What I know about cleaning and seasoning cast-iron skillets
americastestkitchen.com
americastestkitchen.com
A blow-torch works just great too, just the kind you'd use for a creme brulee to carbonize the stuck stuff (usually cheese for me) and scrape it off.
My point being that, as with any tool, there are practices that will limit the lifetime of the tool and eventually render it unfit for its intended purpose. Learning about the best practices for using a tool can help avoid that fate.
Perhaps a lot is implicit in my "within reason" that some people willfully violate.
People who don't cook with plenty of fat, they have problems.
Some users claim flaxseed oil is the ideal oil for seasoning cast iron, as it is a drying oil w/ a high smoke point. https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/5820-the-ultimate-w... Others claim the "drying oil" is an incorrect theory, and that the polymerized oil from a drying oil is a coating that would flake off, rather than the desired bonding with the cast iron.
100% Tung oil, and (not boiled) linseed oil are the ones I'm aware of.
I have no information using them on cast iron.
There are a couple other drying oils, but my understanding is that they're more used in oil painting than wood finishing [0].
Also note that modern boiled linseed oil is not the same as the historic product, which as I understand it, was made by boiling linseed oil with white lead. The modern stuff is partially polymerized by heating it in the absence of oxygen.
Disclaimer: I am not a chemist or finish chemistry expert. I'm just a woodworker who sometimes reads about this stuff. Bob Flexner is an excellent author for anybody interested in further reading.
Matfer Bourgeat and De Buyer both recommend frying up a batch of potato peels in plenty of oil and too much salt, until the peels are very dark. Doesn't matter which kind of oil, salt or potatoes. Move them around and scrub them on the pan with your spatula while frying. When done, clean the pan with hot water.
Then just use the pan. The only things you really shouldn't do are soaking it or putting it in the dishwasher. Simmering acidic foods like tomato sauce is not great, but also not the end of the world.
The biggest contributing factor to make food not stick is to properly preheat the pan and not be afraid of oil/butter.
Yep, even a standard stainless steel pan will not stick to much if you get it up to temp beforehand and use some fat.
I also have a De Buyer carbon-steel pan, which I tried to season the same way; total failure. I had to strip off the failed seasoning. I now just use it with fat, clean it with hot water and detergent, and dry it carefully. All is good.
I seasoned the pan exactly as recommended: Very clean pan, stripped of previous seasoning, super thin layers of oil, barely visible on the surface, heat for 1 hour, cool for 1 hour, then repeat oil and heat/cool. And I used high-quality fresh flaxseed oil, not some old oxidized stuff.
It's a complete waste of time, when frying up some potato peels takes ~15 minutes and gives a sturdier result. It may not be as pretty or uniform, but it works, and how cast iron/carbon steel pans are prepared in every professional kitchen I know of. They don't have time to faff about, seasoning pans doesn't pay the bills. Cooking does.
The other myth is that the pebbly surface is non-stick. I used to work at a casting plant, that's the natural finish from sandcasting. That doesn't mean it's functional. Sanding down the casting surface to a smooth working surface takes less than an hour and lasts a lifetime.
Heating while you do it makes a convection pattern that hinders the process. Air drying for a few days between coats works better but, again, traditional seasoning by regularly oiling (using) the pan is more trad for iron / steel.
For oak though, drying oils that produce a polymerised surface make a fantastic finish. Add thistle oil, sunflower oil and soya oil to your flaxseed (linseed) oil, or just buy this:
In my experience even the inside bottom will at times rust in places. Likely where the seasoning broke or was tore through in scraping.
We did an initial oil (sunflower or rapeseed) or two, either on the flame or more likely in the oven, and my partner cooks with a lot of oil. No expert at all so maybe we have just been lucky so far, but it works.
If you can stay on top of it, you can usually just wipe it down with oil cloth while it's hot, and presto, like new.
If you run it too hot and dry and start burning something, and let it sit and cool...get the hammer and chisel.
I usually don't preseason my pans, as just cooking will take care of it over time. I do however take an angle grinder to the inside to get it glassy when new. Much easier to cook eggs on than that sandpaper Lodge gives you.
Modern conveniences such as a dishwasher coupled with a focus on healthy eating (less fat) result in poorly taken care of cast iron pans.
Dishwashing soap these days are also a lot more efficient than they use to be. More and better surfactants eat away at any pantina that develops.
