You want oil soaked into the metal. This idea that you are trying to build a non-stick surface on top of the metal is just adding extra work that isn't needed.

Wash with soap, dry of the stove top, put in some oil (I use peanut), then take a paper towel and rub the oil around over everything and at the end the metal should look shiny but there shouldn't be any pooled oil left anywhere.

If you are cooking something that doesn't leave a residue or strong flavor, you can skip the washing all together and just leave it there to cook with next time.

If you try to go the whole "never wash this" route, you end up with unhappy results going from cooking something with onions and garlic to cooking something more neutral flavored. No one wants onion flavored pancakes.

However, cast iron will never be as non-stick as a good non-stick pan, and if you treat it as one, you’re going to have a bad time.

Put bacon in a dry, hot pan, and it’ll leave crispy fond stuck to the pan. (Nothing you do will ever create fond in a non-stick pan.) Cook bacon starting with a cold pan, and enough fat will render by the time it heats to keep it from sticking.

Eggs will stick to cold, dry cast iron. Fry eggs in a moderately hot pan with plenty of grease. I had the devil of a time with fried eggs until I realized I wasn’t letting the pan heat enough. Also, it’s very easy to burn butter in a cast iron pan; use a more forgiving fat like bacon grease or a neutral oil.

Cast iron behaves differently than non-stick or stainless steel. Different heat density, different emissivity. Just like any other cookware, you need to learn how to work with it; it’s not just a matter of getting the magical perfect seasoning and pretending it’s Teflon.

  However, cast iron will never be as non-stick as a good non-stick pan

Also I always put bacon in my pan dry and hot, never have an issue

some startups have been experimenting with built-in thermometers, so I can imagine this classic design being different 10yr from now :)

T-fal has had the thermo spot in their regular nonstick pans for at least a decade, if not two or three.

For proof of this, check out your aluminum baking sheets. If they’ve been used, they’re almost certainly covered in a shiny black substance that’s a complete pain in the ass to remove, even with abrasives. That’s essentially what’s on your cast iron.

Actually, if you throw it in the oven and set it to self-clean it'll strip the seasoning right off. I've done it with my cast iron pan before. Washes completely clean and ends up gun-metal grey; a non-oxidized pure iron surface. This is a great way to start over with the seasoning process if you're unhappy with it.

Edit: because of course I triggered a storm. Maybe it's common elsewhere. I've lived in few EU countries, rented then owned a few houses, exactly only one of them had an oven with the self cleaning(by heating up to like 500C) feature, I don't think we ever used it. When we bought our current oven none of the ones we looked at had that function. A fancy Candy we looked at had a function where it cleans itself with steam(where you fill up a provided container with water and then it heats it up to fill the oven with steam and in theory that softens the gunk. No idea if that actually works).

If it's common where you live, then my apologies for this comment.

Maybe it sounds fancier than it is? Is not like it has a little robot that cleans the oven. It's just a mode where the oven can get the internal temperature very high (up to 1000 degrees F according to that article) that just incinerates any organic material stuck to the oven walls.

Most ovens in the U.S. burn natural gas, which burns at 1000 degrees F (which is the self-cleaning temperature).

Couldn't find statistics on this with a quick search...

But yes, it is just an element that can go hotter and a shell that can withstand it. Ovens are incredibly overpriced for how rudimentary they are IMO. Ripe for 'disruption' if you had something non-bullshit to compete on but price - sizing is already standardised.

The cleaning module of the one oven I'm aware of that had that option was more than just a heating thing. The manual talked about foam and how to refill it. Different countries, different mechanisms I assume.

Or just use easy off which is a spray on acid.

http://www.rbnainfo.com/product.php?productLineId=2704

https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=268.0

Most new cast iron cookware now has a raw surface with lots of pits and bumps from the casting process as well, which doesn't seem to get nearly as smooth and non-stick as "vintage" cookware.

As far soap. My experience is that it definitely damages the nonstick coating, depending on how much you use. You can get by with a soapy sponge, but putting detergent directly on it and the nonstick coating will be lost.

The best way to avoid need to avoid soap or scrubbing and re-seasoning is to put hot water in the pan while it's still hot and scrape. Meat is the worst for leaving a coating and this technique removes 99% of it.(If not blackened use that water for a delicious sauce with all the best flavors of your cooking). This routine allows me to use the same pan for months without a deep cleaning.

