The obsession with cast iron like it is some kind of magic ritual is honestly really weird. After you cook with it, wash it with water and dry it with some paper towels, that’s it, no need to make it more complicated than it really is.
If things are sticking to your pan, use more oil in your pan; with enough oil, you can cook on a rock and make it nonstick.
Just wash it with dish soap like everything else, use a soft scrubber like everything else.
If you have an actual polymer layer, it won’t be harmed.
Dry it off, throw it on the burner. Get it hot, give it a touch of oil, and store it.
The reverence and fear of cast iron cooking pots and pans is stupid on both sides. People have been using cast iron under every condition from the big fire place in a castle’s kitchen to a fire pit in a peasant’s hovel to open fires outdoors to Michelin Star restaurants in Paris and London. And they cooked EVERYTHING in it because it’s what they had and all they had. There is no mystery to seasoning and care of cast iron. Just like there is little to fear from cooking with it.
Those that do worship in the church of cast iron-- just cook in it. There is nothing sacrosanct about it. If your Great Grandmother didn’t worry about it, why should you? Any damage you can do it can be repaired quickly and easily. So get over yourselves.
And those that fear cast iron cookery, get over it…They are often the same ones that are fearful of micro plastics getting ingested and yet have no care or concern while cooking with plastic cutting boards and utensils in plastic coated cookware.
The mystery is that iron will rust if wet. The care instructions are “don’t leave it wet for a long time”.
Even if it does rust accidentally, can’t you just scrape or buff out the rust and then reseal/reseason it again and it’s fine?
Unless there is a literal hole rusted through it, grab some sand paper and sand the rust off of it. It’s just iron. I’ve done it many times to rescue an old skillet or Dutch Oven.
Short of taking a sledgehammer to it, it’s nigh on impossible to destroy cast iron cooking pans.
Yeah, but it’s a lot faster to dry it after use/cleaning.
Okay but this one time I did exactly that thing I’m not supposed to and exactly what was expected happened so obviously cast iron bad?
Once my colleague’s dad threw gasoline on a fire and got 3rd degree burns, so oxygen is bad.
So much gatekeeping in anything creative. Music, cooking, art…. If you change one little thing it’s no longer the Thing, it’s something else, and it’s not what chef/band/artist/or grandma made, even though it’s a popular variant of the same Thing called the same thing somewhere else. Cast iron falls into the same trap. Such harsh judgement on use and care. It’s a f’n pan, not the last remaining example of a vintage Ferrari. Get over it.
I have no fear of cooking with it, I just want my cookware to be minimally fussy and not require special treatment. If the $10 Walmart skillet can be thrown in the dishwasher and the $100 cast iron one requires me to baby it or it’ll rust, I’ll go with the cheap skillet every day.
Look at Ol’ Diamond Jim over there with his $100 skillets!
I got 2 cast iron frying pans, a 6qt dutch oven, a 2 burner flat iron, and one cast iron 2qt kettle. I ain’t got $50 into the whole lot of them. Vintage cast iron is cheap because it will last for multiple generations and there is lots of it floating around to be had on the cheap.
And if you ain’t got 5 minutes to clean a cast iron frying pan, then no $10 nuclear glow int the dark Walmart special is going to do any better in your care. I highly recommend you find someone to cook for you. Before you give yourself food poisoning.
God I wish, food prep is one of my least favorite things to do lol.
Teflon also should not go in the dishwasher. Anything with exposed aluminum should not go in the dishwasher. Even stainless steel cookware recommends against dishwasher
Only because some Stainless cookware uses Aluminium rivets for attaching the handle.
I put pretty much all of my stainless steel stuff in the dishwasher and it’s fine
Tbf the cast iron i’m cooking out of was found as scrap in the woods. I wash with soap regularly, and use normal oil/butter qty’s. I just don’t dishwasher it, not that i have a dish!asher XD. I’ve seasoned it one single time which is right after i found it. It’s been a year.
You might want to check that for lead. People who cast their own bullets have been known to melt lead in cast iron.
Ehhh… I’ve taken the 100LL avgas shower. At this point, a year of cooking later, the damage is done ig. Ill grab a test kit tho.
You have those prices reversed though. My cast iron collection, as noted further down, cost less in total than my one really good stainless steel pan, and guess where some of that cast iron was purchased? For $10 at Walmart, LOL. And at thrift stores and Target.
I bet I’d get this joke if I had ever used a dishwasher in my life
That just gets me excited to start a fresh new seasoning. Starting from bare metal is a good feeling
Well that’s blatantly what they’re doing, isn’t it. Must have found a shitty pan or something.
¯\(ツ)/¯ wouldn’t kill it. Just scrub any flakes off and re-season. The abuse they can take is almost unreasonable.
It’s insane to me that people don’t wash them and call it seasoning.
It’s apparently a different story when someone seasons their underwear.
We do wash them, I clean mine by boiling water in them, scraping any stubborn bits with a wooden spatula, rinsing it out under running water and wiping them down with a clean towel and heating the pan again to evaporate any remaining water. No microbials will survive being boiled and then heated again, anything stuck to the pan dissolves away in boiling water and a clean towel will wipe away anything else. After that I add a few drops of oil and wipe down the still hot surface with the thinnest possible coating of oil.
Seasoning for cast iron doesn’t mean holding onto previous flavors. It definitely shouldn’t taste like last night’s dinner. Seasoning in the context of cast iron is the build up of thin layers of polymerized oils from heating them up in a clean pan that forms a durable protective finish that is incredibly non-stick.
So more accurately parallel your underwear example how cast iron is cleaned, if you took your underwear, boiled the hell out of them, used something to give them a scrub, rinsed them out well and then heat dried them.
