Feature
Old-Tyme Flavor
Recipes
Now that Teflon-coated pans are officially suspect, it’s about time we professed our love for the original nonstick cookware—cast iron. Sometimes it’s in, sometimes it’s out, but to us it’s always a great tool. These heavy, durable pans are inexpensive and conduct heat evenly and dependably. They can go from stovetop to oven, are totally nonstick, and will last forever with the right care. You just need to know how to season and clean your pan correctly.
How to Season
Cast iron in its natural state is not nonstick. It gets that way through a process called seasoning. These days, cast iron cookware is sold preseasoned, so you can start using it immediately. But you’ll still need to re-season it from time to time, by oiling and baking it, which gives cast iron its signature shiny black patina. If the bottom of the pan starts looking crusty, rusty, or uneven, it’s time to re-season. Ditto if you burn something in it badly and have to really scour it to get it clean, or if you neglect to dry it and it rusts, or if you buy a used piece of cast iron you want to rehabilitate.
Here’s how.
- Heat the oven to 350ºF, and position the oven rack in the top third of the oven.
- Open your windows—there’s going to be some smoke.
- Rub a thin layer of shortening (like Crisco) or oil—bacon grease works great, too—all over the inner bottom and sides of the pan with a paper towel.
- Place your pan upside down on the top oven rack with a rimmed baking sheet or a roasting pan underneath to catch the drippings.
- Bake the pan this way for 1 hour. Then turn off the oven and allow it to cool with the pan inside.
When the pan is correctly seasoned, the cooking surface should be smooth and shiny. (CHOW’s test-kitchen pan came out a little sticky, but once we used it to cook, the surface became smooth and shiny, the way it’s supposed to be.) It helps if the first few things you cook with your newly seasoned pan involve oil—try frying or sautéing something.
Don’t cook tomatoes or other highly acidic foods in cast iron, as that will destroy the pan’s finish.
How to Clean
To maintain the finish on your cast iron pan, you must abide by the following rules:
- When you’re finished cooking, scrape out your pan with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula while it’s still hot, and wipe it down with a little oil on a rag or paper towel to preserve the finish. Cottonseed oil works well.
- If gentle scraping doesn’t suffice, a little mild, well-diluted soap and a soft sponge or stiff nylon brush are OK, but don’t scrub the pan. Avoid using soap or harsh abrasives on it—and don’t use scouring pads or steel wool. If necessary, you can soak it. After cleaning the pan, put it upside down in a 150°F oven until it is bone dry to prevent rust.
- Don’t ever put your pan in water while it’s still smoking hot—it could crack.
- After washing your pan, dry it well with a clean, dry dishtowel so that it won’t rust.
- If your pan needs re-seasoning, first use a nylon scouring pad or kosher salt and hot water to clean it. Dry it well and follow the seasoning directions as outlined above.
The Deal with the Oils
It always seems weird to us that you’re not supposed to clean your pan with soap, even if it’s greasy. It might seem weird to you, too. But rest assured: You’re not going to get sick from rotten food or rancid oil that’s still on your pan. Why? Because even if there were potentially harmful bacteria living on it, the pan gets hot enough on the stove or in the oven to kill the germs.
Traditional Southern cooks sometimes have one skillet for cooking cornbread, another for fried fish, and another for fried chicken, to keep the flavors separate. But as Mark Kelly, spokesman for cast iron manufacturer Lodge, says, “In American culture, a lot of people are into the ‘purity’ of things. But you never get 100 percent purity, no matter what you do.” Many fans of cast iron cooking see the little bit of extra flavor infused in your dish from past meals as a big selling point of cast iron. We use the same cast iron skillet for Chilaquiles, which contain onion, garlic, and chiles, as we do for our Upside-Down Banana-Coffee Tart, and discern no clashing tastes (check out the recipes at the top of the page for more options). If you cook fish in your pan, you can rub kosher salt on the surface to get it extra-clean.
If it's preseasoned, do you still get the health benefits (ie, the iron) in your food?