I have tried to put cold oil on after heaving soaping, but I'm not happy with the pan until I season it with high heat. The only reason I'd do it for rust and still would pan on seasoning it properly later.

Which makes sense. Essentially burnt-to-pan bits are food-pan interface, as opposed to food-oil-pan interface.

Give enough time, heavy food displaces oil and comes in direct contact with pan. Given enough movement, oil is able to reimpose itself between the two.

I then used a cheap corded drill and inexpensive flap wheels and similar attachments from the hardware store to make it smooth, wearing an N95 mask to protect my lungs.

For smoothing out the surface, you could just use a flapwheel. You can get them for angle grinders. This will also take off seasoning if necessary (but it's a bit worse for the pan if you're not also trying to smooth it out). Be sure to wear a respirator and googles if you're doing this.

Voila - a clean iron surface. Use rubber gloves, and wash off any splash with lots of water - caustic soda is nasty stuff.

I use flaxseed oil. It works. Unless you have an awful lot of pans, your small bottle of flaxseed oil will only be 10% used by the time it goes rancid; swallow the cost.

I've tried this on a goood carbon-steel omelette pan. The result was mixed; a grubby-looking polymer layer that comes off in the wash, but a pan that still works well, and has reasonable non-stick properties. I suspect that with carbon steel, the oil only needs to get into the pores in the metal, and doesn't need to form a layer on the surface at all.

But my best experience has been with cast iron: a mexican comal, to be specfic. I stripped and seasoned my comal about 8 years ago, and the finish is still flawless.

1: https://www.thekitchn.com/why-you-should-almost-never-use-th...

2: https://lifehacker.com/dont-use-your-ovens-self-cleaning-fun...

Obviously, do not use on cast iron or carbon steel.

What also helps is simmering something acidic in the pan for about 10-15 minutes (wine, watered-down vinegar, etc). The base then cleans pretty easily. It's the burnt bits of fat that splatter up the walls of the pan that are murder to get out.

Here in the US at least, there tend to be scratch (yellow/green) and non-scratch (blue/darker-blue). Along with straight scratch pad (pure green) and steel wool (silver metal).

You can grind all day with a non-scratch pad, and all you're really polishing with is the harder bits of gunk you've managed to take off.

Same way you can sand with 220 grit all day and barely make a dent, but hit something with 60 grit and make progress in 5 minutes.

Afaik, Barkeeper's Friend is essentially microgrit in some sort of liquid carrier. If you had the right shaped sand, you could probably add that to something and get a similar effect.

Unless your seasoning is flaking off because you followed OP's instructions and you need to start again.

I'd never made this link before, thanks for pointing it out! We have plenty of baking sheets like this and I thought it was a form of black rust or something but your explanation makes so much more sense.

Use dish detergent (commercial dish soap). It's made in a different way, so you can't get un-reacted lye.

It's part of why you had the rubber dishwashing gloves get invented: soap used to be harsher, and one of the reasons why is the fact that soaps were made with lye.

Commercial dish soap can be soap, or it could be detergent. Detergent is made differently, and doesn't necessarily involve lye.

> The production of toilet soaps usually entails saponification of triglycerides, which are vegetable or animal oils and fats. An alkaline solution (often lye or sodium hydroxide) induces saponification [...]

i.e. that's the usual process, and it often involves lye. (It elsewhere mentions potassium hydroxide too.)

Anyway my point really wasn't too disagree about how to make soap, I've never done it, it just seemed weird to me to tell someone how they made something and that it's a problem, vs. 'Did you use lye? If so...' or even 'Assuming you used lye, ...'

For example, I think what you call 'commercial dish soap' I would call 'washing up liquid' (never soap, not would it cross my mind if someone else said 'soap') so a slightly different conversation could easily have been based on a wrong assumption about what the created thing was or was used for.

Scallion pancake with pork belly is one of my favorite combos :-)

You can make sweet or savory crepes, so why not pancakes?

But then, I'm not a big fan of actual-cake and don't have much of a sweet tooth.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnnycake

Is there solid evidence that this is actually possible, as opposed to creating a layer on top of it? The only people I've ever heard suggest that it's possible were talking about cast iron pans, and it's always struck me as the sort of thing that would have major implications for a lot of other fields.

