10 ms·

As someone who owns more cast iron than is reasonable, I just wanted to go a step beyond upvoting this and acknowledge in writing that this is the correct view

As someone who owns more cast iron than is reasonable, I just wanted to go a step beyond upvoting this and acknowledge in writing that this is the correct view of things. 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.

stouset 6y ago
Also, without washing, you end up with rough spots of non-sticky partially-polymerized bits. Wash it with soap and a scrub brush. Nothing short of steel wool is going to affect the patina. 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.
- gilrain 6y ago
  Incidentally, if your want your aluminum or stainless steel clean again with almost no effort, use Barkeeper's Friend. It's an oxalic acid product, and it wipes away stains with a sponge that you'd work hard to sand out. Obviously, do not use on cast iron or carbon steel.
  - stouset 6y ago
    I don’t know about your experience, but even with BKF, the scrubby side of the sponge, and a lot of elbow grease, it takes ages to get it off an aluminum pan. I did it once and it took two full hours, and gave me blisters on my hands from the sheer amount of scrubbing.
    - cmckn 6y ago
      Try oven cleaner! I leave it on sheet pans for about 15 minutes; it’s amazing what wipes away.
    - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
      I had similar issues with the AllClad pans I bought, so I called them out of frustration. They recommend Dobie sponges in addition to the Barkeeper's Friend. It seems to help. 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.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        Sponges come in all levels of abrasiveness. 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.
      - mark-r 6y ago
        Burnt bits of fat don't come off with acid, they need base. My wife pours ammonia into a baggie and leaves things in it.
    - jfim 6y ago
      There's two versions of barkeeper's friend, a powder one and a liquid one. The powder one is the one to use to remove caked on residue.
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    > Obviously, do not use on cast iron or carbon steel. Unless your seasoning is flaking off because you followed OP's instructions and you need to start again.
  - cpascal 6y ago
    Seconding this. Barkeeper’s friend is like magic on aluminum. If you use it regularly you can keep your aluminum pots and pans looking like they’re factory new.
    - wyclif 6y ago
      BKF is great on stainless steel, like All-Clad sets. Highly recommended.
- chongli 6y ago
  Nothing short of steel wool is going to affect the patina. 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.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Yes, if you happen to own an oven that has this feature. It's not exactly common. 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.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      I’ve never had a non-self-cleaning oven.
    - butterfi 6y ago
      Really? I figured most ovens had a self-cleaning option... I did this trick to recondition several cast iron pans and it works great, but be prepared for massive amounts of greasy smoke.
      - onli 6y ago
        Afaik it's just not a thing in europe. Only high end models have it, and even then it's an optional feature that costs extra. Even in a kitchen I rented where just the sink faucet did cost 1000€ the self-cleaning module of the oven was not installed.
- petre 6y ago
  I wash it with water and scrub with scotch brite. Will try homemade soap.
  - chipsa 6y ago
    Do not use homemade soap. Homemade soap is made with lye, which is the entire reason why people said not to use soap, once upon a time. An unreacted lye will start to strip seasoning. Use dish detergent (commercial dish soap). It's made in a different way, so you can't get un-reacted lye.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      If you have unreacted lye in your soap you're going to have more problems than just stripping the seasoning off your pan.
      - chipsa 6y ago
        I mean, if you have a bunch, yeah, you're going to have more issue than just stripping seasoning off. But most of the problem is just the slightest hint excess from making sure the entire volume of oil is saponified. 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.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      Homemade X is made with whatever you made it with...
      - chipsa 6y ago
        Homemade soap is soap. The only way to make soap is the saponification process. Which involves lye. The oil used can vary, but a strong alkali is required, and any strong alkali you use is going to do the saponification process on your seasoning. Commercial dish soap can be soap, or it could be detergent. Detergent is made differently, and doesn't necessarily involve lye.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Cooking anything acidic will strip all of the seasoning right off. I can easily keep a seasoning on my carbon steel woks, but it’ll vanish if I cook one Pad Thai. For my cast iron I can keep it there until I want to cook anything with tomatoes.
- hnick 6y ago
  > 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. 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.
blueline 6y ago
Totally agree except that onion flavored pancakes can be delicious. Scallion pancake with pork belly is one of my favorite combos :-)
- tharkun__ 6y ago
  Absolutely correct. There are many usually sweet recipes that are actually great when done savoury instead. I personally like it when the last thing I made in the pan was something that had onion and then I gotta make pancakes, precisely because the first pancake will have that flavor. Then I put chorizo and cheese on it too and call it a day. Next pancake will be 'normal' again anyway. Win-Win!