I have an iron gridle that's a bit rusted. What should I do?
*The Deal with Oils
"...even if there were potentially harmful bacteria living on it, the pan gets hot enough on the stove or in the oven to kill the germs"
What about the potential toxins produced by the critters before they're killed?
* How to season #4
If you use aluminum foil instead of a baking sheet to catch the drips, you won't have to try to clean some baked on grease.
*To ronla:
Scrub out all the rust, inside and out with a stiff wire brush or steel wool. If you still have patches of seasoned surface, try to get it all out by getting the pan as hot as you can. Self-cleaning cycle in an oven, or a really hot fire (like when camping) will work. Wash the pan thoroughly with hot water and soap. Then follow the seasoning directions.
thanks
Cast iron is the bomb-biggity. Nothing grills a cheese sammich or cooks a chapati quite like iron. Also, it's a fine day in the early winter when the temp gets low enough that I feel like reseasoning after a summer of cook-n-wipe, cook-n-wipe. Once, some well-meaning houseguests washed it, however, resulting in a mid-summer reseasoning!
But my question: what about the use of metal utensils? I thought I'd heard it was taboo, but a hot skillet might melt low quality plastic spatulas and such...
My mother and I both bought pre-seasoned dutch ovens from Lodge and both seem spottily seasoned. I've braised with it and it seems OK...should I bother seasoning it myself? If I do-- do I have to scrape off the old seasoning and start from scratch or just apply oil and bake over what is already there?
To Joe, What about the potential toxins bacteria release before they die when you take antibiotics? A pointless question to indicate that you are overthinking this a tad.
In general, I love cast iron. I love being able to take it from stovetop to oven just like that.
I've stopped washing my cast iron with soap, and I get no more bacterial illnesses than before.
That said, you may use a mild detergent and it won't get off most of your carbon. Maybe a touch, but that'll come back the next time you cook it.
An Asian friend taught me a trick for keeping my wok sealed that I also use with my cast iron fry pans. After cooking I scrub the pans, then I place them back on the stove and heat the pan until all the moisture has evaporated. When the pan has cooled down it is ready storage and your the next meal. It seems to works and definitely burns off any germs and also prevents rust from forming.
When I don't want to use the oven (like in August) and need to reseason a pan,or if there are just a few bad spots because some roommate washed the pan, I fry up a whole ton of bacon in it, drain and wipe out the excess rendered fat, and return the pan to heat for a few minutes- works great and hey, instead of smoke and heat I get bacon!
pastoralia,
Mark Kelly at Lodge, the major manufacturer of cast iron cookware likens the preseasoned pans to a "starter kit." That said, you will need to reseason your pan occasionally, and should care for your it as if you had seasoned it yourself. He says the preseasoning process they use is the equivalent of doing it yourself at home 20 times. We tested our recipes with both a preseasoned pan and one that we seasoned ourself from scratch with no discernable difference in the end product.
you do a disservice to all buy telling people to not cook tomatoes or high acid foods in cast iron! WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THE TOMATO BASED STEWS, JAMBOLYAS, CATCATORIES, SAUCES, SOUPS THAT HOME COOKS HAVE BEEN COOKING SINCE THE BEGINNING WITH LODGE AND OTHER CAST IRON PRODUCTS. MOST OF THE SOUTHERN, COOKS THAT I KNEW AND KNOW DO NOT HAVE SEPARATE PANS FOR EACH COOKING PRODUCT. THE LARGER THE FAMILY THE LARGER THE PAN, THIS IS HOW THEY KEPT AND STILL KEEP THESE POTS IN USE, THEY USE THEM EVERY DAY AND ALLDAY, THEY DO NOT NEED RE-SEASONING. bacon drippings are normally kept in a jar and used as needed, much like a starter to keep the skillet wet, so to speak when not in use. the easiest cleaning process is to add water to to the skillet with a little left over oil, bring to a boil for 30 seconds, pour this into the sink and wipe out the pan with a dry cloth, it is ready. i am 65 and have used iron for most of my life and as a working chef, i am one of the few that uses cast iron on a daily bases, because i cook southern and american traditional foods. basic lodge is the best, the pans can go in the oven and they allow you to bring each item lets say in a gumbo to a boil quickly and to work with much higher temp. than you can work with in basic alum or ss pans. also buy a lid to fit all of your skillets and if you have the room store the skillet on the stove lid on and the curing process will continue for ever. yes you will get your iron and maybe to much of it if you use cast iron every day all day for all of your cooking.
