Yall need the The Food Lab better cooking with science book by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. He has a whole section on proper cleaning and seasoning of a cast iron skillet.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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I had a roommate that did this. Except their reason for not cleaning it was that they thought all that stuff leftover was what is called seasoning. AND they wanted the cast iron seasoning to flavor their dishes.
I tried to gently explain the misconceptions, but they believed their grandma instead of me.
Which is apparently why burritos from old-school eateries taste so good: they don’t wash the griddle, and the secret sauce is the essence of the entrails of generations of pigs and chickens
For those who don't know, you can wash cast iron with modern detergents, and as long as you dry it properly you won't have any problems.
It used to be that dish detergents contained lye that would strip the seasoning off of cast iron cookware.
Yep, which is why of you ever want to strip and re-season cast iron, you use a lye bath with some electrolysis magic. Do that once and you'll see why back in the lye soap days, you want supposed to wash them.
If you use regular dish soap (i.e. dawn), you most certainly can (and should) wash it. However, the trick is that you absolutely must dry it, put a light coat of oil, and then bake it to keep it from rusting. I preheat the oven to 450°F and then turn off the oven, and let the pan sit until it’s cool enough to the touch to put away.
It's easier than this. Wipe/scrub the excess off, then simply put it on the stove for 2-3 minutes and wipe oil onto it.
Saves you some gas and time. So far it's worked perfectly for me for over a year.
This is the way. People make cast iron sound hard to maintain, but I’ve been doing this for a decade or more and it works great
I just cook bacon any time I need to re-season it. Lol.
how do you know when someone abuses animals don't worry they never stop telling you ha ha ha
That pig was already bacon Jerkface. Delicious delicious bacon... okay! You've won this round! But next time!
If it's seasoned you don't have to oil it. Just make sure it's dry.
Depends how well you clean it, and what you cooked.
If you made bacon, sure. Perfect seasoning and water and a sponge won't dry it out.
That's not how many other foods work, though. I almost always put a bit of oil back on it, then heat it up to preserve the pan. I can cook eggs, pancakes, or really anything on it any time with this treatment. It's literally better than any non-stick pan.
I have cooked on a cast iron pan daily for decades at this point. I never oil it. It's fine.
That’s fair. I have a Lodge, and I ground down the inner surface so it’s flat, so I had to re-season it.
~I guess I can probably stop re-seasoning it now. 😅~
Nah, if you are doing properly thin seasoning you really can't overdo it.
You don't necessarily need to do that every time. The thing about cast iron is that even if you actually "ruin" it, you can just redo the seasoning.
So it's fine to be a little lazy about it. The one thing you want to avoid is rust, as you mentioned. I wash mine with a tiny amount of soap involved and most of the time I just dry them off with a paper towel. If I put on a coat of oil, I leave the pan on the induction stove for a bit, with the stove timer on. Easier than the oven.
Only if the seasoning looks like it might need a couple more layers, do I go the oven route.
I just dry and lightly oil mine. I only bake them if they need it.
Personally I usually just clean it with a paper towel, and put it away. Mine is almost exclusively a cornbread pan, though, so I'm mostly cleaning excess oil unless I fucked up and it stuck.
Occasionally I do give it a proper wash like you've said, but not very often.
Yeah just wipe it with a damp paper towel and it’ll be good. People overcomplicating things.
So if you just wiped it out with a paper towel, how many years do you think one could go before getting actually sick? I'll volunteer to be a test subject if I find a cheap cast iron. Apparently I'm supposed to get away from my non stick pans anyways
Most likely if you use it every day and wipe really well the heat would kill anything that would make you sick. The oil will add slowly to the seasoning, but the surface will have some wet oil and carry some strong flavors forward and make your food taste less appealing. It would be the pan equivalent of overused oil in an oil fryer.
If you cooked steak and fish and vegetables the old rancid fish and meat flavors would end up influencing the vegetables in a bad way.
You don't like your cornbread to taste like fish?
Old rancid fish even!
Not a scientist, but most microbes can't live in pure oil or grease. So If you get the food bits out, the oil itself will go rancid and taste awful before becoming actually dangerous.
It's not the microbes themselves but the toxins they release when they die
Tetanus, botulism, Staph. They're not bacteria itself but the leftover when bacteria die. So those toxins can build up on surfaces if not cleaned.
Bacteria that can not grow can not produce anything.
That would require more than a quick wipe to stop from haopening, though.
Without it being alive it should just pass through the body though right? Because any of the stuff in the pan was killed during the cooking process. Itd be hard to cook anything in a pan that's not heated
Poisons don't have to be alive to hurt you.
To tack on, acidic foods break down the finish and create allow the creation of rust. If you skip a few days of cooking on a pan with a pocket of rust filled with unwashed food, you might get something dangerous brewing. But scraping out the pan and cooking frequently, you could probably go the distance.
For additional reading, they can look up regulations on marrying bottles of condiments.
I’m way too lazy to clean my singular pan. There is exactly zero harm in that. Don’t let food rot in it and you’re good. Microbes need water, so you can let a sensible amount of remains just dry.
Well if its getting heated to a high temp it will be fine. Plus the thin layer of oil after wiping with paper towel will polymerise under the heat and just add to the seasoning of the pan. I mean that's pretty much what I do with my steek pan.
I took my cast iron camping and it got left under the kitchen pop-up during a rainstorm, so it's a bit rusty. I need to figure out how to strip and reseason it (and my pie irons 😤). Need to figure out how to season without using an oven (gives migraines) or a gas grill (don't have one)
The oven or grill is just for heat. You could just as easily use a charcoal grill, or even a hole in the ground with a fire in it as long as you don't get it too hot too fast.
Wait, how does an oven give migraines? Legitimately curious
They probably don't have an exhaust vent in their kitchen
Not OP but mine is natural gas and definitely produces trace amounts of noticeable gases when run. It gives me a very mild headache
He needs a CO detector...