Kitchen Gadgetry

Heretic! Burn the heretic!

But seriously, they are way more robust than the common wisdom suggests.

I picked up one of these, a chainmail scrubber for cast iron pans:

No soap, just hot water and a quick scrub with this thing, then hang it up to dry.

@Charlatan I missed your question a few days ago but this is my take as well.

And I use soap sometimes even to clean mine. My favorite thing though is a lodge scraper, this little guy:

They are small, they get ANYTHING stuck on cast iron to let go with a bit of warm water. You just scrape it a bit to loosen things up.

As for your seasoning, it should be staying on unless youā€™re just taking about use of oil when cooking. Seasoning is a bonded layer to the pan. Not a sheen or oil or stickyness, which are all separate things. Start by cleaning your pan well if itā€™s any of that. Then apply a bit of oil to it, all over, then wipe it with a paper towel and put it laying upside down in the oven at 200 for 30 min. Take it out and wipe it again, back into the oven, again upside down, and crank that to 450 for 30 minutes. Have your windows open, it will get smokey in the house. If itā€™s too much, you can take it out early but you need this part as that is essentially the bonding of the oil to the pan. You can take it out, let it cool down completely and do it all again. You can do this many, many times and each time a small layer is added to your seasoning. If you want to be absolutely crazy you can do something like the psycho on reddit that did it 100 times:

To be honest, 3-4 times should get you what you need.

If you want a mini-seasoning, you can clean it, wipe it with your chosen oil or crisco, wipe it down after with a paper towel, then lay it upside down over one of your stove burners until it gets hot and starts to smoke. Remove it from the heat, wipe it down and once it cools off, store it as you would normally.

I did that seasoning with grapeseed oil last week but I swear it is like nothing is on it. When I cook my daily egg it sticks like a mofo, causing me to have to clean it with salt. Maybe I will try re-seasoning it with my Crisbee stick (which I ended up re-purchasing since it actually worked fine until I stopped getting it to try something cheaper)ā€¦

Iā€™m glad that I seasoned my pans at a previous house. My smoke alarms would go batshit at this one. :)

I do mine on the grill. No mess, no smoke in the house. Easy peesy.

I tend to season pans in the oven.

What kind of oil are you using for cooking your eggs?

when I was using the crisbee stick I didnā€™t need to use anything.

Never used the stuff here, it sounds like it works well? Worth trying out? And did you try the cream as well?

It works well, I believe because it has beeswax in it. Comes in a container that looks like a deodorant stick. I think it works well but I was fishing around for something cheaper. I donā€™t recall how I seasoned the pan initially but I would clean the pan with kosher salt scrubbing and then reapply the Crisbee stick. This is on my mini-cast iron pan thatā€™s used to cook one egg a day for my breakfast, so it gets a lot of use.

I think Iā€™ll re-season the pan with this stuff and see if that helps clear up my issues.

So just for fun and because I needed something to think about, I did a test. My cast iron is 15-25 years old, I donā€™t know because itā€™s cast iron. I burnt one up a while ago and I have this one, blah blah blah.

So what I did is clean the hell out of it, soap and water, then I gave it a hand sanding at 60 grit, which in the woodworking world is the same as a diesel F-350, very rough. It took almost no effort to get to what I would call ā€œthrough the seasoningā€ with streaks of apparent metal.

Then I boiled it again, heated it, applied avocado oil and wiped it out with paper towels until they came clean.

The interesting bit is that I didnā€™t season it at all other than to oil it and wipe it as clean as I could without detergent, then I cooked an egg on it, at medium heat. Probably a step or two higher than I usually would cook an egg. I left the egg to cook, no touching, with the edges burning and no lid until the broken yolk set and it was tasty.

Upshot: it popped off the surface of the pan better than any egg Iā€™ve cooked in the last ten years. Iā€™m not arguing against seasoning at all, but there might be a lot said for a regular higher grit sanding. 60 was way too much but I was experimenting, a sheet of 220 might make a big improvement for a well seasoned pan.



Yeah, as I recall, a lot of modern - and that era stretches back a decade or two at least - mass market cast iron pans arenā€™t really polished much at all out of the factory. Seasoning fills in the bumps and divots very well, but I canā€™t imagine that starting with a smoother surface would make things worse!

Ok, well you are essentially just using the crisbee stick in place of some other oil, like butter. I believe crisbee is mainly soy oil, with some beeswax.

To be clear, a cast iron pan will never function like a Teflon based non stick pan, so I wouldnā€™t expect it to. I think itā€™s pretty normal to use some kind of oil in it when you are cooking with it. A small amount of oil should keep things from sticking.

With my carbon steel pan, for instance, before I start cooking with it Iā€™ll usually just rub a stick of cold butter over it, just leaving a thin coating of butter on it that tends to prevent anything from sticking when I cook eggs or anything like that.

Iā€™m doing further testing but my propane grill has sprung a leak, so Iā€™m stuck with two sanded cast irons and no way to season other than smell-fucking my house. I will say that the surfaces are glass-like right now.

Burying the lede here, I think.

Definitely worth figuring out where the leak is coming from and how repairable it is. Mine had the regulator start to leak and that was very easy to just order a new regulator and replace.

Heh, yeah, donā€™t know but itā€™s the hosey thing that screws into the tank, not the tank itself so no explody stuff happening. Not sure if itā€™s worth fixing or just buying a new grill, this oneā€™s over a decade old.

Whatā€™s the brand? If itā€™s the part of the hose thatā€™s down by the tank you should be able to replace it. On my Weber when I replaced the regulator(which is the bit that screws into the tank) it came with a new length of hose for that section too.

You should be able to season them in your oven without causing any problems, thatā€™s how I initially seasoned my last wok.

Hey, Iā€™ve done this! Unfortunately I canā€™t find my sanding pics but it went well enough. I have a very old Griswold skillet, I think itā€™s 60-70 years old at this point? Itā€™s smooth as butter, it helps a ton when cooking. Conversely I had a Chinese no-name skillet that was quite rough. I wire wheeled it, then sanded it and then reseasoned it to the point it was quite usable and much better to cook on.

What I do have is pics of a coworker of mine. He apparently thought an angle grinder wheel would work much better so he took one to his large Lodge skillet. Unfortunately he gouged and scored it a bit in the process. But, cast iron is cast iron. He gave it to me to season. This was after a single coat:

Thatā€™s my Griswold to the left of his Lodge pan, you can see he got it quite smooth.

This was after the final of 5 season coats when I gave it back to him. Understand the process he used left it bare, like gray and shiny, so this was a marked improvement. I mentioned he should season it again but donā€™t know if he ever did.

But for sure, you can absolutely get a smoother base metal on them and it helps a lot. There were a couple of companies that were trying to set themselves apart a few years ago that were doing this, Iā€™m not sure if any of them are still around.

Great advice. My go-to skillet is very smooth and well seasoned but I wouldnā€™t skip oil for cooking. Besides non-stick cookware, it really doesnā€™t make much sense to chase that dragon. Oil is what helps transfer the heat to what you cook, and it does so by evening out the heat platform between your food and the pan. To skip it for any cooking just makes things a tossup for sticking and can lead to uneven heat.