I tried some web searches before posting this, still not finding anything suggesting it's possible other than cast iron pan aficionados.

I don't have a subscription or SciHub link to pull up the underlying, but it looks like there have been folks who did electron microscopy on seasoned cast iron. (Note: more relevant and profitable to study in the context of machinery / engine design)

I doubt that's actually what happens, but if you think of it that way, you'll end up with the right result.

What we're really talking about is surface-gap-filling.

So yes, "into" at some level of magnification. "Onto" at another.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oilite

However I try to avoid using soapy chemicals on my cast iron. If I do use soap it's literally one drop onto the scrub brush instead of the pan. Although I'm sure that if you went heavier on the soap nothing would come of it anyway. Most of the time I use water and a scrub brush. I scrub with good speed and not a lot of pressure to break off lingering debris.

And if I'm going to be using it the next day I'll leave it shiny, but if it's going to sit for a couple days I'll leave it on a little longer until it's a little more matte looking. Not 100% matte, but not "shiny" either. Just a sheen. That way it won't be sticky during storage where it will collect dust and contaminants.

edit: I discovered cast iron about a year ago and now I do roughly 90% of my cooking on it. If there were reliable, science-based information about how to care for the pan best, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. As an example, a lot of people caution against seasoning with too much oil. They say that when you season your pan (e.g. initially, in the oven), you should wipe the oil off until the pan looks dry. I took this literally, and wiped until it looked the same as before I put on the oil. As a result, my seasoning had approximately no effect. After experimenting, I've decided that the "looks dry" advice isn't wrong exactly, but "dry" needs clarification. It should look more like how you would like it to look when it comes out of the oven — dry, but darker and with more sheen.

I think the trouble here is that the people who best understand cast iron are probably also the least likely to care about the science of it.

The main reason not to leave too much oil in the pan is that it will go rancid and get sticky and generally gross. That's not something you run up against if you use the pan several times a week, but if you have something like a dutch oven that you use maybe once or twice a month, you will come back to a mess that you have to deal with before you can cook in it.

The whole "you're making a polymer coating that mimics a teflon pan" idea is something that sounds fancy, but is impractical and unnecessary in practice.

Hmm. Perhaps. I said science-based information because while I find the science (chemistry, polymerization, etc) of cast iron interesting, I primarily care about the results. For example, knowing that flax oil gives the non-stickiest finish but is prone to flaking and thus high maintenance. Perhaps empirical would have been a better word than science-based. I suspect there are a fair number of people like me, who would like to know more about the trade-offs involved in different oils and maintenance procedures. But perhaps these aren't the people who best understand cast iron, as you say.

Two things of note:

- The best answer in the FAQ in the top comment of this thread, by FAR, is #2, about heat spreading. It gives numbers and additional information (about radiating the heat) that I didn't know before.

- Flax is the only oil that I understand even some of the trade-offs of using. That is a direct result of the post linked in this thread publicly making a hypothesis and providing detailed-enough steps for (some people) to reproduce its results.

Speaking of, as a cast iron enthusiast, would you be willing to share your experiences and/or do some experiments to help test my hypothesis on cleaning methods, here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25716850

I have a cast iron and a carbon steel skillet. I will always reach for the cast iron to sear a steak, but the carbon steel skillet gets used for pretty much everything else.

Somebody's never had latkes before.

Correct.

I will sometimes do the oil and bake thing for our Dutch oven if it has been neglected a while and has bits of rust or other questionable-ness to it.

chemically, carbon steel is very similar to cast iron, so all the info regarding cleaning is still applicable. you should probably expect to do a little more work to maintain the seasoning on a carbon steel pan though.

:/

Another good method is outlined in this America's Test Kitchen video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suTmUX4Vbk

If you have a friend who runs a Chinese restaurant, you could always try this, too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGXGJD2xTzQ

I do this regularly and always clean my pan with soap after use.

The wok burner I have is this one: https://www.amazon.ca/Eastman-Outdoors-37212-Gourmet-Carbon/...

It’s a ton of fun to cook on, and useful for way more than just the wok. When I go diving and get crabs for example, this thing gets a huge pot of water boiling in no time and makes prepping a lot of crabs really easy.

And yeah, it’ll season any pan like nothing else. I was terrible at seasoning pans until I started throwing them on this thing.

