Chemistry of Cast Iron Seasoning: A Science-Based How-To (2010)
sherylcanter.com
sherylcanter.com
Maybe this is overcomplicating things.
Oh, and a bit of dish soap is fine, too. Doesn't seem to bother the pan any.
There's a whole vaguely macho culture around cast iron and the fiddly rituals for producing the perfect surface, but you can just ignore all that and cook on the things and they're fine.
Additionally, there is something else I wonder about: people often seem to be recommended those pans "requiring" seasoning from a health-conscious perspective, but to me it seems like everything that is involved in seasoning could be worse than just using a non-stick Teflon or ceramic pan to begin with. I mean, isn't seasoning basically burning oil and making a layer of burnt stuff at the bottom of your pan? Can't this stuff flake into your food? I can't find much about this on the internet, so maybe I'm wrong, but it just doesn't feel right to me.
One thing that does make a huge difference though, is the surface finish of the cast iron. I had a fancy new pan that was basically unusable compared to some old flea market finds, because it had the raw cast surface, while the old ones had been ground smooth. Ended up taking an angle grinder to it (after which the raw metal was obviously exposed, and it did need seasoning) and the difference is night and day!
I do it on my pellet stove outside (I used to use the oven, but the smell/smoke is not pleasant in the house). Preheat to 375F. Coat the pan (inside, outside, handle...the whole thing) in a THIN layer of oil. I use rapeseed oil or avocado oil. The point is to use one with a high smoke point. I have also used peanut oil.
Put the pan in upside down for an hour. Remove it, cover with another THIN coat of oil. Back in the oven. Another hour. Remove it, coat it, and back in the oven for a third hour. During the third hour, dice a red onion. When the pan comes out, put it on a burner over medium heat and cook the onions in the same oil you used to season the pan. This will remove any "metallic" flavor the pan had, and will perform some magic on how non-stick the seasoning is. I don't know how or why this works, but it does. Cook the onions until they're basically burned, then discard them.
I do this once a year for all of my pans and the seasoning holds up easily through a year of heavy use.
I wash the pans by hand with no soap (if you deglaze the pan after cooking, this is much easier) and I avoid soaking water in the pan. If I have a stubborn something stuck to the pan, I'll boil some water in the pan for a few minutes, then wash it.
After washing it, I put it on the burner on medium-high heat until all the water evaporates, turn off the heat, then coat the pan with a thin layer of cooking oil, shortening, or lard using a paper towel. Now the pan is ready for next time, and it won't rust in the meantime.
EDIT: I use the same method listed above for my carbon steel cookware as well, and it's just as effective for those.
Do you scrub/strip the pans at all before this annual reseasoning?
Why can't I get away with only doing the cooking surface?
I drank the flaxseed Kool-aid (courtesy of this article) when I first started purchasing cast iron ~6 years ago. The flaxseed seasoning is incredibly hard, which is great, until its brittleness causes it to flake off. I was constantly losing bits of seasoning nearly every time I used a pan. (my working theory is that thermal expansion/contraction causes parts of the polymerized coating to lose bond with the steel over time).
I finally got sick of dealing with it, going at all my pans with an angle grinder and flap disk to remove the old seasoning and started over using bog standard vegetable oil. I've not had a flaking problem since. I do need to re-season more frequently, but that is easy and quick to do.
ttps://www.goodhousekeeping.com/food-recipes/a32733/wire-grill-brush-dangers/
The article suggests alternatives such as coil brushes or crumpled aluminum foil instead. Also there are chemical methods.
Wire tools deserve considerable respect and should be used only with protective gloves and eyeware and even skin protection, since spun-off pieces of wire can embed in eyes or bare skin (and you may not notice). Good news: any embedded wire or steel fragment shows up like a lighthouse in an x-ray, making them extremely easy to locate.
