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Clean it, don't clean it, oil it, salt it, water it, "season it", season it by not cleaning it so your french toast gets all that good hamburger flavor from the night before...
I've read so many different ways to treat cast iron that at this point I'm convinced that it's all just superstition.
A lot of it kinda is. Sure there might be some optimal option. But its a fucking frying pan. It can manage being mishandled a bit too. Just don't drop it as you might damage your floor after breaking your feet.
I put a little water in it, turn the burner on, and scrape it with a spatula as the water boils. Rinse out and paper towel dry. Add a little oil if it needs it, heat again, and wipe off the excess.
I wash mine in holy water, then dust it with volcanic ash from the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, and wipe it down with a felted angora cloth, just like my mother taught me.
I'm noticing a severe lack of chants and prayers in your routine. And where's the incense?
Noobie mistake, you need to say you learned it from your nonna
I also have performative masturbation rituals
Scrubbing under running hot water has worked fine for me. I occasionally use boiling water if there is grease that doesn't want to move.
I scrub mine with a Scrub Daddy in a nearby waterfall, then dry it by tying it to the roof of my car and driving around for a bit. Haven't had any issues yet!
I scrape the crud off while it's still hot and then rinse it with dish soap and water. Never had an issue.
NO. NO MORE INSTRUCTIONS.
I’m cleaning it with an industrial angle grinder, seasoning it with crushed up dandelions, then storing it under my pillow just like my couples therapist taught me!
That's all fine but if you do this over long weekends then you don't deserve cast iron.
Leave it outside for 2 years, use acid and scrubbing to get the rust off, reseason. Good as new!
Why would you wait two years when you can just melt it down in a crucible and re-cast it after every use?
Why not just do your cooking directly in the crucible at that point? I heard it's great for pizza
Yup, just go with stainless steel. I wouldn't recommend teflon coated pans anymore, because it's literally poison.
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.
Why is this answer always so far down in the thread, right below all the nonsense and superstition that perpetuate the "cast iron is really complicated to maintain!"?
Soap and water is all you need, be sure to thoroughly dry the surface. If you get rust spots, just polish them off with a cast-iron cleaning sponge or some steel wool. Re-oil as necessary. Do not put in the dishwasher.
That's it. Not sure why the message gets so muddled with other methods involving stripping and reseasoning and baking and such... It's not required.
Any pathogens would be cooked anyway.
The toxic stuff is what bacteria leave behind, and you can't cook that out.
But more likely to ingest benzopyrene which can be carcinogenic
Honestly, depending on the specifics here, not the worst. If they're using an oil that will polymerize, then as they oil/heat/cool cycle it, the seasoning will further develop over time, as long as they're somewhat scraping off remnants of their cooking as they finish, leaving it as clean as it can be without actually washing it, and then heat cycling it to sanitize any bacteria that might be there, I don't really see a problem with it....
It's not exactly up to modern hygienic standards, or social standards.... And I'm pretty sure if any restaurant or food joint did the same they would get shut down by the health inspector before long.... But you do you buddy.
For anyone not in the know, the thing with cast iron and cleaning is no longer a problem. Clean your cast iron. When cast iron was just about the only cookware, soaps included lye. Lye will erode the non-stick "seasoning" on cast iron. Modern soaps do not contain lye, so go ham.
Cleaning, however, introduces water.... And water causes iron to rust, so it is generally advisable to clean your cast iron cookware, then immediately heat it up past the boiling point for water, to vaporize any liquid water and carry it off the surface of the iron. Once past that temperature, let the cookware cool, then treat it with a thin layer of oil. This will protect the surface from atmospheric moisture and allow the cookware to work over much longer periods of time without needing to be "re-seasoned" (which is removing the layers of polymerized oil on the cast iron, and then re-applying it using a slow method of oiling, then heating the cookware, allowing it to cool, oiling then heating again)...
Don't be afraid of cast iron, it needs a little more attention than other cookware, but it's a joy to actually cook with.
I've got a ceramic and it has all the advantages of cast iron without the disadvantages.
My ceramic pan isn't even close on nonstick properties, it can cook eggs but needs more oil than cast iron. My smithey cast iron is king, so smooth the eggs slide around by default.
Yeah I feel like people who say that about ceramic haven't cooked on well-seasoned cast iron. Both of my cast iron pans are nearly as nonstick as Teflon, and eggs slide around like you said. Cooking runny-yolked eggs on my ceramic is a pain without an egregious amount of oil though.
I cleaned a cast iron pan over the weekend. "Oven cleaner" the voices on YouTube said. In reality I needed an angle grinder and it took me the better part of 3 hours to do. My pan had some kind of matt black factory "seasoning" that was definitely not just oil and it took that long to chip it all off. Anyway pan is back in action now.
As an addendum I think the "seasoning" was some kind of matt black enamel layer on the inside of the pan. I wouldn't have touched it but even in regular use flakes detached and I had about 6 divots in the pan because of it. Oven cleaner did nothing to remove this layer so I used by angle grinder and a sanding attachment. It was painfully slow (my grinder is cordless and needs recharging) but I cleaned it eventually. Once I was down to bare metal I cleaned it and seasoned it with a few layers of oil. I think it will be far easier to clean from now on. The outside of the pan and bottom are still coated in whatever the inside was when I bought it.
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.
Just leave it on the stove on maximum heat for one hour after each use, then chip off the carbonized chunks of asphalt that you've just created. 100% sterilized, no washing required, and smells just like your big bad diesel pickup exhaust.
Afer work, I once made dinner for my housemates. After the meal, one of the housemates was like: "if you cooked, you gotta wash the dishes!" ok, so I washed the dishes. After the dishes, the housemate was like: "If you used the cast-iron pan, you have to 'season' it with oil!" and I was like: wtf I worked all day, I cooked, I did the dishes, now I have to cook again just to make the pan happy?!? So I never used a cast-iron pan again.
“if you cooked, you gotta wash the dishes!”
I'm sorry, what? That's how you ensure that nobody ever cooks for you again. If you cooked for you and your housemates, everyone else who ate your food has to wash the dishes, excluding whoever bought the food. What fucking backwards culture did this guy grow up in?
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.
