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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.
I've always just been taught to use boiling/hot water and scrub it, dry it immediately after, and then put some oil on it so it doesn't get dry. Never had any issues.
NO. NO MORE INSTRUCTIONS.
I'm washing it with Himalayan salt, hanging it to dry in the sunshine, then storing it under my bed in a wicker box just like my great grandmother taught me!
It is, I literally just cook in mine, don't baby it, scrape the hell out of it with a heavy stainless steel spatula and use a paper towel to get out anything. If stuck bits of food, they get scrapped, then water and soap. Then just oil the pan and rack it again. None of that silly shit. Just use the damn thing.
Exactly. Just soak it in bacon grease, let the cats lick it dry overnight, then bury it in loamy soil under an orange tree during the full moon. So easy. I'm not sure why anyone doesn't use cast iron.
At first you're gonna boil them. And after tha t you're gonna mash them, then you can choose to stick it in a stew.
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?
Yup, just go with stainless steel. I wouldn't recommend teflon coated pans anymore, because it's literally poison.
I wash mine with soap and hot water, then dry and rub a bit of cooking oil on it (high smoke point oil, not olive oil).
I’ve built up a pretty substantial amount of seasoning on mine though. One of the ways to recognize that is that when you’re rinsing it out after washing the water should just bead right off, not wet the surface. Any areas where the water wets the surface could use some touch up seasoning. A well seasoned pan should be nice and hydrophobic.
NO. NO MORE INSTRUCTIONS.
I’m scraping it with a boar bristle brush, drying it with a traditional Japanese paper fan, then storing it in a nearby cave just like my uncle taught me!
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~~ weren't supposed to wash them.
PSA be careful buying lye. It has other uses than soap making, including stripping of carcasses to the bone, and then turning the fat into soap. If you order enough you might get a visit from your friendly government agent.
Corrected as to what it does.
lye (sodium hydroxide) has all sorts of uses and for cleaning your pan you don't need it dry. Just buy a cleaning agent containing it.
It is one of the most used chemical products and i strongly doubt that anyone having normal uses for it will ever get a government visit.
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.
If it's seasoned you don't have to oil it. Just make sure it's dry.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Yeah I was confused by that as well, that's some entitled shit.
Yeah, I wouldn't have minded if we'd all washed the dishes together. iirc I never cooked for them again; I brought take-out once for a special occasion, but I told them to eat out of the containers bc I wasn't doing their dishes.
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.
You forgot the first step of turning off your smoke alarm, and also leaving the room unless your a pack a day smoker with lungs of steel
Any pathogens would be cooked anyway.
But more likely to ingest benzopyrene which can be carcinogenic
The toxic stuff is what bacteria leave behind, and you can't cook that out.
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.
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.
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.
99% of all the old "don't wash cast iron!" shit you hear is antiquated information from back in the day when they used lye for soap.
There is absolutely no reason today to not wash your cast iron today. That doesnt mean you always have to, though. Often just wiping it out with a damp rag is more than enough, and if you have a lot of really stuck on shit.. You can scrub it with a slurry made up of salt, water, and soap (Make sure you use little water so the salt doesnt dissolve into the water and disappear). The salt will provide some abrasive scrubbing without damaging the cure.
outside of that, again, if you choose to, you can absolutely wash it. Warm water and soap, dry it off, put it on a hot burner for a bit to dry off any remaining water.. and if you are using it again tomorrow, you're done. If you're not gonna use it for a while, then a very very light coat of oil would be wise until you use it next time.
and just in case anyone wants a good way to cure.. I cover my cast iron in a thin layer of lard, and put it on a rocket hot grill, and leave it until it stops smoking. then i take it off, let it sit until i can handle it again.. put another coat of lard on, and repeat. a couple coats should give you a great starting base to build your cure up from.. and its not something you have to do often unless you really abuse your cast iron.