Cast iron is not bad at all to clean if you have a chain link steel scrubber (The Lodge sells these, other companies too). Ideally you scrub it when the pan is still warm. If you've let something sit in there that hardens, like cheese, you may have to let it soak in some warm water for a bit and apply elbow grease with the scrubber. You can even fill it with water and set it on the stove to warm the water up a bit to break down anything that's hardened.

Most of the foods I cook are basic meats and veggies so it's usually quite easy to clean for those.

I wouldn’t soak a cast iron pan.

Just apply a little heat, then use a bamboo/wood spatula to scrape the stuck food, then rinse (if needed) and wipe clean.

For me, the biggest problem with Cast iron is the weight. I’m a big guy, with physical strength commensurate to my size, and cast iron pans are cumbersome to deal with. I have a 9” pan that I leave on the stove for daily use, but I don’t want to have cast iron cookware exclusively.

Carbon steel has much the same cooking properties as cast iron but is like half the weight. You can get a good pan very cheap if you want to try something more wieldy.

>For me, the biggest problem with Cast iron is the weight

Seek out better cast iron cookware. For example, Lodge brand stuff is very heavy and poorly balanced. Compare to a Wagner cast iron pan of similar size made a century ago: it is significantly lighter, and well-balanced. I'm sure there must be modern cast iron cookware that can offer the same experience, but probably not new for $30.

I have problems with my hands and those heavy Lodge pans are annoying (good value though). My old Wagner stuff is no more cumbersome than my nice stainless steel pans, and, for meats at least, is a pleasure to cook with.

Put the pan in the sink while it is still hot. Pour a bit of water in it, and it will boil, loosening the grease.

Soaps that don't include detergents are safe for cast iron, too. Many people confuse carbon and crud buildup for 'seasoning'. The seasoning you want is a micrometer-scale carbonized oil on the surface of the steel, and possible some excess carbon buildup to fill in any surface pores. A mild soap won't affect this, at all.

You can definitely damage a pan leaving it wet, so of course make sure to heat it up on the stove after washing and drying to cook off any remnants of water. I'll usually put on a very thin layer of Crisco if I've used soap.

You mean soaps that don't include caustic lye. Just about every dish soap is a detergent and safe for use with cast iron as they are not caustic.

> Avoiding this exposure will be easy for me, because I was never very comfortable microwaving plastic.

Maybe this specific one, but microplastics are in everything you eat and drink, the presented article merely points out that this specific use case produces lost of micro plastics which are ingested by children.

If you avoid this and other easily avoided situations, like stop using soft plastic drinking bottles and stop reusing bottled water bottles, you would be a big step in the right direction though.

> stop reusing bottled water bottles

Can you elaborate? Like is it somehow worse to buy a bottle of water and refill it periodically over the course of a year, than to let the original contents sit in my house for a year and then drink it? If so, I'm guessing the extra handling (squishing, crunching) is the main culprit? Or does leeching occur more readily when the contents are refreshed, as opposed to static contents that already reached equilibrium? Or is the pH (or other characteristics) of the original contents less likely to cause leeching than arbitrary contents?

Not OP, but I'd imagine the extra handling is the concern here, as far as water bottles go. You do want to refresh water in water jugs routinely as 'preservatives' like chlorine dissipate.

The better wording of 'stop reusing bottled water bottles' to avoid plastics would be 'use glass or metal water bottles'.

I've heard that handling is the main issue with leeching and also shredding of micro/nano plastics into the water, heat and UV also degrade the plastic. It's worse the thinner the plastic bottle is.

I do drink a lot of bottled water, and while I don't reuse bottles I'm still considering how much just pouring the water from the bottles into a glass would help.

The biggest drawback I find with cast iron is the weight. The cleaning, as much as you are supposed to clean it, is generally simplistic. Either just hot water and a light brush or paper.

I good think to know is that any surface that get hot enough will release a bit into the food. Cast iron generally leech iron, stainless steel leech iron, nickel, and chromium, and ceramic leech whatever coating it has similar to non-stick. There has actually been studies done on cast iron on people with iron deficiencies, with gains in haemoglobin concentration.

Carbon steel is similar to cast iron in that it gets "seasoned" over time, but is much lighter (and heats up more quickly and evenly).

the biggest appeal of cast iron is its large thermal mass, owing to the weight and material

I just think of it as a workout! But yea suckers are heavy.