Cook’s illustrated did a short piece on the method not long after it came out too, and found it satisfactory, at least with a minor tweak or two,
Luckily, later on I learned a better way - a cooking spray called Baker’s Joy, which is essentially oil impregnated with a little flour. The flour seems to help speed up the seasoning process, so you can get to a well seasoned pan quickly. I usually heat the pan up, either in the oven or on the grill, then spray the Baker’s Joy when it’s still very hot. I make sure the pan is well coated, then I wipe out the excess.
This technique won’t give you a hard shell like the flaxseed oil method does, but it does seem to produce the same results as multiple seasoning sessions in a single pass. I’ve also found that cooking an onion in the pan helps when the seasoning isn’t quite what you want it to be yet. I read once that it’s a traditional method for breaking in a carbon steel wok.
Iron and steel are sponges for oil but only when hot. If you get your pan hot and put lots of oil in it, the pan will be flooded with grease at the micro and macro levels. That’s it: hot pan, lots of oil, wipe out / pour off the excess.
I used to bake a lot in a domestic oven. Baking baguettes needs steam, so I used one of my small cast irons as a steam bath. I would bring the oven up to the hottest temperature with a dry pan inside. When the baguettes went in I would throw a pint of just-boiled water into the skillet to flood the oven with steam.
Do this enough times and your skillet will look like it has been dragged through skillet hell. Dull, dry, and red with rust. All it needed was one good clean, a sand paper scrub to smooth the surface, and one hot oil soak and the pan was slick enough to make an Appalachian grandma happy.
In this case, how much stress would you have to put a 3/8” thick piece of cast iron, that is shaped into a strengthening bowl, warp out of shape?
Fat chance! They are brittle, but they aren’t weak.
Vegetable oil works ok too, but honestly use that trimmed fat from a beef roast or something, render it to liquid, and then season it the same way you did with vegetable oil and see how it compares.
Sesame oil is a vegetable oil (made from seeds, and primarily polyunsaturated), and it was first cultivated for oil production more than 5000 years ago.
I highly doubt that, my local open air museum has an oil mill from 1860 that was producing linseed oil: https://freilandmuseum.de/besuchen/orientieren-im-museum/bau...
Also you have thousands of years of history using olive oil.
On the other hand the use of animal products is way higher than it used to be.
Cast iron pans are used, of somewhat niche, but without pomp. You put some oil on them, then you wash them and use again.
Perhaps for cast iron cookware, but this mania for detail isn't unusual, nor is it mainstream in the US. When reading HN we are simply more exposed to a population that self-selects for paying attention to detail in everything as it isn't a trait that is turned on at 9 and off at 5.
Think of it as the American equivalent to the subset of Japanese who really get into selvedge jeans. Or the subset of British who really get into high tea. Or Estonians who really get into saunas.
I just take it as a signal of what a wonderful, fractally rich, diverse world we are truly blessed to share with each other.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I salute you all, from a distance, with my $10 T-fal non-stick frying pan.
"There's a sucker born every minute."
- commonly attributed to P. T. BarnumUnlike t-fall you won't damage your cast iron with a fork or metal spatula, and you won't accidentally get it too hot and burn the coating. Short of letting it sit around in water and rust they're virtually indestructible in the kitchen.
If you have a gas range, try this: put some water in a cast iron pan and boil it. You will see a pattern in the water matching the range's support grill.
The water won't hurt the pan. But you can do the same test with oil.
Put a thin layer of oil with a high smoke point in the pan, and turn the heat up. You will see the same effect, where you can see the support grill pattern in the oil.
Cast iron's strength here is that it holds heat (simply because it is so thick and heavy), not that it distributes heat.
On the other hand, for nonstick use lately, I've been using carbon steel on induction. That solves the slowness issue, because they're thin enough that they heat through the thickness basically instantly on induction. And I can still be neurotic about the seasoning issue.
Now if I could get 3 ply Al core with a carbon steel inner, that would be something to try.
This is where 3.5 KW induction burners come into play.
I guess I’d rather have 5x the thermal conductivity than 5x the thermal mass for my cooking.
It's bonuses are heat retention, ability to get red hot and be virtually indestructible. Non stick coating are very sensitive to overheating. CI - don't care. Something carbonized - self cleaning oven cycle and scrape.