash with soap, dry of the stove top, put in some oil (I use peanut), then take a paper towel and rub the oil around over everything and at the end the metal should look shiny but there shouldn't be any pooled oil left anywhere.
If you are cooking something that doesn't leave a residue or strong flavor, you can skip the washing all together and just leave it there to cook with next time.
If you try to go the whole "never wash this" route, you end up with unhappy results going from cooking something with onions and garlic to cooking something more neutral flavored. No one wants onion flavored pancakes.
For proof of this, check out your aluminum baking sheets. If they’ve been used, they’re almost certainly covered in a shiny black substance that’s a complete pain in the ass to remove, even with abrasives. That’s essentially what’s on your cast iron.
Obviously, do not use on cast iron or carbon steel.
What also helps is simmering something acidic in the pan for about 10-15 minutes (wine, watered-down vinegar, etc). The base then cleans pretty easily. It's the burnt bits of fat that splatter up the walls of the pan that are murder to get out.
Here in the US at least, there tend to be scratch (yellow/green) and non-scratch (blue/darker-blue). Along with straight scratch pad (pure green) and steel wool (silver metal).
You can grind all day with a non-scratch pad, and all you're really polishing with is the harder bits of gunk you've managed to take off.
Same way you can sand with 220 grit all day and barely make a dent, but hit something with 60 grit and make progress in 5 minutes.
Afaik, Barkeeper's Friend is essentially microgrit in some sort of liquid carrier. If you had the right shaped sand, you could probably add that to something and get a similar effect.
Unless your seasoning is flaking off because you followed OP's instructions and you need to start again.
Actually, if you throw it in the oven and set it to self-clean it'll strip the seasoning right off. I've done it with my cast iron pan before. Washes completely clean and ends up gun-metal grey; a non-oxidized pure iron surface. This is a great way to start over with the seasoning process if you're unhappy with it.
Edit: because of course I triggered a storm. Maybe it's common elsewhere. I've lived in few EU countries, rented then owned a few houses, exactly only one of them had an oven with the self cleaning(by heating up to like 500C) feature, I don't think we ever used it. When we bought our current oven none of the ones we looked at had that function. A fancy Candy we looked at had a function where it cleans itself with steam(where you fill up a provided container with water and then it heats it up to fill the oven with steam and in theory that softens the gunk. No idea if that actually works).
If it's common where you live, then my apologies for this comment.
Couldn't find statistics on this with a quick search...
But yes, it is just an element that can go hotter and a shell that can withstand it. Ovens are incredibly overpriced for how rudimentary they are IMO. Ripe for 'disruption' if you had something non-bullshit to compete on but price - sizing is already standardised.
The cleaning module of the one oven I'm aware of that had that option was more than just a heating thing. The manual talked about foam and how to refill it. Different countries, different mechanisms I assume.
Maybe it sounds fancier than it is? Is not like it has a little robot that cleans the oven. It's just a mode where the oven can get the internal temperature very high (up to 1000 degrees F according to that article) that just incinerates any organic material stuck to the oven walls.
Most ovens in the U.S. burn natural gas, which burns at 1000 degrees F (which is the self-cleaning temperature).
Or just use easy off which is a spray on acid.
Most new cast iron cookware now has a raw surface with lots of pits and bumps from the casting process as well, which doesn't seem to get nearly as smooth and non-stick as "vintage" cookware.
For smoothing out the surface, you could just use a flapwheel. You can get them for angle grinders. This will also take off seasoning if necessary (but it's a bit worse for the pan if you're not also trying to smooth it out). Be sure to wear a respirator and googles if you're doing this.
I then used a cheap corded drill and inexpensive flap wheels and similar attachments from the hardware store to make it smooth, wearing an N95 mask to protect my lungs.
As far soap. My experience is that it definitely damages the nonstick coating, depending on how much you use. You can get by with a soapy sponge, but putting detergent directly on it and the nonstick coating will be lost.
The best way to avoid need to avoid soap or scrubbing and re-seasoning is to put hot water in the pan while it's still hot and scrape. Meat is the worst for leaving a coating and this technique removes 99% of it.(If not blackened use that water for a delicious sauce with all the best flavors of your cooking). This routine allows me to use the same pan for months without a deep cleaning.
I have tried to put cold oil on after heaving soaping, but I'm not happy with the pan until I season it with high heat. The only reason I'd do it for rust and still would pan on seasoning it properly later.
Which makes sense. Essentially burnt-to-pan bits are food-pan interface, as opposed to food-oil-pan interface.
Give enough time, heavy food displaces oil and comes in direct contact with pan. Given enough movement, oil is able to reimpose itself between the two.
1: https://www.thekitchn.com/why-you-should-almost-never-use-th...
2: https://lifehacker.com/dont-use-your-ovens-self-cleaning-fun...
Voila - a clean iron surface. Use rubber gloves, and wash off any splash with lots of water - caustic soda is nasty stuff.
I use flaxseed oil. It works. Unless you have an awful lot of pans, your small bottle of flaxseed oil will only be 10% used by the time it goes rancid; swallow the cost.
I've tried this on a goood carbon-steel omelette pan. The result was mixed; a grubby-looking polymer layer that comes off in the wash, but a pan that still works well, and has reasonable non-stick properties. I suspect that with carbon steel, the oil only needs to get into the pores in the metal, and doesn't need to form a layer on the surface at all.