I too do not understand the theory of "do not cook tomatoes in cast iron." While I understand the acidity logic, what about all that campfire chili? This is cast iron, and we're treating it like it was magical mithril steel as fragile as an eggshell.
If your iron isn't seasoned well, acid foods will definitely pick up metallic tastes and gray colors.
What are you all talking about? I have Ostovics Culinar cast iron pieces and Sue Cutts' Cast Iron Cookbook (Le Creuset). Is an enameled surface the same thing as a pre-seasoned pan? At least I'll know how to season a Dutch oven when the bottom falls out and we have no soap and water. Sure! But where are the recipes? (Do I need a thermostat for my campfire?)
Do not use cooking oil such as Cisco or shorting to season your CAST IRON pots and pans. use only animal fat such as bacon oil (dripping). If using Cisco/shorting etc your pans will be sticky and dust etc will stick to them also the seasoning process will take much longer...
Noted .. only buy Cast Iron pots and pan made in the USA, those made in china is of inferior (course) iron and much hard to season thus will rust very easy.
nice reference Rocknrope...was that from Lord of the Rings?
I have a collection of antique cast iron pans and have always washed with soap and water then wipe them, and then dry them off on the stove. I also find that the old pans are much better as they are a bit lighter in weight. Also I think of all the other cooks who have used them.
I grew up using cast-iron, my mother used her skillet nightly, and I love my skillet as well. Whenever I fry something like an egg in it, or meat, I scrape out the remaining food, and give it a blast with the sprayer to remove particles, but I rarely if ever use soap. I take a paper towel and dry out the water, and in the process also smear around any oil in the pan, to cover the inside. If you cooked a watery dish in it and it has a dull grey color, then best not to let the dish sit in the pan after cooking; rinse and clean it right away, and maybe give it a light going over with an oiled paper towel.
I've always used a flat edged metal spatula for both cooking and cleaning, I usually hold the spatula upside down and glide it forward at a 10-30 degree angle, which will scrape off anything from sticking during cooking. Perhaps this keeps the bottom less seasoned than it could be, for me it's always black and shiny, but nothing builds up that could flake off. This is my idea of how it should be.
As far as tomato dishes, you can cook something quickly in it (maybe 10 minutes), but without a doubt, if you let it sit in the pan while you eat your first serving, the second serving will taste like iron. Perhaps it's possible to season a pan to a greater degree than I do so that it could stand up to this, but I've always found it to be the case that the iron flavor gets into acidic foods.
Reseasoning inside is dumb. Either use a BBQ or fry a lot of chicken.
Having a house that smells like a foundry is emphatically Not Cool.
Oh, also, those Lodge skillets that are always on sale at Amazon (a good deal, for sure, but TANSTAAFL) have a problem: the bottoms are not machined flat, the way the old Wagner and Griswold skillets were. You can actually fix this somewhat, if you're willing to be a savage, by using steel wool and/or a wire brush drill bit to smooth out the rough bits; but for the amount of work this takes, you could probably buy a Piqua or some such good old tyme pan on eBay.
The better pans from days of yore have nice flat bottoms that get glassier and glassier as you cook more seasoning onto them. Eventually they are as hard and smooth as a billiard ball, and flat as a pancake. It's more convenient to buy one from somebody who's grandma did the several decades of work to get it like this for you. Every now and then, someone will sell all their old cast iron so they can buy an iPod or HDTV or whatever marketingware is being flogged on QVC; that's the kind of rube you want to buy a pan from.
Le Creuset is great, but there is something inherently cool about cooking in a pan that has visibly shrugged off decades of hard use. And thrived from the process.