Yes you can drop a cast iron and nothing will happen to it. But to get eggs not to stick to it takes a bit of upkeep.
putting cast iron in the dishwasher seems insane to me though.
Please don't put your pans in the dishwasher, not matter what they're made of.
Why shouldn't I?
Dishwasher soap is a whole different story. It contains abrasives, among other things.
Cleaning with water and not-too-abrasive tool plus initial and periodic long heating with oil aren't complicated, they are just different from the convenient methods applied for more modern cookware.
It turns out he takes his cast iron abuse to a new level: as soon as he's done with it and it's cooled, he puts it away, not even scraping food into the garbage. When he needs it again, he just cranks up the heat until it's billowing smoke, at which point he scrapes the char away from it.
I can't get behind that approach, but knowing my friend, I have no doubt that he's been doing that for two decades or more.
"The repeated reheating of cooking oil changes its composition and releases acrolein, which is a toxic and potentially carcinogenic chemical." https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324806
Other links.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39767-1
https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma...
> First of all, cooking with vegetable oil in the home (frying or sautéing) presents very little risk as the oil is typically used only once and heated for a short period of time (often less than 10 min). It is also possible to control the temperature of the oil, which should not exceed 190°C (374°F) and is best heated to 180°C (356°F) or lower. The oil should also not be heated at or above the oil’s smoke point.
Then it explains that the actual risk is from frequently consuming deep fried meals produced commercially.
Basically everything that comes out of a pan or fryer and is even slightly darker than "basically raw" will have some carcinogenic compounds. Frying any biomatter will create some measurable quantity of carcinogens, depending on the temperature and composition. First you will get the likes of Acrylamide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (e.g. Furan), Amines. In the presence of salt, spices, certain oils you can get even nastier stuff like Dioxines. And if you heat it even further, getting a few black spots, you are left with basic carbon. Even that isn't harmless, carbon modifications that you will produce in some minute quantity, like nanotubes and fullerenes, are carcinogenic.
Denaturing hydrocarbons like in cooking will inevitably produce some of the above compounds, there is no way around it. You can try to avoid producing some of them by carefully steering conditions in a way that reduces some of the above compounds. But usually that increases the risk of other ones being produced. You can also undercook everything, but then you'll be left with unsafe food because of the bacterial risk.
All of the above are carcinogenic in (comparatively) huge quantities. Usually "in mice". The link to cancers caused by preparation of food is vague at best, totally speculative at worst. I don't worry about it, and neither should you.
If you really want to learn about risky foodstuff, read up about cyanide in almonds and other fruits with a stone (people even eat that stuff "for health reasons"..., e.g. https://www.webmd.com/cancer/cancer-apricot-seeds ), coumarin (basically an anticoagulant, in higher doses rat poison) in cinnamon, tonka beans and woodruff, and the funny flourinated compounds you get from overheated PTFE-coated cookware (the presence of acid lowers the "fun" temperature but at least might prevent production of gaseous hydroflouric acid). There, the risky dose is much much much closer to the usual kitchen use. In comparison, all of the kitchen cancer scare is harmless.
You can use the sous vide approach, cooking to the safe temperature and no higher.
But browning is tasty and the cancer contribution is very low.
But you have to buy new cookware... And theses things are not exactly cheap (if you want something that works reliably)...
(Not that I would want to give up browning)
Nowadays you can get a model that clips onto one of your pots and works great for under $70. It is a bit specialized, but I use mine a lot.
As long as you don't leave it sitting wet there should really be no problem with them.
Depends on what you plan to cook though, probably wouldn't add it if I was planning on cooking pancakes or something. But a stirfry or anything like that.
But they have been used routinely: They seasoned themselves just by being used and they never saw strong detergents. "Iron rusts" was obvious to everyone because one was confronted with it every day and thus the drying for the night or oiling/greasing to protect against humidity was a natural task.
Nowadays, when we don't use our one cast iron pot every day, we need to replace the routinely usage with a maintenance routine.
You are exactly right on this. Ours get, scrubbed, wiped, soaped, and cleaned as needed but just use and constant reseasoning is all it takes to make them look and cook gorgeously.
Our parents (in particular) are terrified of the damn pans. Of caring for them of using them. They have this trope in their heads that is just a feedback loop… they see them as fragile so they treat them as fragile so they become fragile.