But my best experience has been with cast iron: a mexican comal, to be specfic. I stripped and seasoned my comal about 8 years ago, and the finish is still flawless.
Use dish detergent (commercial dish soap). It's made in a different way, so you can't get un-reacted lye.
It's part of why you had the rubber dishwashing gloves get invented: soap used to be harsher, and one of the reasons why is the fact that soaps were made with lye.
Commercial dish soap can be soap, or it could be detergent. Detergent is made differently, and doesn't necessarily involve lye.
> The production of toilet soaps usually entails saponification of triglycerides, which are vegetable or animal oils and fats. An alkaline solution (often lye or sodium hydroxide) induces saponification [...]
i.e. that's the usual process, and it often involves lye. (It elsewhere mentions potassium hydroxide too.)
Anyway my point really wasn't too disagree about how to make soap, I've never done it, it just seemed weird to me to tell someone how they made something and that it's a problem, vs. 'Did you use lye? If so...' or even 'Assuming you used lye, ...'
For example, I think what you call 'commercial dish soap' I would call 'washing up liquid' (never soap, not would it cross my mind if someone else said 'soap') so a slightly different conversation could easily have been based on a wrong assumption about what the created thing was or was used for.
I'd never made this link before, thanks for pointing it out! We have plenty of baking sheets like this and I thought it was a form of black rust or something but your explanation makes so much more sense.
Scallion pancake with pork belly is one of my favorite combos :-)
You can make sweet or savory crepes, so why not pancakes?
But then, I'm not a big fan of actual-cake and don't have much of a sweet tooth.
However I try to avoid using soapy chemicals on my cast iron. If I do use soap it's literally one drop onto the scrub brush instead of the pan. Although I'm sure that if you went heavier on the soap nothing would come of it anyway. Most of the time I use water and a scrub brush. I scrub with good speed and not a lot of pressure to break off lingering debris.
And if I'm going to be using it the next day I'll leave it shiny, but if it's going to sit for a couple days I'll leave it on a little longer until it's a little more matte looking. Not 100% matte, but not "shiny" either. Just a sheen. That way it won't be sticky during storage where it will collect dust and contaminants.
edit: I discovered cast iron about a year ago and now I do roughly 90% of my cooking on it. If there were reliable, science-based information about how to care for the pan best, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. As an example, a lot of people caution against seasoning with too much oil. They say that when you season your pan (e.g. initially, in the oven), you should wipe the oil off until the pan looks dry. I took this literally, and wiped until it looked the same as before I put on the oil. As a result, my seasoning had approximately no effect. After experimenting, I've decided that the "looks dry" advice isn't wrong exactly, but "dry" needs clarification. It should look more like how you would like it to look when it comes out of the oven — dry, but darker and with more sheen.
I have a cast iron and a carbon steel skillet. I will always reach for the cast iron to sear a steak, but the carbon steel skillet gets used for pretty much everything else.
I think the trouble here is that the people who best understand cast iron are probably also the least likely to care about the science of it.
The main reason not to leave too much oil in the pan is that it will go rancid and get sticky and generally gross. That's not something you run up against if you use the pan several times a week, but if you have something like a dutch oven that you use maybe once or twice a month, you will come back to a mess that you have to deal with before you can cook in it.
The whole "you're making a polymer coating that mimics a teflon pan" idea is something that sounds fancy, but is impractical and unnecessary in practice.
Hmm. Perhaps. I said science-based information because while I find the science (chemistry, polymerization, etc) of cast iron interesting, I primarily care about the results. For example, knowing that flax oil gives the non-stickiest finish but is prone to flaking and thus high maintenance. Perhaps empirical would have been a better word than science-based. I suspect there are a fair number of people like me, who would like to know more about the trade-offs involved in different oils and maintenance procedures. But perhaps these aren't the people who best understand cast iron, as you say.
Two things of note:
- The best answer in the FAQ in the top comment of this thread, by FAR, is #2, about heat spreading. It gives numbers and additional information (about radiating the heat) that I didn't know before.
- Flax is the only oil that I understand even some of the trade-offs of using. That is a direct result of the post linked in this thread publicly making a hypothesis and providing detailed-enough steps for (some people) to reproduce its results.
Speaking of, as a cast iron enthusiast, would you be willing to share your experiences and/or do some experiments to help test my hypothesis on cleaning methods, here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25716850
Correct.
I will sometimes do the oil and bake thing for our Dutch oven if it has been neglected a while and has bits of rust or other questionable-ness to it.
chemically, carbon steel is very similar to cast iron, so all the info regarding cleaning is still applicable. you should probably expect to do a little more work to maintain the seasoning on a carbon steel pan though.
Somebody's never had latkes before.
Is there solid evidence that this is actually possible, as opposed to creating a layer on top of it? The only people I've ever heard suggest that it's possible were talking about cast iron pans, and it's always struck me as the sort of thing that would have major implications for a lot of other fields.
I tried some web searches before posting this, still not finding anything suggesting it's possible other than cast iron pan aficionados.
I doubt that's actually what happens, but if you think of it that way, you'll end up with the right result.
What we're really talking about is surface-gap-filling.
