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.
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
I put pretty much all of my stainless steel stuff in the dishwasher and it’s fine
Only because some Stainless cookware uses Aluminium rivets for attaching the handle.
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.
First, everyone (not you because you don’t like it) should buy their cast iron at the hardware store, should be ~ $30. It’ll last pretty much forever so that $30 over a lifetime is not much.
If you don’t cook a starch or aromatic in it, just wipe it out and let it get super hot.
If you do cook starch in it, hand wash it with soap, just let it get over 212 degrees on the stove to dry it.
If you want to throw it in the dishwasher, just pull it out at the end of the cycle and throw it on the stove > 212 degrees to dry. A well seasoned pan is generally so easy to clean, this would be a waste of your time, but it won’t kill anyone.
If you want to subscribe to the no soap, scrub off the cooked starches with water and a non scratch scouring pad, re-coat in a fine layer of oil and let it smoke off under high heat. I really don’t bother and just use whatever it takes to get it clean easily.
If the seasoning polymer you get from burning off oil gets cruddy after 6-8 months, re-season.
If you accidentally get a little rust on it, soak it in vinegar until the rust dissapears, scrub the spot with a 3m pad until the spot is clean and re-season.
You can get a rusty ass pan from a yard sale, soak it in vinegar for a day, scrub it down and re-season it. It’ll come out like new.
If over the years, the seasoned surface starts to look super cruddy, soak it in sodium hydroxide until the polymer disolves, then reseason.
Yeah, they’re harder than throwing it in the dishwasher, But they’re wasteless, cheap, pleasant to cook on and give great results.
I keep a teflon pan and a couple different cast iron around. Even found a glass top lid that fits.
Lol this response proves OP’s point. “Bro it’s so easy bro just soak in sodium hydroxide and fill your house with smoking oil it’s easy dude just measure how much starch is in ur meal dude lol ez”
These are instructions for those who are picky about stuff.
Just cook in it. After cooking, wipe it out. If its bad, when pre-heating I pull it off to put some water and rub with a pad with minimal soap, rinse that off, and back on the hob. Wow 15s of work before cooking. The horror.
The instructions rumba gave were “if you absolutely fuck up, here are easy ways to fix that so you don’t have to buy a new one”
Yup I usually just dry scrub with a little chainmail scrubber to get all the bits off with. Then I wipe down with a little veg oil and it’s ready for next time.
I do nothing to my cast iron, it’s rusty and shit, it’s fine.
LOL at cherrypicking something I said to do instead of throwing the pan away
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.
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.
Nazgûl screeches intensify
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.
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.
Just FYI, you do wash cast iron, you just don’t use detergents on it. One common method is to dump a handful of salt and a tiny splash of water into the pan and start scrubbing. You can use a gentle dish soap, but I’d avoid using the dishwasher, because those detergents will be a lot stronger and will actually ruin the seasoning (as well as linger on the surface and end up in your food, which is also bad).
Modern soaps/detergents don’t contain lye, which is what ruins the seasoning. It’s the humid drying of a dishwasher that causes it to rust. Nothing to with the detergent.
Dawn has lye, that’s why it works so well
As a mild ph adjuster, you would have to soak your cast iron in Dawn (platinum only) for hours, which would ruin your seasoning no matter the detergent used.
Someone doesn’t know Sodium Hydroxide is Lye
I do, the lye is not to aid in cleaning and it doesn’t have enough to ruin a seasoning.
There’s a difference between knowing something is in it, and why it is in it and what it can do.
Soda has caustic and corrosive ingredients, it doesn’t mean it’s going to dissolve your intestines lmfao.
“The caustic ingredient in a soap is not to aid in cleaning” You, that’s you, demonstrating a single digit IQ.
I use a little dawn on mine now and then and it’s still basically like glass. Just put a little oil on it afterwards. Never the dishwasher though omg
Ice in the hot pan also works. Paper towel to wipe out, voila!
Detergents are basic because that works wonders on greasy stuff. When oil polymerises it won’t be susceptible to basic substances anymore but will react to acids. (Unlike acid and oils which don’t really react with each other – think vinaigrette separating in the fridge.)
Washing a cast iron pan with detergent will clean it from unpolymerised oil.
Cooking e.g. tomato based sauces in your cast iron pan will strip it of the polymerised coating (might impart flavour too).
Cleaning kitchen tiles near your stove is sometimes easier with acidic cleaning solutions as well. Just be careful with the caulking which will brittle over time from using acids.
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.
I just wash it as normal, you just need to re-fry/season it once in in 3-5 months or so. People that don’t wash it usually let it become rusted and dirty as well.
Shouldn’t need to reseason it if you are just using dish detergent like Dawn.
I don’t really think about looking for special detergent without lye when buying (dunno why people say that dish detergent in general doesn’t contain it anymore), re-frying it once in a while makes the surface more smooth.
What do you mean by refrying?
I notice it get smother over time the more I use it.
The process where you wash it as clean as possible then apply oil and put into oven.
So another way of saying reseasoning.
I haven’t had to do that since I switched to a less abrasive sponge. The green Scotch brand ones tended to take off some of the seasoning but the blue ones only take off the food.
Whatsa matter? You don’t like your pancakes to taste like last nights steak?
It still gets them to reply, every time.
lol I got seasoned by 101 men at an airbnb and cried
Bukowski
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.
I mean it’s a lump of iron it still won’t be harmed you may just need to scrape some rust off and reseason.