.. TANSTAAFL! Amazing! I never thought that I would see that acronym outside of a Heinlein novel. Now we've had a LotR reference and a Robert Heinlein one here. Way too cool!
.. My skillet (12" Wagner) has been travelling around w/ me for about a quarter century now (and that suddenly makes me feel real old!) and suddenly began losing its seasoning. I've rarely attempted seasoning on a serious basis before, but realized that I was doing something wrong and needed to rectify the problem.
.. I just wanted to say that the above article and all the comments gave me much to feel good about my skillet. Thanks to the author and to all who posted here.
.. I can grok it now!!! hehe........
Ok so is it a bad thing that I'm 18 and already know all this ? I mean ok the TINSTAAFL got me for a few minutes but I figured it out...Maybe I just have great parents huh?
I guess people don't use regular salt for anything anymore, huh? Salt in oil is how I clean mine...and not kosher salt for crying out loud..
Wonderful postings! I'm an old time cast iron user, and have 3 Dutch ovens and at least a half-dozen skillets, most of which are WagnerWare and Griswold. I even have a 5qt. Dutch oven with both the Waner and the Griswold logos embossed on the bottom!
Re the tomato warning: I believe that if you keep your cast iron well seasoned, you can cook all the tomatoes you want. The acid never touches the metal, just the seasoning.
It's very rare that I ever have to re-season any of my cast iron.
Several well-known chefs like Paul Prudhomme and John Folse (also a Lodge spokesman, I believe) cook almost exclusively on cast iron.
When I acquire a fine, old skillet--perhaps at a flea market or yard sale--I always put it in the oven on "clean" cycle for 2 hours. That takes care of the rust and crud buildup you might find. Then begin the re-seasoning process. I'm fond of bacon grease for re-seasoning. I have a large 14" skillet that is so big I seldom need to use it, so it is stored for long periods. I've found that for long periods, Crisco tends to harden, vegetable oil gets sticky, but bacon grease holds up well.
And there's nothing that can make a roux like good ol' cast iron!
I have three cast iron skillets of various sizes that I used for awhile and grew tired of the maintenance. Ok, here's the real reason...I made scrambled eggs and they tasted like rusty nails and they stuck miserably. let's just say if I scrambled three eggs - I got 2 in return...I put them away with newspaper in between each piece. I have since renewed my desire to use them but noticed that they have rusted somewhat. Common sense tells me to scrub the rust off and then re-season as detailed above. Now my other question is - if I have seasoned it properly my cornbread and my scrambled eggs shouldn't stick - correct?
My nutri sci prof in college told us that by cooking acidic foods (like tomatoes) was a good way for a vegetarian to get food in her diet.
After each use I take a soft plastic brush, and rinse out the pan, just to get the caked on stuff out. Then I spray the whole pan with a vegetable oil spray. Then I wipe out the excees oil with a cloth. My pan works great, I can cook eggs in it without worrying about them sticking. But I'm wondering do I really need to do the above after each use? I don't mind, and the pan really does work great. Also, I store the pans in the oven.
If it works, don't mess with it! Keep doin' what you're doin'!
I've been using a Lodge Cast Iron skillet for about a year now and while I love it when it is working, it doesn't always work. Everyone on all these boards seems to think that cooking bacon will keep the skillet seasoned, but I'm actually finding that most bacon leaves the pan gummed up (perhaps because of sugar), so that when I cook eggs after I fry up the bacon, the eggs stick to the pan as if it wasn't seasoned. After getting frustrated with this for a while, I put the skillet on the BBQ, smoked off everything until it was gun-metal gray, and reseasoned with lard. I cooked bacon and eggs today and it did a little better, but the eggs still stuck to the pan. Any advice?
No matter how well seasoned your skillet is, bacon frequently sticks. When you finish frying your bacon, use a stiff spatula to loosen the stuck-on stuff. It should come off easily. Just move it to the side and slide your eggs right on in there. Make sure you have at least a little bit of bacon grease underneath the eggs.