So yes, "into" at some level of magnification. "Onto" at another.
I don't have a subscription or SciHub link to pull up the underlying, but it looks like there have been folks who did electron microscopy on seasoned cast iron. (Note: more relevant and profitable to study in the context of machinery / engine design)
However, cast iron will never be as non-stick as a good non-stick pan, and if you treat it as one, you’re going to have a bad time.
Put bacon in a dry, hot pan, and it’ll leave crispy fond stuck to the pan. (Nothing you do will ever create fond in a non-stick pan.) Cook bacon starting with a cold pan, and enough fat will render by the time it heats to keep it from sticking.
Eggs will stick to cold, dry cast iron. Fry eggs in a moderately hot pan with plenty of grease. I had the devil of a time with fried eggs until I realized I wasn’t letting the pan heat enough. Also, it’s very easy to burn butter in a cast iron pan; use a more forgiving fat like bacon grease or a neutral oil.
Cast iron behaves differently than non-stick or stainless steel. Different heat density, different emissivity. Just like any other cookware, you need to learn how to work with it; it’s not just a matter of getting the magical perfect seasoning and pretending it’s Teflon.
some startups have been experimenting with built-in thermometers, so I can imagine this classic design being different 10yr from now :)
T-fal has had the thermo spot in their regular nonstick pans for at least a decade, if not two or three.
However, cast iron will never be as non-stick as a good non-stick pan
Also I always put bacon in my pan dry and hot, never have an issue
:/
Here is a blog post [0] I read a few months ago about wood finishes. I think the following applies just as much to cast iron as to the wood he is talking about:
So, when I choose a finish, I ignore the industry-standard scratch and adhesion tests. Instead, I separate finishes into two buckets:
1. Finishes that look incredible immediately but look like crap in 20 years (the short-run finishes) vs. finishes that look incredible when worn/abused (the long-run finishes).
2. Finishes that want me dead vs. finishes that I can apply while buck naked.
Teflon will be great to cook on initially. As soon as it gets damaged, it will be hard to fix without stripping and redoing everything.
Oil will take more maintenance over time, but if it starts looking bad, you just put a bit more on. That's exactly how you should treat cast iron as well.
The trouble people run into is they try to use oil to create a teflon surface. That's not what it's for.
[0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/11/30/rip-the-anarchists-...
Despite the flax oil article being bad science, it is still the most science of any of the cast iron information out there, which is why it continues to enjoy such popularity. Even if it is bad science, it at least provides some hypotheses to test!
Here's my hypotheses on soap (edit: rephrased to better reflect my meaning):
1) Soap is fine to use; it will not damage the seasoning.
2) Seasoning is often damaged (at least a little) while cooking and it is important to re-season regularly to keep the pan in good shape.
3) If you do not use soap, the amount of oil left on the surface is similar to the amount you would want to wipe on when re-seasoning.
Basically, I think no soap + dry on stove is a shortcut to avoid the process/effort of reseasoning the pan (especially if you do the oil-and-salt-as-an-abrasive trick). Perhaps you'll get better results using soap and then wiping on oil, but it's more work and many people don't do the second part. Thus, they see better results when they don't use soap.
This would explain why some people tell you you need to reseason after every use, while others say that's bubkis, and why the same is true of soap avoidance.
To test: try all 4 combinations of soap/no-soap and reseasoning/just-drying (always dry the same way, on the stovetop).
These are my most often used pans, and have remained that way for many years.
Fwiw I rarely need or use a scraper or salt while cleaning , I’ll “deglaze” if there is fond in the pan, even in the rare case that I’m not using the result for anything.
Specifically the idea is that IF the seasoning layer is quite durable and is difficult to damage or wear through, except by the rough metal of the spatula I use, then the best seasoning should be achieved by thoroughly cleaning any contaminants off it and then applying a fresh coat of oil.
It will likely take longer than the HN comment window before I feel comfortable drawing any conclusions, so I'm not sure how I'll follow up on this. Perhaps I'll post something at https://smichel.me/castiron (currently this page does not exist).
They don't conflict if the seasoning is already damaged (during cooking) before cleaning it. Cleaning with soap would not repair it at all (thus, reseasoning is required), whereas if you don't use soap, the pan is reseasoned in the same step as drying it on the stove.
Part of the problem was that I was overloading the word "reseasoning" to also refer to doing it in an explicit step (ie, the wiping on/off of oil) as well as the effect of rebuilding the layer of seasoning.
I've edited my post to hopefully be more clear.
What you say seems more or less correct to me. I think if you approach cast iron that way, you will have good results.
Basically, you don't want the pan to look "not-oiled", and how much effort you need to put into that depends on how much you are removing the existing oil during the cooking process.
I think the "looks oily" test is the proper determinant for if the cast iron is in good shape. Trying to develop a "seasoning" layer is likely to just cause frustration.
This doesn't seem to agree with either experience or the scientific understanding of the polymerization process that needs to occur in a well seasoned cast iron pan.
Source: lack of historic availability of avocado oil in the South
This is less effort than using soap, and more effective. The stainless smooths out any imperfections that form in the seasoning over time, and cooking with oil continuously reseasons it.