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    I'm a huge fan of savory fried any-cake (e.g. hoecakes, [0]). Just because something is normally made one way is no reason to limit ourselves. 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. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnnycake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnnycake
zelon88 6y ago
I agree on 95% of this post. I think that's part of the allure of Cast Iron. It's a personal thing where people develop their own methods through experience. 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.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Huh. That's not it at all for me. I like cast iron because: (1) It is extremely durable and can be repaired rather than replaced. (2) It is general purpose, reducing the number of pans I need to own. (3) It is well suited to cooking at low temperatures, which are much more forgiving (I can walk away and write a comment like this and come back to something other than a charred mess). 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.
  - CBLT 6y ago
    Have you tried carbon steel? In my opinion it is superior to cast iron in every way, especially durability.
GordonS 6y ago
So I understand correctly, do you mean to wash it after every (most) uses, and apply a little oil after washing? No need to bake in the oven or anything like that?
- jasallen 6y ago
  If you're trying to add a little more seasoning you will need to bake. You'd do this after a rough cleaning or cooking something watery or acidic. If you're just protecting it from ambient moisture just a teensy coat.
- war1025 6y ago
  > No need to bake in the oven or anything like that? 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.
- OJFord 6y ago
  Just wash it like normal, stuff that comes off is charred food etc. aka 'dirt'. The actual polymerised seasoning isn't going to come off with a bit of water and washing up liquid.
GordonS 6y ago
Forgot to ask in my other comment, does all this apply for carbon steel too?
- leetcrew 6y ago
  general consensus on reddit (and my personal experience) seems to be that seasoning on carbon steel is a bit more delicate than on cast iron, possibly because carbon steel skillets tend to have a much smoother surface. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- atombender 6y ago
  Pretty much, yes: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/06/how-to-season-carbon-steel-pans.html https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/06/how-to-season-carbon-ste...
klyrs 6y ago
> No one wants onion flavored pancakes. Somebody's never had latkes before.
Yetanfou 6y ago
I use only cast iron, always cook on a wood-burning stove. The way I season pans is simple, I just put the thing on a medium fire, dab some canola oil on it, rub it in, wipe it off, repeat this once or twice after which I just use it with enough oil (canola or olive). I clean them by rinsing them while hot with cold water which starts boiling immediately, wipe them with some paper and put them away. As long as they're kept dry they don't need reseasoning. No fancy oils needed, no special rituals, just use them regularly and that's it.
blincoln 6y ago
> You want oil soaked into the metal. 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.
- BikiniPrince 6y ago
  Yes, this isn’t a mystery. There are lots of coated steel products that use the crudest of coatings that need grinder off. Unless the material is polished to a high shine it will absorb oil.
- war1025 6y ago
  > Is there solid evidence that this is actually possible, as opposed to creating a layer on top of it? I doubt that's actually what happens, but if you think of it that way, you'll end up with the right result.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    "Soak into" is probably an engineering approximation converted to lay language. What we're really talking about is surface-gap-filling. So yes, "into" at some level of magnification. "Onto" at another.
    - BikiniPrince 6y ago
      Indeed! I was avoiding describing the surfaces at high detail .
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Yuan, Z., Xiao, J., Wang, C. et al. Preparation of a superamphiphobic surface on a common cast iron substrate. J Coat Technol Res 8, 773 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11998-011-9365-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11998-011-9365-7 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)
neild 6y ago
The main thing I’ve learned that most advice about seasoning pans doesn’t tell you is that how you use the pan to cook matters more than how well seasoned it is. Cast iron is really forgiving of seasoning, you don’t need the perfect job to cook with it. 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.
- captainredbeard 6y ago
  Keeping an IR thermometer by the stovetop is handy if you're cooking with cast iron. It removes the guess work around things like "Am I going to burn this butter if I drop it in the pan?"
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Putting a drop of water on the pan is a good indicator of temperature. It will either sit there in a small puddle, wander around a bit, or zoom around in a frenzy.
    - lmeyerov 6y ago
      for most medium/high, when an oiled pan, you can see the super faint smoke. for some oiled, even based on the viscosity from shaking the pan. water test is good for learning this point. but water in an oily pan can hurt later so good to learn to do without :) some startups have been experimenting with built-in thermometers, so I can imagine this classic design being different 10yr from now :)
aksss 6y ago
> no one wants onion-flavoured pancakes :/

stouset 6y ago

Also, without washing, you end up with rough spots of non-sticky partially-polymerized bits. Wash it with soap and a scrub brush. Nothing short of steel wool is going to affect the patina. 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.

