its just a fry pan
You would probably like cast iron more if you stopped committing war crimes against it.
It’s insane to me that people don’t wash them and call it seasoning.
It’s apparently a different story when someone seasons their underwear.
I just wash it as normal, you just need to re-fry/season it once in in 3-5 months or so. People that don’t wash it usually let it become rusted and dirty as well.
Shouldn’t need to reseason it if you are just using dish detergent like Dawn.
Just FYI, you do wash cast iron, you just don’t use detergents on it. One common method is to dump a handful of salt and a tiny splash of water into the pan and start scrubbing. You can use a gentle dish soap, but I’d avoid using the dishwasher, because those detergents will be a lot stronger and will actually ruin the seasoning (as well as linger on the surface and end up in your food, which is also bad).
Modern soaps/detergents don’t contain lye, which is what ruins the seasoning. It’s the humid drying of a dishwasher that causes it to rust. Nothing to with the detergent.
We do wash them, I clean mine by boiling water in them, scraping any stubborn bits with a wooden spatula, rinsing it out under running water and wiping them down with a clean towel and heating the pan again to evaporate any remaining water. No microbials will survive being boiled and then heated again, anything stuck to the pan dissolves away in boiling water and a clean towel will wipe away anything else. After that I add a few drops of oil and wipe down the still hot surface with the thinnest possible coating of oil.
Seasoning for cast iron doesn’t mean holding onto previous flavors. It definitely shouldn’t taste like last night’s dinner. Seasoning in the context of cast iron is the build up of thin layers of polymerized oils from heating them up in a clean pan that forms a durable protective finish that is incredibly non-stick.
So more accurately parallel your underwear example how cast iron is cleaned, if you took your underwear, boiled the hell out of them, used something to give them a scrub, rinsed them out well and then heat dried them.
I hate cast iron, but ‘seasoning’ is just a misnomer that was adopted to refer to the oils polymerizing on the pan. The oil (usually something like canola) is literally bonded to the metal.
Not cleaning a cast iron pan is gross, fats left in the pan will go rancid.
The only soap you can’t use is lye based as that will strip the seasoning off.
You can wash Cast Iron all you like, I wouldn’t suggest the dishwasher, just don’t use soap, scrape with a plastic paint scrapper under hot water, heat until smoking, rub some oil on it, let cool. Easy peasy. After knowing we’re all poisoning ourselves with the nonstick coating and have been for decades, the Cast Iron is a great nonstick alternative.
My main issue is with calling cast iron “non stick” when things most definitely stick.
The trick of pre-heating it to unreasonable temperatures before adding the ingredients isn’t a property of cast iron, it works on all materials, but it can quickly go wrong and make everything stick. Which is a shame, because teflon is poison and we do really need alternatives.
It is non-stick if the seasoning is right, but often it’s not smooth enough off the shelf.
Eh, not really. You can “season” it and if you add eggs with no oil they’ll stick. Of course we forget now, but this is exactly why teflon became so popular so fast, even though cast iron has existed for ages.
Teflon itself isn’t poison. The entire point of teflon is that it’s so chemically unreactive that nothing can even bind to it on a molecular level.
The problem with Teflon is that manufacturing it uses a lot of actually toxic chemicals incidental to making the Teflon bind to the metal of a pan and because it’s so non-reactive and very brittle, general use and any disposal of it will result in Teflon molecules just floating around in the environment unable to be broken down by anything.
Use “soap” if you want. Modern dishwashing liquid doesn’t have lye in it. It’s the lye from old school rendered soap that damages the seasoning.
Don’t use anything with an abrasive more than the rough side of a sponge, and even with that, don’t rub super hard or in the same place for too long.
This thread is full of people claiming that dish soap doesn’t contain lye, but the most popular dish soap I’m aware of, Dawn, contains lye and that’s easily found in a two second Google search.
I wash my cast iron with normal dish soap and steel wool, and if I’m too lazy, I put it in the dishwasher. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I don’t “season” it. It’s a pan, no more, no less. The main advantage is that you don’t need to worry about scratching the shit out of it.
Needs a tiny little bit more fat than a non-stick if you want to make an omelette.
I know you’re a troll but the idea of cooking on a dish soap infused cast iron is filthy lol
I’m not a troll. But the amount of magical thinking around cast iron amuses me to no end.
“dish soap infused” lol. Tell me, are your kitchen knives “infused” with soap, too?
Yeah, soap doesn’t hurt a fucking thing, If I just cooked with a seed oil or bacon or something I’d be inclined just to let it burn off, But if I cooked noodles or pasta or garlic or anything fragrant on there, I’d soap and scrub the piss out of it. I just make sure to throw it back on the fire and get it past 212 if it’s been wet.