I found that I had to re-season my pans every 5-10 years if I used soap, and that the seasoning was an inferior cooking surface (more food stuck to it). With the technique I described above, I can cook eggs and they don’t stick. (be sure to preheat, use plenty of oil, and then don’t touch for a minute or two at the beginning of cooking)
I find fatty meats(bacon, sausage) or just canned lard to work absolutely best for seasoning. It's also what our ancestors used before they probably even knew what an avocado was. For a vegan, I'd assume shortening is ok as well, but I've never actually tested that.
I get his point about the older ones having smooth(er) finish due to production methods change, but what stops SOME modern manufacturers to do the same? Surely for a community that is essentially a cult, there should be enough people buying it to worth the additional manufacturing cost?
I believe there are manufacturers filling that niche now. Field [0] is one that I'm aware of. I think there are four or five others.
I have one of their pans and it's excellent.
https://fieldcompany.com/pages/how-to-season-cast-iron-pan-s...
Oven seasoning instructions:
https://fieldcompany.com/pages/how-to-season-cast-iron-pan-s...
How to care for cast iron cookware:
https://fieldcompany.com/pages/how-to-clean-maintain-cast-ir...
Been using safflower for over 20 years on my day-use skillet.
> I had friends dedicate years to flax seed oil. They're not happy about it, as they've got flaking to deal with.
I happen to have bought some flax oil specifically for seasoning my cast iron - you’re saying it’s contraindicated though? (So “you don’t need special oil, but _especially_ not these” (leaving only peanut and avocado))?
For the amount of times the word “science” is dropped there’s still a good amount of myth and legend associated with owning cast iron. Short of having my own double blind statically significant study and perhaps a microscope to observe the polymerization effects, I’m still flopping back/forth a bit about what “the best” or at least not leaving a simple improvement on the table, is. What a journey.
Still worth the trouble, though. Cooking is fun, and cast iron is a good cooking tool.
Having some good success and failure I am willing to try a few ideas in the article.
One variation a YouTuber offered was to heat the oil in the pan on the stove and then wipe the excess.
So far I have duplicated a lot of points in the article with different success ratios. I do agree a long smoke rate, upside down and long cooling period is ideal.
I use the grill so I don’t worry about the smoke generation.
More or less I’ve used this on the last successful project, but with corn oil. I went with a hybrid seasoning oil recently and I’m not impressed. I’ll try flax next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
Just fry up a full pan of very heavily salted potato peels. Use more oil and a lot more salt than you would normally use for pan frying. Make sure to move them around, don't be afraid to scrub them around, they will feel gritty due to all the salt. Fry the peels until they're very dark, they should be far too dark and salty to be edible.
Wash out the pan with hot water and dry it. Done.
It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. It's the method used in professional kitchens, as far as I know.
+1 on the squirt bottle of oil, I started doing that a few years ago and it was game-changing. Previously I'd just pour a little out of the original bottle when I was cooking, which was a lot less convenient than having something appropriately sized and within arms reach.
This sounds somewhat like "special" to me.
The best oil for seasoning is flaxseed oil, which has very low smoke point. I mean you can use high smoke points oils, but you want your oil to start smoking.
I used avocado, coconut and flaxseed oils for seasoning - flaxseed is the easiest and delivered best results IMO. Plus it's nice oil for salads and some smoothies. It's not a "special" oil.
As for soap, I used it from time to time. However, why my pans are at the peak of seasoning - there is just no need to use soap.
I use cast iron and carbon steel for high-temperature cooking. If I really care about the non-stick-ness I'll usually use nonstick. But nonstick doesn't char well (and isn't safe). So when I want a serious sear or browning, I use iron & stell.
Problem is, if something burns on, it burns on hard. Soap doesn't really help. Water and scrubbing mostly do, but they don't completely get it off. I can't even tell when the remaining patina is seasoning and when it's just gunk -- until it becomes rough to the touch, in which case it's obvious, and I scrub hard.
Cleaning gets much easier:
1. Rinse dirty pan out with some warm water 2. Clean the chunks and stuff that sticks to the pan with the chainmail 3. Rinse again under some warm water
That’s it. The oil from whatever you were cooking should still be on there; no need to put peanut or avocado oil on there unless you burnt it all off or cooked something acidic (use a different pan for that; you’ll learn).
Other people seem to have a bigger problem with burnt-on bits than I do. I don't know why that is, but I'm inclined to trust my process.
Also I like washing all the cooking oil off so I don't have used oil sitting around going rancid. Surfactants are good for that.
Acidic stuff is also fine. If my pan looks thirsty afterwards, I've got the squirt bottle and paper towels, it's easy. Cast iron is the least sensitive, most versatile tool in my kitchen. I'm not babying it.
It might seem like a bit much, but this is an article presenting the conclusions of "science" as recommendations to pursue in your every day life, and a lack of scientific rigor can create false confidence in false solutions. For something as complex as polymerization in the varied environment of home cast iron seasoning, there's an enormous amount of work and confounding factors you would need to sift through (seasoning on the stove vs oven?). Without that rigor, you might have stumbled into the best way of doing things, but as other comments suggest, its more likely your lack of rigor has led to missing things like the seasonings tendency to flake.
If someone wants to dethrone this article, they need to do it with more/better science to support an alternative hypothesis (e.g. a recommendation for a different oil). Without this, it is impossible to establish the credibility of different recommendations.