Just cook at home more, preferably bacon. Lots of mechanical things are meant to be used, pans, cars, homes. Letting them sit unused causes more decay
How you'd do pan sauces with anything but a stainless steel pan is beyond me. You can do it, but if you took care of your cast iron skillet the way people suggest, you can't get any fond to create the pan sauce.
And you cannot cook good eggs on anything but a non-stick pan if you're not working on a commercial, well-oiled skillet, which is a different beast all together. Shakshouka doesn't count.
No clue what people are talking about when they say you shouldn't clean your cast iron either, it's disgusting to me. It makes no chemical sense. Sure, you've got the pan seasoned, but as soon as you cook anything in it, it will transfer, and there's no amount of wiping that will prevent that. None. If you salt it, you will transfer salt.
Cook with it, clean it thoroughly with soap like you would anything else, dry it immediately, and then just use it again. Any amount of neutral oil you use to cook with it in the future is going to effectively do the same job as seasoning it. Occasionally seasoning it should be fine if you have to restore it for some reason, but you'll end up washing it again anyway.
I agree with the notion that it's strange to treat cast iron with such esteem when it's far easier to screw up stainless steel and have to restore that, which is far more labor intensive.
Disagree strongly on this. I cook fantastic over-easy egg on my cast iron skillet.
> No clue what people are talking about when they say you shouldn't clean your cast iron either, it's disgusting to me. It makes no chemical sense.
These people are wrong (and were likely misled by bad internet articles. I know I was about 15 years ago)
It took some time to figure out but I realized I was crashing the pan temperature. This wasn't an issue as much with gas because the heat was always on. But an electric stove cycles. Many clad pans are built with an inadequate amount of core material. Such is the case with All-Clad's D3 pan wich only has about 1.6mm of aluminum if I recall.
I now use a mixture of iron and clad pans. But it took some research to find a clad pan with a thick core of aluminum. I use All-Clad D7s which are out of production but can be found on overstock sites or used occasionally.
What kinds of things would require cast iron, provided you have a good stainless and a non-stick pan?
This is important if you want to get the pan hot and for it to stay hot. Common for searing large cuts of meat.
Disagree completely. And I’m not the worlds biggest cast iron fan that swears by them either, I usually prefer stainless. But for eggs I will 100% of the time reach for my cast iron. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve reached that “mythical” non-stick level in my cast iron or what, but any thing from scrambled to sunny side up work great in mine, and I never have problems, and the pan acts pretty much non stick. Heat the pan to the correct temp (I don’t over heat like u suggest is necessary), and use of butter are probably they key. Along with a “well seasoned” pan. Which as u can tell from this thread, there is much debate on how to get there…
I often reach for stainless for sauces because the fond comes right off and you can scrub it clean, but you can absolutely get a fond on cast iron, even deeper than stainless. It’s just more of a mess to clean up if it doesn’t come off completely.
> And you cannot cook good eggs on anything but a non-stick pan
Pretty sure humanity cooked eggs before we decided to put Teflon on everything. Either iron or steel, you just need to preheat very well and use a bit of oil.
The author is absolutely right that most folklore about cast iron is grade A BS. Soap is one of those things. The thing most people seem to have missed is that dish soaps in the current era are significantly different from dish soaps even 30-40 years ago, much less at the turn of the century when most of the folklore of cast iron started being passed down from our great-great grandparents to their children.
You cannot damage the seasoning of a cast iron skillet using any amount of modern dish soap (Dawn, Palmolive, or similar) and a sponge designed for non-stick cookware (blue scotch sponge, not the green scratch pads). It simply cannot happen, because modern soaps are not caustic like lye-based soaps of the past, they are primarily synthetic surfactants and various alcohol-type solvents. Dawn and most dish soaps are specifically formulated to have a PH between 7-8, as a neutral cleaner.
Use as much soap and elbow grease as you need to make your pan clean. The most important thing to do is to ensure it's /really/ dry after you finish washing the pan, which can be done easily just by putting it back on a burner on low for 15-20 minutes while you do other things and then just turn the burner off. Water is the enemy of iron, because it causes rust. The seasoning helps prevent rust by creating a barrier against water, but if you soak a cast iron pan or fail to dry it sufficiently it can and will rust. Rust is what you're trying to avoid for surfaces other than the cooking surface. For the cooking surface, seasoning also builds to create a natural non-stick surface.