> I had friends dedicate years to flax seed oil. They're not happy about it, as they've got flaking to deal with.

I happen to have bought some flax oil specifically for seasoning my cast iron - you’re saying it’s contraindicated though? (So “you don’t need special oil, but _especially_ not these” (leaving only peanut and avocado))?

For the amount of times the word “science” is dropped there’s still a good amount of myth and legend associated with owning cast iron. Short of having my own double blind statically significant study and perhaps a microscope to observe the polymerization effects, I’m still flopping back/forth a bit about what “the best” or at least not leaving a simple improvement on the table, is. What a journey.

Still worth the trouble, though. Cooking is fun, and cast iron is a good cooking tool.

Having some good success and failure I am willing to try a few ideas in the article.

One variation a YouTuber offered was to heat the oil in the pan on the stove and then wipe the excess.

So far I have duplicated a lot of points in the article with different success ratios. I do agree a long smoke rate, upside down and long cooling period is ideal.

I use the grill so I don’t worry about the smoke generation.

More or less I’ve used this on the last successful project, but with corn oil. I went with a hybrid seasoning oil recently and I’m not impressed. I’ll try flax next.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...

Just fry up a full pan of very heavily salted potato peels. Use more oil and a lot more salt than you would normally use for pan frying. Make sure to move them around, don't be afraid to scrub them around, they will feel gritty due to all the salt. Fry the peels until they're very dark, they should be far too dark and salty to be edible.

Wash out the pan with hot water and dry it. Done.

It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. It's the method used in professional kitchens, as far as I know.

Despite the flax oil article being bad science, it is still the most science of any of the cast iron information out there, which is why it continues to enjoy such popularity. Even if it is bad science, it at least provides some hypotheses to test!

Here's my hypotheses on soap (edit: rephrased to better reflect my meaning):

1) Soap is fine to use; it will not damage the seasoning.

2) Seasoning is often damaged (at least a little) while cooking and it is important to re-season regularly to keep the pan in good shape.

3) If you do not use soap, the amount of oil left on the surface is similar to the amount you would want to wipe on when re-seasoning.

Basically, I think no soap + dry on stove is a shortcut to avoid the process/effort of reseasoning the pan (especially if you do the oil-and-salt-as-an-abrasive trick). Perhaps you'll get better results using soap and then wiping on oil, but it's more work and many people don't do the second part. Thus, they see better results when they don't use soap.

This would explain why some people tell you you need to reseason after every use, while others say that's bubkis, and why the same is true of soap avoidance.

To test: try all 4 combinations of soap/no-soap and reseasoning/just-drying (always dry the same way, on the stovetop).

These are my most often used pans, and have remained that way for many years.

Fwiw I rarely need or use a scraper or salt while cleaning , I’ll “deglaze” if there is fond in the pan, even in the rare case that I’m not using the result for anything.

Specifically the idea is that IF the seasoning layer is quite durable and is difficult to damage or wear through, except by the rough metal of the spatula I use, then the best seasoning should be achieved by thoroughly cleaning any contaminants off it and then applying a fresh coat of oil.

It will likely take longer than the HN comment window before I feel comfortable drawing any conclusions, so I'm not sure how I'll follow up on this. Perhaps I'll post something at https://smichel.me/castiron (currently this page does not exist).

What you say seems more or less correct to me. I think if you approach cast iron that way, you will have good results.

Basically, you don't want the pan to look "not-oiled", and how much effort you need to put into that depends on how much you are removing the existing oil during the cooking process.

I think the "looks oily" test is the proper determinant for if the cast iron is in good shape. Trying to develop a "seasoning" layer is likely to just cause frustration.

They don't conflict if the seasoning is already damaged (during cooking) before cleaning it. Cleaning with soap would not repair it at all (thus, reseasoning is required), whereas if you don't use soap, the pan is reseasoned in the same step as drying it on the stove.

Part of the problem was that I was overloading the word "reseasoning" to also refer to doing it in an explicit step (ie, the wiping on/off of oil) as well as the effect of rebuilding the layer of seasoning.

I've edited my post to hopefully be more clear.

+1 on the squirt bottle of oil, I started doing that a few years ago and it was game-changing. Previously I'd just pour a little out of the original bottle when I was cooking, which was a lot less convenient than having something appropriately sized and within arms reach.

