I have several cast iron pans of varying vintages and styles. They see a lot of use. And my experience is that the quality of the seasoning just doesn't matter that much. If the pan is hot and there's oil in it, almost nothing sticks even if the seasoning is indifferent. The stuff that does stick (tortillas are terrible for leaving carbonized residue on the pan) will do so no matter how good the seasoning is. It doesn't matter, though, because I just scrub it off and the pan still works fine.
Oh, and a bit of dish soap is fine, too. Doesn't seem to bother the pan any.
There's a whole vaguely macho culture around cast iron and the fiddly rituals for producing the perfect surface, but you can just ignore all that and cook on the things and they're fine.
I have a similar experience with stainless steel pans. We use them for everything (also eggs, which people seem to find especially hard on the internet). After getting used to the pans (especially cooking on the right temperature), I just don't get the obsession people have with non-stick pans and seasoning.
Additionally, there is something else I wonder about: people often seem to be recommended those pans "requiring" seasoning from a health-conscious perspective, but to me it seems like everything that is involved in seasoning could be worse than just using a non-stick Teflon or ceramic pan to begin with. I mean, isn't seasoning basically burning oil and making a layer of burnt stuff at the bottom of your pan? Can't this stuff flake into your food? I can't find much about this on the internet, so maybe I'm wrong, but it just doesn't feel right to me.
I assume it's a similar thing to "non-GMO" being presented as more healthy. The more clearly artificial something is, the worse it's supposed to be for you.
My experience (and habits) exactly. Just use more fat than you think you need, even for greasy foods (especially bacon). Wash with hot water and a brush, and turn upside down to dry or wipe off. Explicit seasoning is a smoky mess, usually best avoided.
One thing that does make a huge difference though, is the surface finish of the cast iron. I had a fancy new pan that was basically unusable compared to some old flea market finds, because it had the raw cast surface, while the old ones had been ground smooth. Ended up taking an angle grinder to it (after which the raw metal was obviously exposed, and it did need seasoning) and the difference is night and day!
I've tried many techniques for seasoning over thirty years of cooking, after inheriting my grandparents' cast iron cookware and purchasing some of my own. It's anecdotal, but I'll share it anyway.
I do it on my pellet stove outside (I used to use the oven, but the smell/smoke is not pleasant in the house). Preheat to 375F. Coat the pan (inside, outside, handle...the whole thing) in a THIN layer of oil. I use rapeseed oil or avocado oil. The point is to use one with a high smoke point. I have also used peanut oil.
Put the pan in upside down for an hour. Remove it, cover with another THIN coat of oil. Back in the oven. Another hour. Remove it, coat it, and back in the oven for a third hour. During the third hour, dice a red onion. When the pan comes out, put it on a burner over medium heat and cook the onions in the same oil you used to season the pan. This will remove any "metallic" flavor the pan had, and will perform some magic on how non-stick the seasoning is. I don't know how or why this works, but it does. Cook the onions until they're basically burned, then discard them.
I do this once a year for all of my pans and the seasoning holds up easily through a year of heavy use.
I wash the pans by hand with no soap (if you deglaze the pan after cooking, this is much easier) and I avoid soaking water in the pan. If I have a stubborn something stuck to the pan, I'll boil some water in the pan for a few minutes, then wash it.
After washing it, I put it on the burner on medium-high heat until all the water evaporates, turn off the heat, then coat the pan with a thin layer of cooking oil, shortening, or lard using a paper towel. Now the pan is ready for next time, and it won't rust in the meantime.
EDIT: I use the same method listed above for my carbon steel cookware as well, and it's just as effective for those.
The onion trick really is amazing! I do that whenever my pans aren’t quite as slick as I’d like. They always end up performing better afterwards. I think maybe the sugar in the onion is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think that a little bit of material that can carbonize and mix with the oil seems to produce a slicker pan. For example, cooking bacon in a fresh pan seems to yield a better result than just lard alone.
Kenji Lopez-Alt (formerly of Serious Eats) believes flaxseed oil results in seasoning that will flake off. I've not heard that allegation from others, but I admit he generally does his homework.