gilrain 6y ago
Incidentally, if your want your aluminum or stainless steel clean again with almost no effort, use Barkeeper's Friend. It's an oxalic acid product, and it wipes away stains with a sponge that you'd work hard to sand out. Obviously, do not use on cast iron or carbon steel.
- stouset 6y ago
  I don’t know about your experience, but even with BKF, the scrubby side of the sponge, and a lot of elbow grease, it takes ages to get it off an aluminum pan. I did it once and it took two full hours, and gave me blisters on my hands from the sheer amount of scrubbing.
  - cmckn 6y ago
    Try oven cleaner! I leave it on sheet pans for about 15 minutes; it’s amazing what wipes away.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    I had similar issues with the AllClad pans I bought, so I called them out of frustration. They recommend Dobie sponges in addition to the Barkeeper's Friend. It seems to help. 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.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      Sponges come in all levels of abrasiveness. 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.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      Burnt bits of fat don't come off with acid, they need base. My wife pours ammonia into a baggie and leaves things in it.
  - jfim 6y ago
    There's two versions of barkeeper's friend, a powder one and a liquid one. The powder one is the one to use to remove caked on residue.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  > Obviously, do not use on cast iron or carbon steel. Unless your seasoning is flaking off because you followed OP's instructions and you need to start again.
- cpascal 6y ago
  Seconding this. Barkeeper’s friend is like magic on aluminum. If you use it regularly you can keep your aluminum pots and pans looking like they’re factory new.
  - wyclif 6y ago
    BKF is great on stainless steel, like All-Clad sets. Highly recommended.
chongli 6y ago
Nothing short of steel wool is going to affect the patina. 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.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Yes, if you happen to own an oven that has this feature. It's not exactly common. 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.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    I’ve never had a non-self-cleaning oven.
  - butterfi 6y ago
    Really? I figured most ovens had a self-cleaning option... I did this trick to recondition several cast iron pans and it works great, but be prepared for massive amounts of greasy smoke.
    - onli 6y ago
      Afaik it's just not a thing in europe. Only high end models have it, and even then it's an optional feature that costs extra. Even in a kitchen I rented where just the sink faucet did cost 1000€ the self-cleaning module of the oven was not installed.
petre 6y ago
I wash it with water and scrub with scotch brite. Will try homemade soap.
- chipsa 6y ago
  Do not use homemade soap. Homemade soap is made with lye, which is the entire reason why people said not to use soap, once upon a time. An unreacted lye will start to strip seasoning. Use dish detergent (commercial dish soap). It's made in a different way, so you can't get un-reacted lye.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    If you have unreacted lye in your soap you're going to have more problems than just stripping the seasoning off your pan.
    - chipsa 6y ago
      I mean, if you have a bunch, yeah, you're going to have more issue than just stripping seasoning off. But most of the problem is just the slightest hint excess from making sure the entire volume of oil is saponified. 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.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Homemade X is made with whatever you made it with...
    - chipsa 6y ago
      Homemade soap is soap. The only way to make soap is the saponification process. Which involves lye. The oil used can vary, but a strong alkali is required, and any strong alkali you use is going to do the saponification process on your seasoning. Commercial dish soap can be soap, or it could be detergent. Detergent is made differently, and doesn't necessarily involve lye.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
Cooking anything acidic will strip all of the seasoning right off. I can easily keep a seasoning on my carbon steel woks, but it’ll vanish if I cook one Pad Thai. For my cast iron I can keep it there until I want to cook anything with tomatoes.
hnick 6y ago
> 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. 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.

blueline 6y ago

Totally agree except that onion flavored pancakes can be delicious. Scallion pancake with pork belly is one of my favorite combos :-)

tharkun__ 6y ago
Absolutely correct. There are many usually sweet recipes that are actually great when done savoury instead. I personally like it when the last thing I made in the pan was something that had onion and then I gotta make pancakes, precisely because the first pancake will have that flavor. Then I put chorizo and cheese on it too and call it a day. Next pancake will be 'normal' again anyway. Win-Win!
- ethbr0 6y ago
  I'm a huge fan of savory fried any-cake (e.g. hoecakes, [0]). Just because something is normally made one way is no reason to limit ourselves. 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. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnnycake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnnycake

zelon88 6y ago

I agree on 95% of this post. I think that's part of the allure of Cast Iron. It's a personal thing where people develop their own methods through experience. 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.