Cleaning shouldn't require much effort. For most cases, it's sufficient to pour some sea salt on the pan, scrub with a paper towel, heat the pan until it's quite hot, and then steam it with hot water from the tap, wiping dry (and removing the salt). Nonetheless, using modern dish soap is not going to hurt your cast iron in any way.
Low temps guarantee you won't warp or crack the pan. But if you're not super worried about it, go ham.
That only works so-so for me. What always works is baking soda with a little bit of water and heat. The fat and meat residue just cooks off into the water and cleaning after that is a breeze.
Maybe microwaves would win? Note that I'm not saying that should be the be all end all. I'm just curious. Although the amount of recipes that want you to crank up the oven just to brown half a cup of almond slivers is pretty annoying.
I would definitely do that on the hob. Not even for energy efficiency, just.. why not? You can see them better, keep moving better, avoid burning better.
Also, not something you could do in a microwave! So the suggestion you didn't make really doesn't fly anyway, they have their place (defrosting and reheating something I made a batch of, for me) but they don't really replace anything. Arguably a kettle, but then so does a hob (and better).
Never tried it, but now I might. I'm already frying onions in the microwave: https://www.seriouseats.com/fry-garlic-shallots-in-microwave
My favorite cast iron pan is a pan that I literally polished SMOOTH with with a rotary sander.
It's impossible to build up a thick layer of seasoning on it, but it doesn't matter, because the surface is smooth. All you have to do is oil it before cooking. When you are done cooking, it's super easy to clean, and I have zero qualms about stripping all of the seasoning off the main bed using soap and water and whatever scrubber I want. The only important thing to remember is to lightly oil it before putting it away in the cupboard.
Being able to use soap on a smooth, non-stick, cast iron skillet is a game changer.
I also adopted this same approach when dealing with my carbon steel pans. I basically just don't even worry about seasoning anymore. Just make sure you oil the pan before you put it away.
I milled a pan flat once upon a time. Not worth it. The smooth iron with the thin coating is a nifty party trick but it doesn't outperform the other four crappy eBay pans in the set that I didn't do that to and which built up a coating.
I don't do any preheat, post heat or regularly scheduled seasoning BS, I just have a terrible diet that's high in fat. Not even eggs stick. I clean with soap and a sponge if that matters.
I never did any actual experiments to back this up though, so it's hard to say if it's true or not.
I did end up buying a set of stainless steel pans from Costco that were 5 layers of stainless steel and aluminum (basically Costco's answer to All Clad d5 pans), and those worked equally well for searing. Food stuck to them like crazy though, and I ended up just taking them back to the store.
My new favorite pans are my Misen carbon steel pans. They are truly incredible. I'm seriously considering just giving away all my other pans. https://misen.com/products/carbon-steel-pan
The main benefit was that cast-iron could be made before steel was invented, it does not retain heat better than aluminum alloys. Cast-iron pans heat less evenly and must be made thicker than their aluminum counterparts.
Many stainless pans will have cast-iron handles because it conducts heat worse than steel or aluminum, and will not get hot to the touch as quickly.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Cast iron pans retain heat better than aluminum pans because cast iron pans are 4mm thick and aluminum pans aren't 6mm thick.
(Also it does retain heat better. [EDIT: by thickness, not by weight. The comment below is also correct.])
https://www.centurylife.org/heat-retention-myths-and-facts-d...
https://www.makeitfrom.com/compare/6061-AlMg1SiCu-3.3214-H20...
For most day-to-day cooking where you're ingredients are in direct contact with the pan over a burner (sautés, searing etc) heat retention can actually be bad (it's difficult to adjust the temperature). For specific tasks, cast iron excels, that's why you don't see a lot of copper deep fryers.
(This is mentioned in the 2 experiments that person runs in their kitchen that you posted)
In the end, it didnt cook that much better than my All-Clad D7. So I just stayed with that. But I have never cooked with anything so brimming with heat and ready to pour it into absolutely anything that came into contact with it.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-metals-d_15... says that aluminum has twice the specific heat capacity of cast iron, and another page on that site says that it has about four times the thermal conductivity. So if your goal is to dump as much heat into your food as fast as possible, aluminum is definitely the way to go. But if you want slower heating, iron may be better.