I've experienced this firsthand, and can corroborate Kenji's recommendation against using flaxseed oil.
I drank the flaxseed Kool-aid (courtesy of this article) when I first started purchasing cast iron ~6 years ago. The flaxseed seasoning is incredibly hard, which is great, until its brittleness causes it to flake off. I was constantly losing bits of seasoning nearly every time I used a pan. (my working theory is that thermal expansion/contraction causes parts of the polymerized coating to lose bond with the steel over time).
I finally got sick of dealing with it, going at all my pans with an angle grinder and flap disk to remove the old seasoning and started over using bog standard vegetable oil. I've not had a flaking problem since. I do need to re-season more frequently, but that is easy and quick to do.
BTW a wire wheel would probably clean the old seasoning off faster than a sanding disk. That being said, the sanding disk has the added benefit of giving you a smoother finish on your cast iron, which is nice because most cast iron cookware available in the US is no longer machined on the interior surface. They leave it rough after the sand-forging process.
Gotta be careful with the wire wheel, it's possible to get the surface too smooth and the seasoning won't stick as well. Source: I've stripped and re-seasoned 20+ pans and the one I wire wheeled has never been quite right. People on /r/castiron also advise against it. Even for pans where the sand cast finish was milled smooth from the factory.
I recommend never using any kind of wire wheel, brush or scraper around any kind of food utensils whatsoever. The wire will break and you could ingest a fragment or it could embed in your eye/skin with serious consequences:
The article suggests alternatives such as coil brushes or crumpled aluminum foil instead. Also there are chemical methods.
Wire tools deserve considerable respect and should be used only with protective gloves and eyeware and even skin protection, since spun-off pieces of wire can embed in eyes or bare skin (and you may not notice). Good news: any embedded wire or steel fragment shows up like a lighthouse in an x-ray, making them extremely easy to locate.
So the wire wheel causes this, but not a sanding disc? I trust your experience, but that's very counterintuitive. I've never used either on my cast iron, so I appreciate your feedback.
The lowest effort approach I’ve found to stripping bad seasoning off a pan is to just throw it in the oven on self-clean. But make sure you’ve got the windows open! The results are beautiful but also accompanied by some acrid smoke.
He specifically says that when people complain about their seasoning not working and he asks where they learned to season like that, they usually refer to this article. So I wonder if this article is doing more harm than good.
That was exactly my experience. I tried this method many times, thinking I must have made a mistake each time, but it was always the same result. The seasoning would work beautifully for a short while, and then it would flake.
Luckily, later on I learned a better way - a cooking spray called Baker’s Joy, which is essentially oil impregnated with a little flour. The flour seems to help speed up the seasoning process, so you can get to a well seasoned pan quickly. I usually heat the pan up, either in the oven or on the grill, then spray the Baker’s Joy when it’s still very hot. I make sure the pan is well coated, then I wipe out the excess.
This technique won’t give you a hard shell like the flaxseed oil method does, but it does seem to produce the same results as multiple seasoning sessions in a single pass. I’ve also found that cooking an onion in the pan helps when the seasoning isn’t quite what you want it to be yet. I read once that it’s a traditional method for breaking in a carbon steel wok.
I don’t doubt that painting a layer of congealed linseed oil varnish will produce these results, but they are not necessary. I tried to follow this article’s advice several years ago. It never really worked out for me and ultimately felt like pseudoscience. I have better advice that actually works.
Iron and steel are sponges for oil but only when hot. If you get your pan hot and put lots of oil in it, the pan will be flooded with grease at the micro and macro levels. That’s it: hot pan, lots of oil, wipe out / pour off the excess.
I used to bake a lot in a domestic oven. Baking baguettes needs steam, so I used one of my small cast irons as a steam bath. I would bring the oven up to the hottest temperature with a dry pan inside. When the baguettes went in I would throw a pint of just-boiled water into the skillet to flood the oven with steam.