smichel17 6y ago
Huh. That's not it at all for me. I like cast iron because: (1) It is extremely durable and can be repaired rather than replaced. (2) It is general purpose, reducing the number of pans I need to own. (3) It is well suited to cooking at low temperatures, which are much more forgiving (I can walk away and write a comment like this and come back to something other than a charred mess). 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.
- CBLT 6y ago
  Have you tried carbon steel? In my opinion it is superior to cast iron in every way, especially durability.

GordonS 6y ago

So I understand correctly, do you mean to wash it after every (most) uses, and apply a little oil after washing? No need to bake in the oven or anything like that?

jasallen 6y ago
If you're trying to add a little more seasoning you will need to bake. You'd do this after a rough cleaning or cooking something watery or acidic. If you're just protecting it from ambient moisture just a teensy coat.
war1025 6y ago
> No need to bake in the oven or anything like that? 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.
OJFord 6y ago
Just wash it like normal, stuff that comes off is charred food etc. aka 'dirt'. The actual polymerised seasoning isn't going to come off with a bit of water and washing up liquid.

GordonS 6y ago

Forgot to ask in my other comment, does all this apply for carbon steel too?

leetcrew 6y ago
general consensus on reddit (and my personal experience) seems to be that seasoning on carbon steel is a bit more delicate than on cast iron, possibly because carbon steel skillets tend to have a much smoother surface. 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
atombender 6y ago
Pretty much, yes: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/06/how-to-season-carbon-steel-pans.html https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/06/how-to-season-carbon-ste...

klyrs 6y ago

> No one wants onion flavored pancakes. Somebody's never had latkes before.

Yetanfou 6y ago

I use only cast iron, always cook on a wood-burning stove. The way I season pans is simple, I just put the thing on a medium fire, dab some canola oil on it, rub it in, wipe it off, repeat this once or twice after which I just use it with enough oil (canola or olive). I clean them by rinsing them while hot with cold water which starts boiling immediately, wipe them with some paper and put them away. As long as they're kept dry they don't need reseasoning. No fancy oils needed, no special rituals, just use them regularly and that's it.

blincoln 6y ago

> You want oil soaked into the metal. 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.

BikiniPrince 6y ago
Yes, this isn’t a mystery. There are lots of coated steel products that use the crudest of coatings that need grinder off. Unless the material is polished to a high shine it will absorb oil.
war1025 6y ago
> Is there solid evidence that this is actually possible, as opposed to creating a layer on top of it? I doubt that's actually what happens, but if you think of it that way, you'll end up with the right result.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  "Soak into" is probably an engineering approximation converted to lay language. What we're really talking about is surface-gap-filling. So yes, "into" at some level of magnification. "Onto" at another.
  - BikiniPrince 6y ago
    Indeed! I was avoiding describing the surfaces at high detail .
ethbr0 6y ago
Yuan, Z., Xiao, J., Wang, C. et al. Preparation of a superamphiphobic surface on a common cast iron substrate. J Coat Technol Res 8, 773 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11998-011-9365-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11998-011-9365-7 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)

neild 6y ago

The main thing I’ve learned that most advice about seasoning pans doesn’t tell you is that how you use the pan to cook matters more than how well seasoned it is. Cast iron is really forgiving of seasoning, you don’t need the perfect job to cook with it. 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.

captainredbeard 6y ago
Keeping an IR thermometer by the stovetop is handy if you're cooking with cast iron. It removes the guess work around things like "Am I going to burn this butter if I drop it in the pan?"
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Putting a drop of water on the pan is a good indicator of temperature. It will either sit there in a small puddle, wander around a bit, or zoom around in a frenzy.
  - lmeyerov 6y ago
    for most medium/high, when an oiled pan, you can see the super faint smoke. for some oiled, even based on the viscosity from shaking the pan. water test is good for learning this point. but water in an oily pan can hurt later so good to learn to do without :) some startups have been experimenting with built-in thermometers, so I can imagine this classic design being different 10yr from now :)

aksss 6y ago

> no one wants onion-flavoured pancakes :/