…why are you not cleaning your cast iron pan?
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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.
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
Teflon Poisons the entire planet. Also when over heated, creates Florine gas that may be harmful if you are in close proximity.
I exclusively use stainless steel pans in my kitchen. None of the weird chemicals from teflon, I can scrape the shit out of them with metal tools and I can toss them in the dishwasher with no second thought. The only downside is that I have to deglaze from time to time while cooking to get stuck bits off, but it's really not that bad.
Can you explain the deglazing process and reasoning. I just got two stainless pans and I'm very curious.
Sometimes brown bits get stuck to the bottom of the pan while cooking and the best way to get them off is to toss some water into the pan before those bits can burn. Not much, maybe like a tablespoon - it dissolves all the brown bits into a very tasty brown sauce that coats the rest of the food in the pan. It's really not complicated, but the added moisture sometimes makes the cooking take a bit longer and isn't ideal when your goal is to cook something very dry and crispy (like when frying tofu)
Now, that being said those browned bits are delicious and are the starting point for a lot of sauces. A dirty steel pan is an opportunity for loads of flavor (provided were talking about a seared or sauteed food, not like pasta or something.
You can deglaze with alcohol as well, and then reduce it into a delicious sauce.
I agree with you on the stainless. I do still have one cast iron pan that I swear by for certain things but I also don't baby it in any way. I also have a couple of ceramic coated pans for specific things that love to stick to stainless. I mostly use the stainless and the cast iron, though.
The fuck? Nonstick lasts like one year, MAYBE two. It's not worth it.
Also cast iron also cooks different. Not better, different.
You're buying trash pans if they only last a year.
I cook everyday and throw them away as soon as there's any visible sign of wear. Then after the third buy that damaged so soon, stopped buying nonstick.
But also, yes, I was buying cheaper pans. (Edit: tramontania i think?) Those aluminum ones with the nice red silicone handles. Fantastic pans, but degraded far too fast.
Now, I just use my cast iron skillet from a hundred years ago and it's easier to cook in AND makes better eggs AND I can use my metal spatula.
To clean it, I'll wipe it out with a paper towel, rinse it with warm water really fast, then every week or few days or if it smells, use a dollop of dawn and some warm water and sponge wash it for like 10 seconds and rinse it out, then one paper towel it clean, add in a tiny bit of canola oil, wipe it around, heat it until it starts to smoke on the stove, then turn it off. That process takes like, maybe 30 seconds, not including heating it until it smokes, which realistically is like only another 30-90 seconds.
The eggs are runny yolks and browned and crispy bottoms. And I'm not eating teflon, which to me is absolutely fantastic!
Yes this. Literally just handwash with soap and water. Season occasionally (clean & then scrub with steel wool to get an even surface, very small amount of oil/lard spread over pan very thinly, oven at 260c/500f until totally dried/hardened, repeat a couple times).
Oven safe, nonstick, durable.
Stainless steel pans are quite nice too.
The best ones imo. No microplastics, zero maintenance, extreme durability, not hard to wash and not so expensive nowadays.
My grandmother still uses her stainless steel pans that are like 50 or 60 yo, and they still look perfect, almost like new, if not for the scratches. They were a gift when she married, and she literally never bought pans for herself in her life.
They're better than cast iron for some things in my experience. Acidic dishes, eggs (scrambled always stick to cast iron for me). But cast iron's heat retention is superior, providing a more even cooking surface on electric ranges - good for searing meat and most other applications.
Also teflon is TOXIC
A common misconception, the teflon molecules are very stable and don't react with almost everything, when ingested it usually just goes through your system in and out, no considerable interaction.
Now the other chemicals used to make Teflon ARE TOXIC, and are present literally, and I mean literally, everywhere on the globe.
Here's an educative video from Veritasium about the subject, super interesting watch.
I thought Teflon coatings were only good for 5yrs before the shit PFAS start leeching out.
It's entirely possible, I've actually never even had one last even that long and just kinda guesstimated how long a pan that had been absolutely baby'd would last.
Sorry for linking R*ddit, but this thread seems to mirror my suspicions, 3-5 years on average, 10 if you treat it insanely well.
Sending this to my wife. How does she bake shit in so bad? Jump her shit
Acidic stuff will eat into the seasoning on cast iron, so that be careful with those.
Honestly I've been told this a bunch, but I cook so much tomato-filled Italian/Mediterranean food and then just leave the pan until the next day to clean, never seen any serious issues from it. Seasoning is also regenerative, so even if you do fuck it up a bit, a couple of meals later it will be basically back to normal.
I make shakshuka in mine fairly often and never had a problem, but if that's all I used it for I could see it causing trouble
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.
Lol a few minutes with an angle grinder and a flap wheel will take it back down to metal real fast.
300€ WTFFFFFFFFF!????!! For a pan??
So what they do is they tell you you won a free lunch (the irony is not lost on me) from like a raffle or something, which you can claim at location x at time y. Aaaaand then it turns out the free lunch is actually a marketing event where they make you (and the people who come with you) barely any food, while extolling the virtues of their ridiculously overpriced products.
I'd just gone through it with my grandma who's luckily a moderately sharp pencil and invited me and my mom along. We just outright refused to buy anything and ate the cookies and shit (they were demonstrating a cookie maker lmao, made like 3 cookies). But my ex's mom went there I think either alone or with someone who yes-manned her into spending money on the pan. And I think she did it in installments too.