With specific heats of 0.91 kcal/(kg⋅K) for aluminium and 0.46 kcal/(kg⋅K) for cast iron, this works out to
Aluminium: ~2500 kcal/(kg⋅m³)
Cast iron: ~3100 - 3600 kcal/(kg⋅m³)
So for a pan of the same thickness/shape, cast iron should have a heat capacity that's 25-45% higher.
I don't know if such thick aluminium pans are available, though.
Actually, both "steels" and "cast iron" are iron-carbon alloys, and we have evidence of quench hardened carbon-alloy "steels" thousands of years before the first cast iron pieces.
While we tend to think of bronze age as not featuring iron, the truth is that steel production dates back almost 4,000 years.
While cast iron cookware predates other steel cookwares, it's likely because it was far cheaper and easier to cast cast-iron into pot or pan shapes than it was to work mega-hot steels, which was reserved for much more expensive and important uses.
We started getting cast iron once we could get the temperature up to melting, then the optimized steels once we figured out how to add oxygen to the cast iron and burn out the excess carbon.
It's still possible to get higher carbon content out of a bloomery to get steel, but highly unlikely... And you'd get what, a nail's worth from 3 people's labour over a couple of days? {Mine the ore/grab it from a swamp, bake it, make charcoal, make the bloomery, run the bloomery, consolidate the bloom}
It is amazing how, when well cared for they actually work better than most non stick pans I've used over the years. Sure there is a tiny bit more 'maintenance' required after use, but I actually enjoy the process (even if it was hard for me to deliberately NOT use soap during the cleaning process - a simple scrub out with a hot water & a stiff brush is all I do now before re-heating and re-coating with oil).
(The big secret for me was using high quality olive or flaxseed oils).
I fry most things in either extra virgin olive oil or butter. The olive oil stands up to the heat better than butter (the milk solids will burn).
I've been pan frying eggs, onions, pork chops, chicken, potatoes, fish, basically anything interchangeably in extra virgin olive oil and butter/ghee for decades. There is certainly a flavor difference, but that's because the olive oil is much milder in flavor than butter, and the process of frying dulls the flavor of the olive oil, as mentioned.
I - along with millions of people in countries bordering the Mediterranean - enjoy the flavor of food cooked in olive oil.
Adam Ragusea did a great video on the topic, with cited sources. I highly recommend watching it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_aFHrzSBrM
Sources:
https://actascientific.com/ASNH/pdf/ASNH-02-0083.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02786...
https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/24/8/1555/htm
Including this famous chef using it for deep frying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZSPDYAUn7E
Additional sources:
https://www.nutritionadvance.com/cooking-with-olive-oil-good...
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/can-you-fry-with-olive-oil
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24360472/
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/healthiest-oil-for-deep...
The bottom line is that extra virgin olive oil is more heat stable than other cooking oils with higher smoke points. Just don't use it to sear steaks or something.
So much of the conventional wisdom around cooking is not based on scientific fact, but rather on unsubstantiated observations and gut feelings. The viability of extra virgin olive oil for cooking is one of those pieces of faulty conventional wisdom, the need to sear steaks to "seal in the juices" used to be another big one, until we finally got the record set straight.
It's an extremely interesting subject of research, which may hold a large part of the explanation for the apparent health benefits of the Mediterranean diet :-)
I cooked on cast iron for years before switching to clad. Cast iron's poor conductivity causes hot spots underneath the burner. With clad pans, you find yourself pushing the food around less to get even heat.
I often hear people say that cast iron conducts heat well, but that is easy to disprove if you have a gas burner: put some water in the pan and turn the heat up. You will see the water boiling in a pattern that matches where the flame hits the pan.
I like to fry frozen chicken in the cast iron pan, but it is always a bit of a nuisance that the center of the pan gets much less hot than the perimeter. My gas range has a fairly large burner with no flame in the middle.
https://www.centurylife.org/how-to-choose-cookware/
It's what inspired me to try out clad, and I'm glad I did. My cast iron mostly sits unused now.
[1] http://cookingissues.com/2010/02/16/heavy-metal-the-science-...
Not using soap is just a myth. The hard surface is not oil anymore. You don't want to abrade it off, but it isn't going to come off with a little bit of soap. My big "ah moment" came when i realized why our teflon pan was ruined. It became "seasoned" after someone overheated it with some low-smoke point oil in it. The black layer that formed in it is the same "seasoned" layer you get from oil in a cast iron pan.
I think one of the biggest reasons is that people want an easy shortcut, when in reality the best thing to do is simply to use the pan a lot, and respect that it is iron and that iron will rust if you strip away the protective layer, so don't do that.
