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.
> 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.