It's better used as a fucking weapon than a cooking utensil.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Most of the care tips you see on cast iron are just superstition.
It's actually super easy to care for. You just scrub it with some salt and a boar bristle brush, dry it with a linen towel, then store it in a marble sepulchre facing North.
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…why are you not cleaning your cast iron pan?
It's old wisdom from way back when soap was made from lye.
That kind of soap is much harsher and can dissolve the seasoning, which is just a bunch of layers of polymerized oil that protects the metal from rust and gives it a glossy, almost non-stick coating.
Modern dish soap is nowhere near that harsh and is completely safe to use on a seasoned cast iron pan. It's just that your grandparents and great grandparents beat that lesson into their kids and it stuck.
Cast iron is fine to cook on, but I much prefer stainless steel. It's a bit harder to get the results you want, but it's way easier to maintain.
They say high temp stainless basically becomes non stick. I just get stuff sticking then immediately burning and smoking out my kitchen.
Lower your temps. Stainless only sticks like that if you get it too hot.
This but also stop trying to unstick stuff when its not finished cooking yet.
That was one thing i had to learn when moving to stainless, you need to wait for the protein to unstick itself. Which when you're so used to cooking on non-stick seems insane and risky.
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It takes practice and making sure it's at the correct temperature. If I can fry eggs in stainless steel without sticking you can too friend. Follow the instructions on this page to get you started:
https://theskillfulcook.com/how-to-know-when-stainless-steel-pan-is-ready/
Heat up the pan on medium setting and then apply oil, if it smokes it is too hot. And don’t use olive oil, use an oil with a reasonably high smoke point. And you need to use more oil/fat than you’d normally do on other (non-stick) pans.
no, medium-ish temp.
stainless steel has pores that close at the right temp so food wont stick.
you need to practice it on your cooktop yourself to find out what setting. after its heated, drip a big drop of water on it and it should dance around and sizzle. too hot or too cold it will stay where it is in the pan. theres prob a video you can watch to see what the drop of water should look like
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sEaSoNinG
They last forever and don’t contain forever chemicals.
IIRC the forever chemicals are not the coating that stays on the pan. The Teflon coating is inert, the toxic part is the water soluble PFAS they use to apply it that would go away (away meaning everywhere, each and every corner of the planet) while or shortly after manufacturing, or with the first uses.
So if you already own non-sticky pans don't get rid of them, but look for another alternative when you buy a new one tho.
It's not quite inert, a too-hot Teflon pan will release toxic gasses that can kill smaller pets like birds.
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If you consider the lifetime, it's the cheapest type of pan by far.
Also you can clean them stop spreading misinformation pls 😘
If it's too heavy for you there is stainless steel or carbon steel which also last but those aren't as cheap.
Yeah I've been using my mom's cast iron pan since she died like 7 years ago. Barring a level of fuck up I don't think I can manage it should last the lifetime of the person who inherits it from me
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I saw some greentext about some list of caring for castioron/developing and maintaining seasoning. The list was some collection of a bunch of progressively more absurd tips. The comments were:
I own cast iron, and none of these are true.
I own cast iron, and all of these are true.
I own cast iron,, and some of these are true.
The thing is, cast iron cookware is a criminally under researched segment of metallurgy and food science. Like, most of what is known is just oral tradition and folklore. It’s mystical in a sense, we preform these old practices and rituals in an attempt to coax an outcome in to being, not based on rigorous testing or knowledge based conjecture, but on myths and ancestral knowledge.
Like we can draw parallels from other areas of metallurgy to get a rough idea of what is going on but most of the modern research is for industrial uses (not cooking) and not for cast iron specifically because it’s not a super common material in engineering anymore.
Some of these old rituals and practices were developed in specific circumstance that are different from the modern day, and from each other, leading to conflicting ideas and practices as different traditions run In to each other. Some old knowledge is applied incorrectly, like people saying you can’t wash it with soap because that will damage it, which is true in the context of an 1800s homestead where they’d be using lye and fat based soap which would strip away the polymerized oil coating, but most dish soap is surfactant based and won’t strip the seasoning.
This level of mystery is not true. It's just a hunk of iron that gets a polymerizered coating of oil on it. That used to be hard to achieve before we had reliable ovens and cooking oil. Now it's easy.
That's all there is to it.
They've continued to today because some people are paranoid / like to feel special / don't understand things well, so default to perpetuating rules they heard someone say confidently rather than questioning why that rule was created in the first place.
There is actually a lot we don’t really know about the polymerization and how it layers and adheres. Particularly about how certain heating regimes and oil type effect it. There are a handful of papers about it, but there is a lot missing particularly about what effects the resiliency, porosity, and toughness of the layers. Best practice for what oils to use for seasoning, and how to best apply them and get them to form even layers is up in the air.
We understand generally what is happening, but the specifics are poorly understood and not well researched.
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Folks love to harp on about how "iTs So HaRd To CaRe FoR" but honestly Teflon pans (the more common option) are worse
Cast iron:
- be a little careful when washing it
- will last longer than your grandkids
Teflon:
- don't get it too hot
- don't use metal tools
- don't use too much oil
- often not oven-safe
- will last like 10 years at most
Sending this to my wife. How does she bake shit in so bad? Jump her shit
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more expensive?
I once had a girlfriend whose mom bought a 300€ cast iron pan that she was talked into at one of those marketing events. Eastcon is a fucking con.
I have a set of cast-iron I found under an abandoned trailer next to a junkyard. They cost exactly nothing and I got to have nerdy fun restoring them over a weekend afternoon, I have been using them for 20 years.
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For the big stuck on pieces, you use a stainless steel chainmail scrubber. For cast iron pans you can scrub as hard as you can with that and you aren't hurting the pan. Try doing that on your aluminum, Teflon non-stick pan, or your nicely polished stainless steel pan and let me know how that goes (don't do this). For cleaning off oils and grease off cast iron, regular liquid dish soap (like Dawn) works great and is totally okay to use for cleaning cast iron.
For your cast iron, don't use lye based cleaners and don't put your cast iron in the dishwasher.
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I put mine in the dishwasher like maniac. And I don't season it, I just spray pam on it. Works fine, purists are just being weird about it.
There are a lot of myths and legends around cast iron that are due to older circumstances that are no longer applicable. And spray on oil seems like a pretty efficient way to season given that it’ll apply a fairly light and even.
I seen a quote yesterday that I liked and it seems fitting here.
Tradition is not an excuse to not think critically.
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I have one that I only use to make cornbread. Cornbread doesn't make it dirty and cast iron is the only thing that will give you a proper crust on the cornbread.
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IDK anything about cooking really but... being heavier is a big deal. You kinda charge up the pan with stored heat and then when you plonk your steak or whatever on there it's going to sizzle and give you that nice crusty crispified outside.
It's the difference between something that looks like this picture, and the steak your grandma makes.
Yeah i dont wanna bother having to sort through all the misinformation and contradictory advice on cast iron pans at this point. Cuz I'll read someone say "I wash it all the time" and then the next comment will be "I washed mine and it rusted instantly"
I just use carbon steel and it treats me right.
I mean, carbon steel is basically the same thing in terms of how you care for it.
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