Leaving it wet doesn't do you any favours either though.
Yes but sorting out the sense from the nonsense is effectively impossible. You can find arguable authorities/experts that will say whatever point of view you want to find and validate: Soap is bad, soap is okay in small quantity, soap is fine; Use salt and oil to rub it clean, don't use salt and oil because you'll dig into the seasoning; you have to strip it down to re-season it, no you don't. It goes on and on. Literally everything about cast iron care is contested, and by people who are professionals in the kitchen/cooking business and "use them all the time and get great results" so they must be right, etc etc.
If it can't stand up to ordinary dish soap and even a bit of salt scrubbing to get out burnt bits, it is not properly polymerized and therefore not fit to cover the inside of my pan.
So keep using that pan, including washing it by hand, until a proper strong seasoning is achieved. Some things can't be rushed.
It's still a great pan, but after using a slick surface pan I realized there is a big difference and better option out there. I still can't cook scrambled eggs in this 20 year old pan without a bit sticking and staying behind on the rough surface. Ultimate I switched to using carbon steel pans which are just as nice with heating but perfectly smooth and slick from the factory.
Excellent to sear meat from the sous-vide and surprisingly easy to clean compared to what I expected.
I did do a full strip with lye then intense heat and season essentially from scratch, but in retrospect I probably didn’t have to. (I was operating under the misconception that I had to in order to get a good low-stick surface.)
One thing I wonder is if it's possible to get similar results by buying a cheap Lodge skillet and flattening the surface with a milling machine or a random-orbit sander.
- Heat the pan to cooking temperature (about 265 F for eggs) before adding butter. Don't overheat, eggs are not hamburgers. You don't need to sear them.
- You can basically just wipe the pan to clean it. Use hot water/bristle brush for any stuck-on remains.
- I have one pan that I use only for eggs.
On my electric stove I let the pan warm up on medium heat for 5 minutes or so until the edges of the pan are good and hot, then add butter, let it almost brown for 30 seconds or so (if it burns the butter, too hot), then toss in the scrambled eggs which should immediately bubble and start cooking. Some quick stirring and you're done cooking in about 1-2 minutes for 2-6 eggs.
This has been known scientifically for almost 50 years at this point. More people should get off the Internet and read Harold McGee
Of course sometimes you want the extra heat, like when you're searing a steak. In that case, to clean up I'll bring some water to a simmer and gently scrape the pan with my steel spatula. Then I pour the water out and dry/season. This seems more effective than soap/scrubbing and seems to better preserve the seasoning.
Often though, I won't even need to use water or the steel spatula. It's sufficient to bring the skillet to high heat and let the stuck food burn off, but this can sometimes cause air quality issues, so be sure to have a well-ventilated space.
You know how people sometimes say "the first pancake never turns out right" or similar things? That's because the pan isn't preheated enough yet.
More food sticks because of too low heat, than because of too high heat, unless you turn your pan to really scorchingly high.
Iron is a sponge that simply needs to soak up oil. c.f. Oilite™ bearings, or your feet. Keep them constantly moisturised with oils and don’t let them dry out.
On another note, I love the look and feel of cast iron but the heat dissipation is crap compared to sandwiched metal pans. If you can make me a cast iron skillet with a copper core I will throw my money at you.
https://www.amazon.com/Carote-Stone-Derived-Non-Stick-Switze...
When it comes to skillets, I primarily use teflon, with the occasional use of carbon steel. I almost never use cast iron or stainless steel.
Works well in an electric oven, haven’t tried it in a self-cleaning gas oven. Search online for more details, other opinions, videos. Still skeptical? Try it on the ugliest & cheapest thrift store pan you can find as a test.
Apparently the pan is a classic Griswald. I was shocked that you can buy it for $600 on Ebay. The pan is better than my similarly sized carbon steel pans, but not by a great deal.
Would it have a similar "cooking profile" to cast iron while still being easy to take care of?
I realize that it would be prohibitively expensive but I feel that it would virtually last forever.
I know some people do season stainless steel, but I've never tried it myself. I do cook with coconut oil, though, so maybe they've kind of self-seasoned over the years.
Don't worry about having to cook at low temperatures, or with lots of fat, or to make sure it dries perfectly, or one of the 1000 other comments in this thread. Easy as heck to use and clean.
