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How to season cast iron: Cook with it. Use oil / fat. Honestly, cast iron is about the most forgiving cooking surface you will find. People love to make it mo
by war1025 6y ago
How to season cast iron:
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.
- cascom 6y agoAgreed, would add just don’t scrub off your seasoning with soap/scouring pad.
- taeric 6y agoMeanwhile, I have a chain cloth that I use when cleaning to make sure no food is left behind. Remarkably hard to actually get the seasoning off. Granted, if you still use soap that warrants the use of heavy plastic gloves, probably a bit easier.
- SteveNuts 6y agoSoap is fine anytime, scouring pad is never fine unless you're deliberately trying to scrub off the seasoning for some reason.
- grenoire 6y agoCarbon steel gang here, I just cook with it, if the coat flakes then I just keep cooking with it. Run under hot water when I'm done, scraping with a dish brush. I don't see the point to the perfect coating; occasionally using it in the oven already gets you to the perfect slick season.
- RamRodification 6y agoMy dish brush gets really yucky with this method (not using dish soap). Greasy and soot:y. Do you just not care about this issue or do you spend some time cleaning it afterwards?
- chipsa 6y agoI usually scrap my cast iron with a plastic scraper before I start with the dish brush. Soap and warm water help too, while you're doing the initial scrape.
- alliao 6y agoi chuck it in the dishwasher, comes out brand new! try it. It'd even "reanneal" the plastic if that's the right term lol. The bent brushes will return to it's virgin position, try it!
- grenoire 6y agoMy mom top me to just toss it in after she saw my year-old crusty brush. It was seriously like brand new!
- derekp7 6y agoI find that my skillet comes out really nice when I make a batch of cornbread. You grease it real good and get it hot before pouring in the batter, and during cooking the right amount is absorbed by the cornbread. This leaves behind a hard slick surface.
- mindcrime 6y agoCook with it. 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.
- hansthehorse 6y agoMy cast iron set is 20 years old now and used almost every day. One thing cast iron isn't good for is when you have to change temps mid cooking. If doing something that needs mid heat then going to low heat cast iron will fail you as it won't go to the lower heat easily. 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.
- iamacyborg 6y ago> If it boils into nothing immediately, you are too hot. If it just sits there and does nothing, you aren't hot enough yet. That is actually slightly misleading due to the Leidenfrost effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect
- war1025 6y agoIt could be, but in practice I've found that you can tell the difference between "too hot" and "still cold" very easily.
- chipsa 6y agoA drop of water affected by the Leidenfrost effect looks different from one in a too cold pan. 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.
- GordonS 6y ago> 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 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.
- adrianN 6y agoHeating Teflon to high temperatures and preparing food on it is a good way to get Teflon into your bloodstream.
- robocat 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever
- cbsmith 6y agoYou have to get to really high temperatures though. Like over 300 Celsius.
- p1necone 6y agoA stovetop cranked high should be able to achieve that though shouldn't it? Not something you can discount entirely.
- cbsmith 6y ago300C is pretty damn high... that's like 500F. I generally cook on my grill to get to really high heat, and that is definitely at the high end of what I'd even do with the heat. 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.
- walshemj 6y agoThat my view - a quick dip in warm water with a bit of soap and lightly whip of any bits and let it dry. Ill try the water test next time
- kova12 6y agoDollar stores are still carrying metal spatulas
- Spinnaker_ 6y agoIt takes months of continuous use to develop a great seasoning by just cooking. Or you can accomplish the same in an afternoon.
- war1025 6y agoThe youtube algorithm decided it needed to recommend a whole hose of cast iron videos to me over Christmas and they kept repeating this. 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.
- Spinnaker_ 6y agoYou might be confused as to what the seasoning is. You can't just wash it away. It takes something like oven cleaner to strip it. 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.
- war1025 6y agoWell, my cast iron was a wedding present that my grandparents got in the 40s, so it didn't come "preseasoned", but it's also had 70-odd years of continuous use. 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.
- Spinnaker_ 6y agoSo it has 70 years of seasoning! I bet it works great. The whole point of the article is to take a newer pan and make it perform like yours, without needing 70 years of use.
- duxup 6y agoAgreed. 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.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago> Also buy a metal spatula. 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.
- fideloper 6y agoCompletely agree. My "pre-seasoned" cast iron from Target was the best purchase I ever made.
- mark-r 6y agoUsing high heat on Teflon pans can also end badly, particularly if you have birds. http://www.animalplanet.com/pets/other-pets/teflon-bird-guide/#:~:text=Birds%20are%20susceptible%20to%20a,coated%20with%20polytetrafluoroethylene%20(PTFE) http://www.animalplanet.com/pets/other-pets/teflon-bird-guid....
- jennyyang 6y agoThis is what I think too. I bought my cast iron pan for $15. I use the heck out of it, and I don't think about seasoning one second. If I need to cook something that will stick, I put oil or butter on it, and I wash the pan afterwards. Even my stainless steel pans, I use them as I like without worrying about anything. I use oil/butter when I need to, and then wash. What I love most about both is that I scrub it with SOS pad if something gets caked on. I don't know why people are so concerned about "seasoning" the pan. My All-clad frying pan was $100, I've had it for a few years now, lots of scratch and dents but who cares? I'll probably use it for a long time and not think about replacing them. They are indestructible and even if I had to replace them, it wasn't an arm and a leg.