Your method sounds great and I’m sure it works well, but I just want to make sure you know that modern dish soap won’t damage your seasoning at all.
I fully get that modern dishsoap isn’t caustic enough to truly strip the seasoning, but I have noticed it does very slightly affect the seasoning.
For 99.9% of the time it’s not necessary to use dishsoap and if something is really burnt on, then I’ll tend to go with something a bit more abrasive like a green scrubby pad or maybe steel wool or a paste of baking soda and water.
It’s the same thing I do for my carbon steel wok too, boil water, rinse well, dry with heat and reapply oil to the reheated surface.
I hate cast iron, but ‘seasoning’ is just a misnomer that was adopted to refer to the oils polymerizing on the pan. The oil (usually something like canola) is literally bonded to the metal.
Not cleaning a cast iron pan is gross, fats left in the pan will go rancid.
The only soap you can’t use is lye based as that will strip the seasoning off.
Whatsa matter? You don’t like your pancakes to taste like last nights steak?
It still gets them to reply, every time.
Lol I like cast iron cookware, but you do whatever with what’s yours as long as you leave mine alone.
As long as you don’t leave it sitting in water you’ll be fine.
I wash with soap and add a little oil every cook. Works great.
Perfect ☺️
Unseasonably mad
I am in flavor of this.
You… hate cast iron? Of all things people could hate, cast iron is the choice here. Mmaight.
Cast iron has a weird cult following. It’s like the jahovas witnesses of cookware
I don’t like using it because of the maintenance and manual cleaning, but I do use it because of the iron rich food it makes, and the longevity of the cookware.
Also I heard Teflon is literally freaking poison for you, like one of the worst things to consume. And pots and pans always tend to flake Teflon after a while, from general use. So we got rid of everything Teflon.
I don’t know how true it is but it feels good. Doing some manual labor isn’t a bad thing either.
Ugh they’re so gross.
I threw my cast iron away about a year ago. Just couldn’t get the hang of it, probably a me problem. Moved to a stainless steel, and my goodness, the crust I get on meats is unparalleled.
I wash my cast iron with normal dish soap and steel wool, and if I’m too lazy, I put it in the dishwasher. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I don’t “season” it. It’s a pan, no more, no less. The main advantage is that you don’t need to worry about scratching the shit out of it.
Needs a tiny little bit more fat than a non-stick if you want to make an omelette.
Same here, though i don’t use steel wool and i do season it every now and then
The pan handles it like a champI know you’re a troll but the idea of cooking on a dish soap infused cast iron is filthy lol
I’m not a troll. But the amount of magical thinking around cast iron amuses me to no end.
“dish soap infused” lol. Tell me, are your kitchen knives “infused” with soap, too?
Yeah he’s a panoisseur. I wash mine with soap too lol. But I use the lemon scented shit so my soap infused food is always citrusy fresh.
Lol I’m not religious about it or anything, but it’s porous unlike other cooking materials, so yeah, I don’t put soap on it
What are your cutting boards made of?
I also try not to use much if any soap there too, because, porous wood
To each their own my friend, you do you. Not trying to get into a fued over soap preferences lol
Gets angry over the fact that you have a dishwasher
Actually not my photo but I finally have a dishwasher after like 25 years of living with my SO.
The whole cast iron thing is such a cult. Always makes me laugh when someone tries to preach it to me, how it’s great, then there’s all this stuff you need to do that you normally wouldn’t, oh right you can’t do this and you need to do this and yes it’s heavy as all hell but that’s actually a good thing
lol
I’m not a fan boy, I actually resisted getting one for nearly a year before one was gifted to me. There are a couple perks and draw backs I’ve learned. Pros: heating is pretty even, cleaning is actually way easier (IMO), and I can use metal on it. Cons: needs to be seasoned, takes longer to heat, some people get the ick from seeing rust.
TBH it’s pretty much the only pan I use now (cause I find cleaning easier and I’m lazy AF), but people should use whatever suits them.
If you’re drying it properly you really shouldn’t be getting any rust. I sometimes get a bit on the handle loop but that’s it.
I personally don’t get rust but some people do and they can dislike that. Usually I’ll put the stove on low and help it evaporate to avoid rust. Its also really only a concern if (lye free) soap is used because otherwise the seasoning prevents it pretty well
Yeah I got one for free because a family member saw rust and wanted to throw it out.
Scrub, oil, and we’re good to go.
Rust (clean) is actually perfectly safe to eat! And can add extra iron content to your diet if necessary! https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/12540
(Most sources assume tainted rust, or large quantities, but small amounts of “clean” rust are fine, just don’t over eat iron quantities)
People make this shole “cast iron cult” thing out to be a much bigger thing than it actually is. Cast iron is a durable material and has been used as a tool for cooking in the harshest of conditions for centuries, but to be able to use it in those harsh conditions it needs to be properly taken care of just like any tool.
The reason people seem so neurotic over taking care of cast iron is that cast iron cookware is an investment. Year after year a cast iron pan (and this applies to carbon steel pans too) becomes better and better the more the thin layers of oil polymerization into the seasoning. A fresh off the line Lodge dutch oven doesn’t have the years of layer after layer after layer of polymerized oil on it as the same mode Lodge dutch oven my grandmother used when back she was half my age.
Cast iron is easy to take care of, there’s nothing special about how to take care of it, but the ways to take care of it are specific because of the nature of the metal used. Hell I spend less time cleaning my cast iron pans and carbon steel wok than I do cleaning any other pan type.
Meanwhile, I’m like “huh, maybe you should learn how to cook, but you do your stuff, that’s your own business”.
You son of a-
