Weekly Tips for Maintaining, Restoring and Preserving Your Estate Sale Purchases & Personal Treasures

(CLICK HERE for a listing of all postings)
*******

January 11, 2015

~SEASONING & CLEANING CAST-IRON COOKWARE~

 

Seasoning
Traditional cast-iron skillets don't emerge from the box with a nonstick surface. That comes with seasoning, or coating the skillet with cooking oil and baking it in a 350° F oven for an hour. It won't take on that shiny black patina just yet, but once you dry it with paper towels, it will be ready to use. You'll reinforce the nonstick coating every time you heat oil in the skillet, and you can hasten the process by seasoning as often as you like.

Cleaning
A cast-iron skillet isn't ideal for a set-aside-to-soak sort of person. For best results, rinse the pan with hot water immediately after cooking. If you need to remove burned-on food, scrub with a mild abrasive, like coarse salt, and a nonmetal brush to preserve the nonstick surface; you can also use a few drops of a mild dishwashing soap every once in a while. If the pan gets a sticky coating or develops rust over time, scrub it with steel wool and re-season it. To prevent rust, dry the skillet thoroughly and lightly coat the cooking surface with cooking oil. Cover with a paper towel to protect it from dust.

Seasoning is actually not a thin layer of oil; it's a thin layer of polymerized oil, a key distinction. In a properly seasoned cast iron pan, one that has been rubbed with oil and heated repeatedly, the oil has already broken down into a plastic-like substance that has bonded to the surface of the metal. This is what gives well-seasoned cast iron its non-stick properties, and as the material is no longer actually an oil, the surfactants in dish soap should not affect it. Go ahead and soap it up and scrub it out.

Cast Iron Is Not Difficult To Maintain
Cast iron is tough as nails! There's a reason why there are 75-year-old cast iron pans kicking around at yard sales and antique shops. The stuff is built to last and it's very difficult to completely ruin it. Most new pans even come pre-seasoned, which means that the hard part is already done for you and you're ready to start cooking right away.

Storage: If your seasoning is built up in a nice thin, even layer like it should be, then don't worry. It won’t chip off. You can store cast iron pans nested directly in each other.

Does Cast Iron Heat Evenly?
Actually, cast iron is terrible at heating evenly. The main advantage of cast iron is that it has very high volumetric heat capacity, which means that once it's hot, it stays hot. This is vitally important when searing meat. To really heat cast iron evenly, place it over a burner and let it preheat for at least 10 minutes or so, rotating it every once in a while. Alternatively, heat it up in a hot oven for 20 to 30 minutes (but remember to use a potholder or dish towel!)

The one thing you shouldn'tdo? Let it soak in the sink. Try to minimize the time it takes from when you start cleaning to when you dry and re-season your pan. If that means letting it sit on the stovetop until dinner is done, so be it.

Cooking Acidic Foods in Cast Iron
In a well-seasoned cast iron pan, the food in the pan should only be coming in contact with the layer of polymerized oil in the pan, not the metal itself. So in a perfect world, this should not be a problem. But none of us are perfect and neither are our pans. No matter how well you season, there's still a good chance that there are spots of bare metal and these can indeed interact with acidic ingredients in your food.

You Can Use Metal Utensils On Your Cast Iron Pan
The seasoning in cast iron is actually remarkably resilient. It's not just stuck to the surface like tape; it's actually chemically bonded to the metal. Scrape away with a metal spatula and unless you're actually gouging out the surface of the metal, you should be able to continue cooking in it with no issue.

So you occasionally see flakes of black stuff chip out of the pan as you cook in it? It's possible that's seasoning, but unlikely. In order to get cast iron pan's seasoning to flake off, store it in the oven for a month's-worth of heating and drying cycles without re-seasoning it before you start to see some scaling. More likely, those flakes of black stuff are probably carbonized bits of food that were stuck to the surface of the pan because you refused to scrub them out with soap last time you cooked.

For this reason, it's a good idea to avoid long-simmered acidic things, particularly tomato sauce. On the other hand, a little acid is not going to hurt it. You can deglaze your pan with wine after pan-roasting chicken. A short simmer won't harm your food, your pan, or your health in any way.

Is Modern Cast Iron Just As Good As Old Cast Iron
The material may be the same, but the production methods have changed. In the old days, cast iron pans were produced by casting in sand-based molds, then polishing the resulting pebbly surfaces until smooth. Vintage cast iron tends to have a satiny smooth finish. By the 1950s, as production scaled up and was streamlined, this final polishing step was dropped from the process. The result? Modern cast iron retains that bumpy, pebbly surface.

The difference is more minor than you may think. So long as you've seasoned your pan properly, both vintage and modern cast iron should take on a nice non-stick surface, but your modern cast iron will never be quite as non-stick as the vintage stuff.

The following are the only rules you need to know to have a successful lifelong relationship with your cast iron:

 

http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/the-truth-about-cast-iron.html

 

 *******