Others don't want to deal with buying new pans every few years due to the flaked off coating. Not to mention that buying new pans every few years is a bit of wasteful consumerism.
Either way you probably don't want to be cooking on high heat unless you're doing a saute. Your meat is going to be charged outside and raw inside. It takes time to move that heat into the middle regardless of the pan.
Just get a steel pan instead.
To which I agree. I’ve had more success just making sure I cook a bunch of fatty foods in a row, then continue using the pan normally, vs intentionally seasoning it (oven method or not) which is slow, messy and never seems to really give the same kind of deep patina.
When I purchased my most recent new cast iron, I did power sand the interior with a drill attachment. I prefer the smooth interior to the rough interior that they come with, and for me they stay rough for a very long time. It also gave me the opportunity to know what exactly the inside cooking surface is seasoned with (crisco).
I don't agree with the claim that simply cooking fatty food results in a seasoned pan. Nor does oiling it before putting it away - that just deters rust.
I don't know what mixture of oils they're using at the moment in Crisco, but I doubt any of the ingredients is a drying oil. Drying oils polymerise readily when exposed to air, and especially when heated. Linseed oil is the most-prominent example. If you smear linseed oil on wood, it will harden into a tough finish in a few days.
Flax seed oil was mentioned up-thread; that's the same stuff, but food-grade.
If you have to season from scratch, invest in some flax oil, apply VERY thinly, and bake for an hour, then cool. Repeat 5 times.
If you need to strip it, caustic soda does a pretty thorough job.
I stick to vegetable oils and shortenings because it's what my grandparents and their parents used. I find that it works well, is cheap ($3/16oz vs $12/8oz), and readily available. I choose crisco because of its shelf life and high smoke point.
Seasoning cast iron with crisco is the same process as flax seed oil, but you don't have to repeat the process as many times and it is forgiving if you use too much. You still should use very little oil and season the pan upside down so any excess oil doesn't pool on the surface.
Finally, I don't care to keep or use lye.
In my lexicon, lye is made from wood-ash; the stuff I'm referring to comes as white pellets, and it's nasty stuff indeed - rubber gloves and goggles. I keep it because my drains tend to get blocked, and caustic works better than supermarket drain-cleaner.
I also keep a bottle of "Spirits of Salts", which is 30% HCl in water. It's better at removing scale than supermarket toilet cleaners.
I imagine a vigorous reaction would occur if I were ever to mix these two sustances.
Frankly, I don't like paying a premium for a proprietary product, when these simple chemicals just work better and go further.
The original sense of the word "lye" was referring, as you said, to the lye obtained from wood ash (or other vegetable ash), whose main component was caustic potash.
Caustic soda, having similar properties, was obtained from soda (sodium carbonate) extracted from evaporite mineral deposits.
Before the end of the 18th century, when the names of potash and soda (formerly just commercial names) were adopted in the chemical language, for many centuries the scientific names for lye (caustic potash) and caustic soda were vegetable alkali and mineral alkali, because of their different preparation methods.
I'm sorry to say that you disagree with every professional kitchen that uses cast iron or carbon steel cookware.
Regular cooking with adequate amounts of fat is absolutely what maintains and strengthens the seasoning. The initial layer you bake/fry on is only a starter to get the pan ready for use. For carbon steel pans, it also serves to prevent it from rusting, after you remove the protective wax/lacquer that was put on it for shipping.
> If you have to season from scratch, invest in some flax oil, apply VERY thinly, and bake for an hour, then cool. Repeat 5 times.
You can do this, and it results in a very pretty deep dark golden coating that would look great on a display piece. Unfortunately the resulting coating is brittle and doesn't bind very well to the surface, so it's fragile and will flake off. It's more of a lacquer coating than an actual polymerization of fat molecules onto the iron.
To be clear, I tried this exactly as the common advice tells you to: by meticulously cleaning and drying the pan, then wiping on a super-thin almost dry layer of oil, then heating in the oven, then repeating several times. The coating was very pretty, but it was no match for the normal method I use, which is the one recommended by Matfer Bourgeat and De Buyer for their carbon steel pans.
Just clean the pan well, then fry up a batch of potato peels in plenty of oil and salt, until the peels are very dark. Clean out the pan and start using it. It will get better and better the more you use it. That's all there is to it, and it's so much quicker than repeated applications of flaxseed oil and baking cycles.