Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

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> If there were reliable, science-based information about how to care for the pan best, it would have saved me a lot of trouble

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.

> 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.

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

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