Source: lack of historic availability of avocado oil in the South

I find fatty meats(bacon, sausage) or just canned lard to work absolutely best for seasoning. It's also what our ancestors used before they probably even knew what an avocado was. For a vegan, I'd assume shortening is ok as well, but I've never actually tested that.

This is less effort than using soap, and more effective. The stainless smooths out any imperfections that form in the seasoning over time, and cooking with oil continuously reseasons it.

I found that I had to re-season my pans every 5-10 years if I used soap, and that the seasoning was an inferior cooking surface (more food stuck to it). With the technique I described above, I can cook eggs and they don’t stick. (be sure to preheat, use plenty of oil, and then don’t touch for a minute or two at the beginning of cooking)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FKBR1ZG/

Cleaning gets much easier:

1. Rinse dirty pan out with some warm water 2. Clean the chunks and stuff that sticks to the pan with the chainmail 3. Rinse again under some warm water

That’s it. The oil from whatever you were cooking should still be on there; no need to put peanut or avocado oil on there unless you burnt it all off or cooked something acidic (use a different pan for that; you’ll learn).

Other people seem to have a bigger problem with burnt-on bits than I do. I don't know why that is, but I'm inclined to trust my process.

Also I like washing all the cooking oil off so I don't have used oil sitting around going rancid. Surfactants are good for that.

Acidic stuff is also fine. If my pan looks thirsty afterwards, I've got the squirt bottle and paper towels, it's easy. Cast iron is the least sensitive, most versatile tool in my kitchen. I'm not babying it.

I use cast iron and carbon steel for high-temperature cooking. If I really care about the non-stick-ness I'll usually use nonstick. But nonstick doesn't char well (and isn't safe). So when I want a serious sear or browning, I use iron & stell.

Problem is, if something burns on, it burns on hard. Soap doesn't really help. Water and scrubbing mostly do, but they don't completely get it off. I can't even tell when the remaining patina is seasoning and when it's just gunk -- until it becomes rough to the touch, in which case it's obvious, and I scrub hard.

This doesn't seem to agree with either experience or the scientific understanding of the polymerization process that needs to occur in a well seasoned cast iron pan.

The best oil for seasoning is flaxseed oil, which has very low smoke point. I mean you can use high smoke points oils, but you want your oil to start smoking.

I used avocado, coconut and flaxseed oils for seasoning - flaxseed is the easiest and delivered best results IMO. Plus it's nice oil for salads and some smoothies. It's not a "special" oil.

As for soap, I used it from time to time. However, why my pans are at the peak of seasoning - there is just no need to use soap.

I get his point about the older ones having smooth(er) finish due to production methods change, but what stops SOME modern manufacturers to do the same? Surely for a community that is essentially a cult, there should be enough people buying it to worth the additional manufacturing cost?

I believe there are manufacturers filling that niche now. Field [0] is one that I'm aware of. I think there are four or five others.

[0] https://fieldcompany.com/

https://fieldcompany.com/pages/how-to-season-cast-iron-pan-s...

Oven seasoning instructions:

https://fieldcompany.com/pages/how-to-season-cast-iron-pan-s...

How to care for cast iron cookware:

https://fieldcompany.com/pages/how-to-clean-maintain-cast-ir...

I have one of their pans and it's excellent.

Been using safflower for over 20 years on my day-use skillet.

This sounds somewhat like "special" to me.

Here is a blog post [0] I read a few months ago about wood finishes. I think the following applies just as much to cast iron as to the wood he is talking about:

  So, when I choose a finish, I ignore the industry-standard scratch and adhesion tests. Instead, I separate finishes into two buckets:

  1.   Finishes that look incredible immediately but look like crap in 20 years (the short-run finishes) vs. finishes that look incredible when worn/abused (the long-run finishes).

  2.   Finishes that want me dead vs. finishes that I can apply while buck naked.

Teflon will be great to cook on initially. As soon as it gets damaged, it will be hard to fix without stripping and redoing everything.

Oil will take more maintenance over time, but if it starts looking bad, you just put a bit more on. That's exactly how you should treat cast iron as well.

The trouble people run into is they try to use oil to create a teflon surface. That's not what it's for.

[0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/11/30/rip-the-anarchists-...