A teaspoon of vodka in the dough makes the pie crust flakier? At the very least it seems like one could say "we cooked 5 pies each way, and a blind taste test found that 4/5 tasters rated the batter with vodka as flakier".
That seems like the minimum amount of effort to call something scientific. It doesn't require any specialized equipment or training. We're not even getting into detailed methodology, or significance testing. Yet still, even the best sources I see make completely opaque claims such as "we found reverse creaming makes the cake more dense and buttery, while traditional creaming results in a traditional fluffy cake".
Cook with it. Use oil / fat.
Honestly, cast iron is about the most forgiving cooking surface you will find. People love to make it more difficult than it is.
Edit:
Some additional tips on cast iron:
Setting 4 / 10 (slightly below medium) is the default heat setting, and you have to really have something specific in mind to ever go above 5. I find that people who are used to teflon pans like to go up into the medium-high range. Things don't end well up there with cast iron.
Also buy a metal spatula. You aren't going to hurt anything, and it will be a more satisfying cooking experience. Plastic + cast iron is just going to leave you with a melted spatula. There used to be a ubiquitous metal spatula design, but I can never find them anymore. I've found it is much better to use something small like a cake / bar server than something big like a grilling spatula.
Don't cook on cold cast iron. The trick my mom showed me is you always wait until a splash of water (get your fingers wet and flick it on the pan) will start boiling on contact. If it boils into nothing immediately, you are too hot. If it just sits there and does nothing, you aren't hot enough yet.
Granted, if you still use soap that warrants the use of heavy plastic gloves, probably a bit easier.
I don't see the point to the perfect coating; occasionally using it in the oven already gets you to the perfect slick season.
Exactly. No reason at all for all of these crazy rituals involving 42 different kinds of oil (2 or 3 of which are made of Unobtanium anyway), ovens, salt, baking soda, owl urine, black cats, graveyard dirt, the Necronomicon, or whatever other weird shit people are throwing out there. Just cook with the darn thing. I don't know why people feel the need to overcomplicate this.
When oiling the pans take the time to try to wipe out all the oil you applied. This leaves just a tiny layer of oil and your pans won't get sticky. I clean with diluted Dawn and a sponge - dry on burner - then oil / wipe out each use.
That is actually slightly misleading due to the Leidenfrost effect.
If I'm doing something that requires a ripping hot pan, one that's actually hot enough for the Leidenfrost effect is where I am for. This usually requires that I use a high smoke point oil, like refined peanut oil.
Do you do any chinese cooking with a carbon steel wok?
For stir frying you generally want things as hot as you can get them. I only have a Teflon wok, and my biggest problem with it is that it just doesn't get hot enough. The other problem is that Teflon really doesn't like very high temperatures, so I'm lucky if a wok lasts a year before bits are peeling off. I've always been put off a carbon steel wok though, because of all the faffing about with seasoning, but reading some of the comments here it might be simpler just to wash and oil it after every use.
At that's the low-point for the effect. I'm not sure that commercial products necessarily all experience that reaction at that temperature.
That's above the smoke point of any oil I could imagine cooking with. While I'm sure you can't discount it entirely, I would not consider it something you would need to worry about unless you were throwing caution to the wind with your cooking process, or perhaps left your stove unattended.
That said, I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone as we rarely use it.
I read somewhere that unless you have a commercial-grade gas range, you are unlikely to hit the temperatures needed to really properly cook with a thinner metal wok. Cast iron is supposed to be a bit of a compromise because it can hold the heat better, but you can't toss it around the way you would with a normal wok.
As to carbon steel, I'd say go for it. I think you'll find it a lot less fussy than you have been told.
Also, I'd say stir fry definitely qualifies under the "something specific" where you would want to use the high heat settings on the stove.
[0] https://www.lodgecastiron.com/product/cast-iron-wok?sku=P14W...
We do our stir-frying on a regular 14 in carbon steel wok, nothing fancy. It does take a bit more oomph than most American gas stoves provide, but we've had good results by ponying up for a Bluestar range [0] which outputs 25K BTU/h ... well short of what you see in Chinese restaurants, but on par with Western commercial stoves.
Actual Asian households don't generally cook on fancy restaurant stoves, and yet somehow manage to stir-fry satisfactorily. The trick is they use propane, which has about twice the energy density of natural gas. So it's a lot more effective (and cost-effective) to use a turkey fryer/crab boil burner to do your stir-frying, if you can swing it.
[0] https://www.bluestarcooking.com/cooking/rangetops/36-platinu...
but you summation is pretty much correct, a wok is useless for most home ranges. The heat has to be directed up the walls of the wok for it to cook correctly.
That might sound a lot, but it really only takes a few minutes!
I'll do this every time after using the wok. I expect it to be good for a very long time. There might be easier ways to achieve this, but that's what extensive research has taught me to do.
One tip to add that the cast iron griddle maker gave me in the manual was to avoid putting lots of cold water on it while it's hot. You can wash soon after cooking, but use hot water. Otherwise it can warp.
Talking about additional gotchas: Acidic foods will apparently eat into the seasoning, so one should be careful with those.
Anyway I took the plunge, carbon steel wok and cast iron pan are on their way. At least if I ruin them I can get a do-over unlike non-stick!