Greetings! I need some cast iron expert advice! :) I have a cast iron pan that I have gotten seasoned just way I like it, and my hubbie very sweetly made a meal and accidently scratched part of the surface off. There are lighter colored silver scratches in one curve instead of being all black. I keep reseasoning it, concentrating on that part, and it does NOT seem to be getting back to its original black, matching the rest of the pan very quickly. Will it eventually "catch back up" with the rest of the pan, or do I need to scour it and start from scratch again? *yikes* Not a big deal, it still functions fine, but it looked so nice all black.
My suggestion is to keep doing what you're doing. I'm certain it will accept the seasoning after awhile.
Ok, thanks!!
See "How to Season a Cast Iron" and "Care of Your Cast Iron" by John Folse.
http://www.jfolse.com/fr_seasoniron.htm
Cast iron needs to be seasoned at 500 degrees for one hour. This will make it black, shiny and non-stick.
At 350 it won't be fully seasoned and will come out brown and sticky.
We cooked stew last night in our dutch oven (chili, beans, etc.. in it) and it has stuck to the pan. It will not come out. We have tried mild soap and scrubbing but don't want to scrub too hard. We are afraid we have ruined it. Does anyone know what we can do without ruining it? It will not come out.
Hello, I'm Tim H. Royal, originally from Roanoke Rapids N.C. I now live in Portland, Ore. I come from generations of cast iron users. My mother made me sit by the side of the road (unpaved) and scour the pan with sand and a dish cloth, that pan was her grandmother's and mothers, now my nephew's. I thought I had that pan for many years till I noticed mine was made in Taiwan. Still, it is a respectable pan that I have used for 45 years. It is crusted and black on the outside but wonderful to use. Back home we used my Grandmother's 30 or so gallon cast iron wash pot for family Brunswick stews. I remember my Grandmother standing over that pot stirring clothes with a short pole. That huge pot was the center of attention for many years of family gatherings. My sister later sold it for $500.00 to pay for her divorce. Wipe your iron clean, gently scrub if necessary, wipe with whatever oil you have and love it. Short of breaking it, you can't hurt it.
To ddw:
I know my response is quite late, but I hope you haven't tossed the pan. For stuck on food, I recommend putting some water in the pot and boiling it until all the stuff comes off. Of course, make sure there's always plenty of water. For stubborn stuff, you can put the lid on, turn the heat off and let it sit for a few hours.
If this doesn't work, remember that it's very hard to kill cast iron. You can use steel wool and get all the stuff off. Yes, it will remove the seasoning, but you can reason the pot and it will be good as new again. Another option is to put the pot into a hot fire, like a campfire. The extreme heat will burn everything off, including the seasoning. Let it cool and then re-season thoroughly.
To ddw:
I know my response is quite late, but I hope you haven't tossed the pot. For stuck on food, I recommend putting some water in the pot and boiling it until all the stuff comes off. Of course, make sure there's always plenty of water. For stubborn stuff, you can put the lid on, turn the heat off and let it sit for a few hours.
If this doesn't work, remember that it's very hard to kill cast iron. You can use steel wool and get all the stuff off. Yes, it will remove the seasoning, but you can re-season the pot and it will be good as new again. Another option is to put the pot into a hot fire, like a campfire. The extreme heat will burn everything off, including the seasoning. Let it cool and then re-season thoroughly.
To ddw:
I know my response is quite late, but I hope you haven't tossed the pot. For stuck on food, I recommend putting some water in the pot and boiling it until all the stuff comes off. Of course, make sure there's always plenty of water. For stubborn stuff, you can put the lid on, turn the heat off and let it sit for a few hours.
If this doesn't work, remember that it's very hard to kill cast iron. You can use steel wool and get all the stuff off. Yes, it will remove the seasoning, but you can re-season the pot and it will be good as new again. Another option is to put the pot into a hot fire, like a campfire. The extreme heat will burn everything off, including the seasoning. Let it cool and then re-season thoroughly.
Aye!
Sorry for the multiple posts.