Do this enough times and your skillet will look like it has been dragged through skillet hell. Dull, dry, and red with rust. All it needed was one good clean, a sand paper scrub to smooth the surface, and one hot oil soak and the pan was slick enough to make an Appalachian grandma happy.
A technique I like to use with questions like this: if you are worried about something happening, think instead about what you would have to do to make the thing happen.
In this case, how much stress would you have to put a 3/8” thick piece of cast iron, that is shaped into a strengthening bowl, warp out of shape?
Fat chance! They are brittle, but they aren’t weak.
I've never found any need to do anything more complicated than frying a pack of bacon, in order to season a new (or newly cleaned) cast-iron pan. shrug
Flaxseed oil is garbage, just use animal fat like your (great great) grandparents did. Cast iron was perfected when people cooked with lard and tallow, not vegetable oils, which are a 20th century invention.
Vegetable oil works ok too, but honestly use that trimmed fat from a beef roast or something, render it to liquid, and then season it the same way you did with vegetable oil and see how it compares.
>vegetable oils, which are a 20th century invention
Sesame oil is a vegetable oil (made from seeds, and primarily polyunsaturated), and it was first cultivated for oil production more than 5000 years ago.
True, and olive oil also dates back that far. The soybean, corn and canola/rapeseed represent the majority of cooking oils used today. They're fairly modern inventions.
Perhaps for cast iron cookware, but this mania for detail isn't unusual, nor is it mainstream in the US. When reading HN we are simply more exposed to a population that self-selects for paying attention to detail in everything as it isn't a trait that is turned on at 9 and off at 5.
Think of it as the American equivalent to the subset of Japanese who really get into selvedge jeans. Or the subset of British who really get into high tea. Or Estonians who really get into saunas.
I just take it as a signal of what a wonderful, fractally rich, diverse world we are truly blessed to share with each other.
I'm no stranger to food nerdery, arguably a food nerd myself, but this particular flavour seems to come from the US only. Googling "how to season cast iron frying pan" seems to link to US website regardless.
Cast iron isn't much more expensive and much easier to maintain long term. Articles like this are vastly over complicating it to feed into some sort of cast iron mythos.
Unlike t-fall you won't damage your cast iron with a fork or metal spatula, and you won't accidentally get it too hot and burn the coating. Short of letting it sit around in water and rust they're virtually indestructible in the kitchen.
I like my heavy modern-non-stick pan (not quite as have as cast iron, but close). Most of the same benefits of even heating, but it's even easier to clean and also it's NBD if I discover that it's been sitting in a sink half full of water all day.
If you have a gas range, try this: put some water in a cast iron pan and boil it. You will see a pattern in the water matching the range's support grill.
The water won't hurt the pan. But you can do the same test with oil.
Put a thin layer of oil with a high smoke point in the pan, and turn the heat up. You will see the same effect, where you can see the support grill pattern in the oil.
Cast iron's strength here is that it holds heat (simply because it is so thick and heavy), not that it distributes heat.
It holds heat, but if you've got something that absorbs it quickly, it's really slow at coming back up to heat. It's a pain really, the only ting I've found it good for is things where you don't want fast heat transfer -- dutch ovens in the actual oven, or pancakes on a griddle. I much prefer 3 ply aluminum core cookware for almost anything.
On the other hand, for nonstick use lately, I've been using carbon steel on induction. That solves the slowness issue, because they're thin enough that they heat through the thickness basically instantly on induction. And I can still be neurotic about the seasoning issue.
Now if I could get 3 ply Al core with a carbon steel inner, that would be something to try.
Cast iron is terrible for even heating unless the heating element is IR hotplate. Induction is not optimal either - too much heat, too localized - not because of technology, but the shitty and cheap engineering of the induction burners.
It's bonuses are heat retention, ability to get red hot and be virtually indestructible. Non stick coating are very sensitive to overheating. CI - don't care. Something carbonized - self cleaning oven cycle and scrape.
Just use Longyau from wok cooking fame. Get it white hot, throw some oil swirl - and you have some fairly non stick surface for the session and have a spackle/putty knife in handy for more sticky proteins. That's it
Maybe this is overcomplicating things.