Ill try the water test next time
So I went and washed my skillet down to a matte surface, rubbed oil into it, and cooked an egg. Worked perfectly fine.
You won't ever get the "slippery" coating like with a teflon pan, but I also find cooking on that type of surface to be absolutely maddening since any time you try to chop or scoop in such a pan, the food just slides out from under you and you have to chase it about.
I want my food to "not stick" in the same way that a book doesn't stick to a table. I don't want an ice rink.
Many, if not most, pans today come preseason-ed. And they do it exactly like in the article: a very hot oven and oil with a high smoke point.
It's probably got "seasoning" on it, but it also is not at all "seasoned" in the sense that for example this article or the person I was replying to is meaning.
The advantage of cast iron is that you just cook on it and over time (if it isn't already seasoned) it seasons itself. That's all there has to be to it... fussing over how you season it and then throwing whatever food in there seems a little silly.
I cook a great deal and once in a while it's time to scrape down (often because I made a big mess in the pan) the cast iron pan and 'start over'.
My starting over just means ... I clean it thoroughly, oil it a bit when I cook on it the next time. That's it. Pretty quickly it will be plenty seasoned.
If folks want to take a deep dive into seasoning their cast iron pan in a complicated fashion, awesome, but it's really not necessarily.
Without sharp corners. You will cut the polymerization layer otherwise, if not careful.
> Don't cook on cold cast iron.
You literally can't cook on cold metal. :)
Dancing water is too hot for some things, IMHO, like eggs. Once it is that hot I'm past the point of good eggs.
I put the oil in and bring it up slowly until the oil runs faster than cold oil, but way, way, way before the smoke point. I like my eggs to have zero brown crisp, so I use low temps and a good olive oil. Also have to use fresh eggs so that the white doesn't spread more the 4-5". On a good day with good eggs if I'm paying attention, I get a perfecty-set white with no brown crisp, and a slow-run yolk with no cooked bits, and after one quick flip to the top to sear the yolk. Perfection.
This was the article which started the flaxseed oil cast-iron fad. I think that has now faded: apparently flaxseed oil has a tendency to deteriorate and flake off over time.
I did the flaxseed thing when this blog post came out some years back and ended up having to redo my seasoning on the couple pans I tried it on. The seasoning easily flaked off. Just use canola oil and call it a day.
This is especially confusing given how long cast iron has been around; you'd think that someone would have taken an interest in cataloguing what actually works, by now.
So while this post may not be good science, or very much of it, I still appreciate that it exists.
The page linked in another top comment is worth reading in full.
Also, what if I told you its ok to use soap on cast iron pans? The hardened coating isn't prone to soap interaction. It removes all the grime and gives you a clean non-stick surface if you use soap.
I blame all this on hipster culture which is based on nothing but making things more complicated than it should be, getting viewership and generally misleading people into thinking something is more difficult that it really is. In turn, making people spend more money on useless shit that they don't need.
I got a good kick out of this.
I've never cooked with what I imagine to be a perfect seasoning on my skillet. I just cook with it.
I sorta wonder if there's a kind of placebo effect. When you really think about your tools, you notice lots of little things to do better (or I did anyway).
Getting the pan hot enough, and being aware of what parts are hotter, like the ring where the burner heats the skillet, had a huge impact on stuff "sticking" I don't know if the heat helps seal up little micro holes and cracks, so food doesn't grab onto those edges. Or perhaps The moisture turns to steam and creates a little gap, letting food sort of float above the pan, never really making contact. Maybe both.
Just a tiny bit of lubrication helps so much as well. A spray of pam or a few drops of oil work wonders.
With a good understanding of heat and lubrication, I feel sorta like I could cook eggs on a pie pan over a burner, and they won't stick.
I wonder how much is seasoning, and how much is understanding how the tools work, inside and out, to get desired outcomes.
Talk about over-complicating the treatment of cookware that has been around for hundreds of years.
I have about 8 pieces of cast iron cookware, but I really only use one: my grandmothers pan. It’s not a fancy brand, it’s 65 years old, and it just works.
My mother never used it because “it was hard to clean and heavy”.
Use a little oil with it and stuff doesn’t really stick. I can cook lbs of bacon, make steaks, bake a whole chicken, sliced potatoes, make gravy, put an apple cobbler in the oven...
I use a metal spatula to scrape anything off (after boiling some water in it to loosen it up), or a lodge plastic scraper, and scrub it lightly with a sponge and a bit of dish soap. Don’t put it away wet. It’s simple.
This is pretty much what I do, except I use a nylon brush instead of the scraper – same deal. I think the boiling water and brush are perfect because they leave just the right amount of oil still on the pan.
I did get poor performance after a few months and felt heartbroken over it, but fixed it with another approach that differs from received wisdom: use soap and a nylon scouring pad from time to time. That’s never damaged the seasoning, but removes any caked on burned bits of food that dull the pan. I read on /r/castiron that the idea of soap being damaging is a hold over from when lye based soap was commonly used for dishes. Modern dish detergent isn’t going to cause the same damage. The other thing that helped was getting a straight metal spatula to really scrape the pan which has resulted in a smoother surface over time.
IMO your problem was likely the lack of washing. Soap and scrubbing will not damage your patina in any meaningful way. What washing does do is removes the caked on, half-polymerized bits that causes food to stick (and which creates a negative feedback loop of problems).