Well, yes, but let’s not be intentionally obtuse eh?
“Harm” in this case refers to the seasoning (polymer layer), which takes time and effort to repair if it’s significantly damaged.
In the same way that scratching a wood floor is harming it (you can just resurface it), or denting your drywall is harm (you can just repair it).
¯\(ツ)/¯ wouldn’t kill it. Just scrub any flakes off and re-season. The abuse they can take is almost unreasonable.
You could leave it outside in the dirt for 5 years and still just give it a lye bath then reseason it to work like new
Preach!
So, this is somewhat of an irksome idea to me. My stainless steel pans would also be just fine buried in dirt for years, and you could just scrub them with heavy steel wool and or toss them in your dishwasher with no problem. Likely the same for ceramic. This isn’t the flex that most cast iron folks think it is. Note that I have a couple very nice cast iron pans that I love, but they certainly are more of a pain to use. I’ve never cracked a steel pan, but I have tried to rinse a cast too quickly and it was gone for good.
I’ve seen a video where someone did just this. Blew my freaking mind.
You… hate cast iron? Of all things people could hate, cast iron is the choice here. Mmaight.
Maybe a cast iron skillet killed his family.
Cast iron skillets don’t kill people, people kill people.
It’s not a cast iron skillet problem, it’s a mental health problem.
Cast iron skillets sure do make it easier though.
Cast iron has a weird cult following. It’s like the jahovas witnesses of cookware
Oh no people like something, better start calling it a cult so can we can get views.
Social media is such shit.
I used to think so, then I just started using them on the reg and it turns out to be super easy.
It’s just a pan.
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.
Girl I’m with you. It feels like they’re never really clean!
Exactly. It feels like they just ooze dirty oil no matter how much you wipe them.
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.
Yeah, soap doesn’t hurt a fucking thing, If I just cooked with a seed oil or bacon or something I’d be inclined just to let it burn off, But if I cooked noodles or pasta or garlic or anything fragrant on there, I’d soap and scrub the piss out of it. I just make sure to throw it back on the fire and get it past 212 if it’s been wet.
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
Unseasonably mad
I am in flavor of this.
I use the washer and then let it sit wet over night to bring out its natural paprika seasoning.
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 ☺️
I leave mine sitting in water all the time. It still works.
As long as you don’t scrape off the protective layer and then leave it in water.
even putting it on the top rack, instead of the bottom where the pots go. Masterfull attention to detail in trolling.
And turning it away from the water jets
Lol I like cast iron cookware, but you do whatever with what’s yours as long as you leave mine alone.
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.
Seasoning is a polymer, which is known for its strong resistance. It is unlikely to breakdown just with one dishwasher wash.
The seasoned surface is hydrophobic and highly attractive to oils and fats used for cooking (oleophilic).
The protective layer itself is not very susceptible to soaps, and many users do briefly use detergents and soaps.[28]
Unless you are dish washing it everyday and refuse to dry/reseason it, you will be fine.
However, cast iron is very prone to rust, and the protective layer may have pinholes, so soaking for long periods is contraindicated as the layer may start to flake off.
This aligns with how I care for mine. Scrub it with a chainmail scrubber, Wash it with soap / watwr, then rinse dry over flame and then drizzle a but of oil and rub with a paper towel.
I have no reverence for my cast iron besides avoiding letting it sit wet for a long time.
Carbon steel > cast iron. Lighter, basically the same heat properties, and you don’t get peer pressured into unnecessarily babying a lump of solid metal.
Seriously no reason to dote on either of them so much. Only real care you need to take is that they can rust, so don’t leave them wet. And don’t needlessly scrub them with chain mail or angle grinders, or you might need to take a few minutes fixing them with cooking oil and the oven.
Does cast iron really take babying? I have a 12" cast iron skillet that’s pretty much the only pan I use, and I just scrub it with steel wool, get it hot again, then throw in some avocado oil. It takes like 60 seconds of work
No, it doesn’t. But people think it does and will get really vocal about it if you, god forbid, get it super gross and need to rinse it out with some soap and water.
That’s why I specified that it was peer pressure, not necessity. :)
No, it doesn’t. I don’t even bother coating mine with oil, just a scrub with hot water and let it dry.
Also don’t temp shock them, they can warp
Ah, true. That one’s become so ingrained for cooking in general that I don’t really think about it. Putpan on low/medium heat, toss in a bit of oil and let the heat get even then swirl the oil. Adjust heat to desired level and cook.
I also mean when cleaning, don’t go from hot to under the sink stream
Oh God, do people do that? Shouldn’t do that with any pan.
Toss a cup of water in the pan to deglaze it and scrape any crap up with your cooking tool. Dump the water in the sink and use some paper towels to wipe out any loose stuff.
This might be enough to clean it, but if not once it’s cool clean as appropriate. If it’s carbon or cast iron, reheat to cook off any water and wipe with a drop of oil you bring to smoking.
Inevitably leave on the stove until you need to use it next instead of putting it away properly.
I end up reseasoning mine every couple of years, inevitably somebody leaves it in the sink for a bit trying to soak off some burnt on stuff. It’s really no big deal.
Babying it is pretty new and somewhat cultish behaviour, my grandfather just used it and washed as normal, the only babying it needs is a huge temperature differences can break it. Stainless steel and high carbon steel pans are better.
Carbon steel has the heat storage of cast iron but transfers it fast like aluminum. I thought a cast iron seared steak was great until I used carbon steel and omg is it so much better.