This was like 10 years ago. It's a proper scam, idk if they still do it, but I bet they do.
And yes, the pan was excellent, it came with a removable handle and a kinda cone shaped lid that had a hole in the center, which was useful (lets humidity out, but fat doesn't splatter everywhere). But I was still flabbergasted to hear someone would spend 300€ on a pan. In like 2015 or 2016 Estonia. Her net salary was under 1000€ a month.
It's in the name.
I can be tempted by cast iron with a nice image on the base, though probably not for that much.
Vintage, or nicely finished pans with polished surfaces or extra greebles and nubbins can be expensive.
Something liked a lodge pan will be cheap but the bottom of it kind of sucks without being ground down ether by long usage or by tools.
I cook on gas, couldn't care less about the smoothness of the bottom but I get people would if cooking on glass top
In general thought, cast iron is cheaper than any pan equivalent in performance... the cheaper stufq they sell at grocery stores are practically dispossable
They don't mean the underside.
They mean smooth on the inside. The bottom as In where tu out your food to cook.
I mean like, the interior cooking surface is rough.
I'm not sure if you are joking or not but when you buy the pan you are supposed to do the first seasoning in the oven a half dozen times. By the end of that the pan should be smooth. I tend not to look at new cast iron since I have so many I yhrisfted over the years. I suppose the import mass produced stuff might look awful on close inspection.
Nah, you’re not gonna smooth that out with seasoning. Like, it’s the texture of the sand mold just like the rest of it, zero sanding or grinding on the cooking surface to smooth it out and this isn’t a “cheap import” kind of thing, the brand I’m thinking of, lodge, are made in America. Like, they’re functional pans, but the roughness makes them harder to use than something with a polished or even sanded cooking surface, stuff just catches on the nooks and crannies regardless of seasoning. Like a quick pass with a sander or grinder improves them immensely, but that’s not really something most people are going to bother with.
I'll keep an eye out then. Wild that something that quality survives on the market.
I mean, there are a bunch of American cast iron companies still making really good stuff, most are just kinda pricy, like 100 bucks for a skillet. Lodge is just notable for being super cheap, 20 bucks for a skillet, and having a very crude finish compared to the others.
What they're talking about sounds like the pan I have. Bought it in the camping aisle, and it was much cheaper than the ones in the kitchen aisle. I haven't found the roughness to be much of an issue; I probably have to use more oil than I would otherwise. It has gotten smoother over many years of use.
The glass cooktops are insanely scratch resistant. I use a metal scraper to clean mine.
My gigantic cast iron had a rather annoying raised ring around the bottom. It was fine on a coil electric range, gas stove, or campfire, but when I moved into a place with a flat top, it was annoying since it didn't actually make contact. I took an angle grinder to it and ground it flat. Night and day differerence.
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.
I heard tradition is the dead telling the living what to do.
Not that all tradition is bad, but many are out dated or were never made for a good reason.
Most spray oils are high smoke point for frying, which is the opposite of what you want for seasoning
What? You want high smoke point oils for seasoning. You want to season the pans in temperatures higher than you would be normally cooking in, which means higher smoke point oils. I season all of my cast iron and carbon steel with canola, works great.
If you season with Extra Virgin Olive Oil, it's going to burn the seasoning off under normal circumstances.
https://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-for-seasoning-cast-iron/
tl;dr Flax oil is best, low-smoke-point oils in general polymerize better, resulting in better and tougher non-stick coatings, but there's more to it than just smoke point
I mean, there are a lot of types of spray cooking oil I’ve seen. Coconut, olive oil, and soybean (vegetable oil) are what I see most commonly, and none of those have particularly high smoke points.
A good seasoning should withstand some pretty brutal punishment. And even if it doesn't, you can easily reseason the pan which you'll have to do from time to time regardless.
I season my cookie sheets the same way. I've put them in the dishwasher, hit them with those steel wire soapy things, used barkeeper's friend, not much has taken the seasoning off once it's on there.
Except for lemon juice. Lemon juice fucks it right up.
Lemon juice. Tomato sauce. That one egg that for some reason decided to be a real motherfucker.
I love my cast iron cookware, but it can be a fickle bitch.
I thought the concern was rust more than anything
I don't put mine in the dishwasher and I don't use soap when cleaning mine (cleans easy enough with hot water, dish rag, and sometimes steel wool), but I don't season either. I just use a refillable oil spray bottle.
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.
I usually just wipe up oil and leave it. Thin layer can remain for the next time I use it
I recommend people use lye-based cleaners and put them in the dishwasher in a whim.
You can throw a cast iron pan off a fucking roof, leave it in a wet ditch for 2 years, it won't be harmed.
Quarter teaspoon of oil rubbed in, be back to cooking.
You can throw a cast iron pan off a fucking roof, leave it in a wet ditch for 2 years, it won’t be harmed. Quarter teaspoon of oil rubbed in, be back to cooking.
Sure but if you don't use lye and just use dish soap, then you can skip that step and you keep cooking.
You can throw a cast iron pan off a fucking roof, leave it in a wet ditch for 2 years, it won’t be harmed.
Well if you leave it in a wet ditch for years it would rust and pit eventually. It doesn't mean you couldn't regrind the surface to get it smooth again, then seasoning to get it back into cooking form.
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