Your cast iron is not a precious flower. Your grandmother did not fret over the decision of which oil to use for optimal seasoning. Use it, abuse it, and clean it out like anything else when you’re done (if there’s visible residue). If you want, dry it out on the stove top afterward and wipe a thin layer of oil on to it.
But I also haven’t seen any flaking of the flax base seasoning like others have. With previous pans I have accidentally scrubbed down to bare metal. Maybe I was just starting with thrift store pans that had been too heavily babied, and the process of cooking off the layers of carbonized food and old seasoning and starting over helped regardless of which oil I used.
Um.
I have a friend who literally didn't even scrape food off his pan when we was done cooking - just let it cool and put it away. When he took it out weeks later, it was green and fuzzy, and he just cranked up the heat until it smoked, and then scraped it clean. That's more than a bit extreme for me, but perhaps an example of how rugged it is.
I also really like my De Buyer high carbon steel skillet, but if I leave it out for 15 minutes without thoroughly drying it, it starts turning orange from rust. It's a bit finicky for me now that I've come to love my cast iron.
The thing cast iron has going for it is that it's black, and black hides a multitude of sins. I'd guess the orange isn't a huge deal, maybe it is though.
No, it is simply a major PITA in the kitchen and no match whatsoever for teflon. It is such a PITA that the cast-iron venders are marketing "enameled cast-iron" which, of course, has a coating of enamel atop the cast-iron.
And get this: there are beaucoup WWW posts on "seasoning" the enamel!
Incidentally, it's really good for flatbread :-)
Just buy this (obviously not at that price).
https://www.amazon.com/Sunrise-Kitchen-Supply-SYNCHKG102693-...
After cooking, while the cast iron is still hot, give it as little water as possible and just scrub all the food off.
rinse with plenty of water, by the end of cleaning it'd still be warm.
wipe dry then put it back on the stove I still use electric stove so it's still warm by then and residual heat will dry it.
Never needed to season... I use mostly lard/olive oil. Vegetable oil tends to leave a really nasty sludge that's really hard to clean so I stopped using them.
It seems like taking and bunch of long chain fats, heating them up to high temperatures in cycles and then cooking all sorts of foods in that has a chance of producing carcinogenic molecules.
For the synthetic non-stick pans we have studies of their biological effects. I don’t think we have any studies for the patina that results from seasoning.
However you have to remember that correctly seasoning an iron pan does not create a coating or a layer as such, the polymerized oil fills in the microscopic gaps in the metal and creates a smoother surface, with fewer irregularities that proteins and carbs can cling onto. The actual amount of polymerized oil left on a correctly seasoned pan is absolutely minuscule, so if anyone complains that their seasoning is flaking off, they tried to slather on a way too thick layer, treating it more like a paint or lacquer than a surface treatment.
Compare that to the teflon coating on a non-stick pan, which is an actual thickness of material bonded onto the metal surface of the pan, in fact sprayed on much like paint or powder coat, which is why it will eventually start flaking off.
Seasoning is not the burnt bits in the pan after you fry something, it's a process that binds polymerized fat molecules into the surface of the iron itself, which is why you can't simply scrub it out with dish soap. If you somehow can, it's just burnt bits, not seasoning. I had to take sand paper and a not insignificant amount of elbow grease to a second-hand cast iron pan I was stripping down, in order to get down to bare metal, but the actual amount of material I sanded off was less than a quarter teaspoon of black dust. That tells you something about how little material actually goes into seasoning cast iron, and how hard it bonds to the iron.
If you eat fried or grilled meat and enjoy that heavy maillard reaction on the surface, and especially if you like your BBQ sauce to get dark and sticky and aaaalmost burnt, you're already ingesting significantly more carcinogens than you would ever get from a cast iron pan.
I have a (found) cast-iron pan I'd basically given up on: thick, cracked, chipped coating. With a tiny kitchen, I'd stored it in my oven, and after baking a dozen or so loaves of bread while it was in there I discovered that the coating had almost completely burned off. I obsessively researched cast-iron seasoning (included Sheryl Canter's article), heard about the flaking flaxseed oil (not to mention the insane price of the stuff), and ultimately opted for high smoke-point grape seed oil ($4 @ Trader Joe's), the science-y logic being the goal of exceeding the smoke point at the highest possible temp, and indulged in $6 worth of lint-free (blue) shop towels (hardware store), and then:
1. preheat oven to ~ 200deg F; 2. give pan a vinegar/water bath (~50/50) for 30 minutes, then steel-wooled it for a minute to ensure it was down to the bone; 3. thoroughly dry ... and crank the oven to 450+; 4. using lint-free towel: thoroughly apply a coat of oil to the warmed pan, then wipe almost completely dry, then bake for about an hour; 5. apply another coat (yeah, silicone oven mitts), another wipe-off, another hour ... at most 3x;
The thing is now the gem I always wanted it to be; eggs slide around like on teflon. I wash after use in hottest water using a chainmail scrubber for any tiny stuck bits (almost none ever), and don't mind if there's a drop or two of dish soap. Dry thoroughly, on the fire for a minute to be sure, and then a quick wipe of oil - no re-seasoning, just protection. So the cleanup and maintenance is a bit of a ritual but for me it's well worth the performance.
When you use soap and put copious amounts of oil, and wait for the heat to release the food, of course it’s possible to cook, because the oil forms a barrier between the pan and food. You’re basically creating a half assed seasoning layer
However the notion that soap can unstick bonded food atoms but doesn’t also unstick bonded polymers is an oxymoron. You can still use soap, just know it will strip food and seasoning both. Even using metal scrubbers and metal utensils can strip the seasoning, in my experience, which is why I re-season frequently. Anecdotally acidic foods strip large amounts of seasoning, happened just the other day with taco seasoning for me.
I can definitely tell the difference between a good seasoning layer and a layer of oil simply poured. It’s better for the cooking process and better for the flavor to “properly” season in my subjective experience
A couple of times after I made eggs, I let the water sit for too long, and the pan got a bit rusty. No problem with cast iron! Just a bit of steel wool and it was as good as new.
A cast iron pan is the easiest pan you'll ever use.
I kept putting off actually doing it. Why?
It's gonna smoke. I have a small one bedroom apartment.
It's gonna take an hour of baking and two hours of cooling for each coat.
It's gonna need at least six coats. Just the time investment seemed insane on a one-pan scale: 18 hours of oven use, plus applying the coats, plus a risk of starting over if something she thinks is obvious wasn't mentioned (this happens to me quite a lot, since "Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail"...).
A pre-seasoned replacement cast iron pan is like $50.
I bought a dutch oven cast iron set and donated the old pan to whomever picked it up in the waste room of my building, with a note on it.
There is absolutely no reason to micro-optimize cast iron pans, they are great because they are pretty much indestructible.
Vegetable oil works fine. Shortening works fine. Don't overthink this.
Does anyone successfully cook eggs in cast iron?
It's a vintage Wagner pan, from when they used to mill flat the cooking surface. Modern lodge has a porous surface from the cast.
Anyway I just cook them in butter, they basically float. I think they would slide across the pan if I tilted it. I'm cooking them fried/"over medium"
If you find your pan is too sticky: use lots of oil/fat, cook at medium temperature (not too cool nor too hot), and be patient for a couple weeks; the problem will sort itself out, and eventually you'll be able to cook eggs with just a little oil.
https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/en4yml/this_is_go...
Lard might not be _popular_ anymore, but it's definitely readily available (for cheap!).
> If it’s conventional bacon, you’re baking in carcinogenic nitrates. But even organic bacon is not good for an initial seasoning because it’s filled with salt.
Both conventional and organic bacon contain carcinogenic nitrates - organic just contains nitrates from a natural source (celery). By definition, all bacon has nitrates.
https://www.mcmaster.com/3004N11/
It would be interesting to see the results for different oils, temperatures, bake times, number of coats, etc.
The book changed the way I cook (for the better!)
I quite like my carbon-steel pan but the seasoning instructions (salt, oil, and potato peels?) left a mess, and instead I used the normal cast-iron method.
So linseed oil is flaxseed oil, the question is only if the process of extracting it is food-grade.
Buy a cheap teflon skillet at your local store. When it becomes worn and no longer operates flawlessly then buy a new one. Never pay $17 for 17 oz. of "flaxseed oil" that becomes rancid two months later. Save hours of time cooking and cleaning!
Best of all, avoid buying a cast-iron boat anchor that you will endlessly try to "season". "Try" is all you'll do, b/c nobody knows really what a "properly seasoned* cast-iron pan is (i.e., there is no science here, folks). If you own cast-iron cookware, throw it away and move into the 21st century: get teflon pans.
Cast-iron cookware is a sucker's purchase suitable for only one scenario: old cowboy movies depicting cattle drives.
Gotta disagree with you there. Cast iron is great for dishes that you want to sear, or that you want to finish in the oven or under a broiler. Searing on most stainless pans doesn't work nearly as well because the metal doesn't retain its heat as zealously, and if you whack your little teflon pan in the oven you'll ruin it.
Sure, there's a lot of mythology around how to season the pans and how you need to baby them, etc. That's all BS. The "secret" is to cook on your pan regularly, using a little more oil/butter than you would on teflon, and don't let your pan soak in soapy water.
If you scrape away the memes and the hype on blogs and on reddit from astroturfing accounts they're dependable, versatile cookware and they're not particularly expensive. What's not to like?
For some people Teflon isn't an option. Bird owners for example can't use pans with PTFE coatings, cooking with them releases a compound that is toxic to parrots.
OK, for the bird owners: buy a stainless steel skillet and use it until your bird dies. Then buy a teflon skillet.
Buy a cheap screwdriver from Home Depot. If it breaks, buy another one.
Rather like someone trying really hard to get me to fire-proof my house with asbestos
I paid $40 for a cast iron pan a decade ago. I clean it with water, and scrubbing a metal spatula. I don't do any black magic to season it. I use it for cooking almost everything... And I'll never touch teflon, because of health concerns with it.
The only stuff that sticks to my pan is food that I burned into it, because I had the heat too high. A sharp scrape with a metal spatula gets it off.
The big secret is that I simply use it regularly, clean it when it's dirty and otherwise don't worry about it.
Cast iron and carbon steel are great, I'll never buy a teflon pan ever again.
It's the fanatics and over-complicators who ruin it.