You must log in or # to comment.
I don’t know if people will be angry with me but I just cook in it for iron. So I just clean it normally with water later (no soap most of the time). Heat it to dry, and apply a bit of oil and store it. That way I never have grimes and dirty pieces there.
I never touched a cast iron pan in my life growing up, it simply wasn’t a thing. My ex had one and shortly after we met I was cleaning up his kitchen for him, found his nasty crusty cast iron pan and washed it. (We didn’t have Internet then so it’s not like I would have looked it up). His Australian parents were horrified. I still hate the filthy things.
That is yuck. Sometimes you do need to wash them properly with soap and everything, and just re-season them or whatever the cast iron enthusiast say.
That’s reminds when people don’t clean their BBQ and it’s this smelly source of fat going bad.
Not sure where this superstition came from. You can clean your cast iron with soap, pretty much any kind. Seasoning is very tough, around the hardness of glass. Pretty much the only real guidelines are don’t use anything abrasive like bar keepers friend (unless you wanna reseason), and don’t leave it wet.
The people leaving a layer of uncleaned grease on their pans have no clue what they are doing.
Does it really make a difference? Personally I want my pan to sparkle but are these people really experiencing any negative effects? I realize food born illnesses exist but it doesn’t seem like the practice is bad enough to matter.
Yeah you’re definitely over complicating it hommie
More expensive???
Most of the care tips you see on cast iron are just superstition.
It’s actually super easy to care for. You just scrub it with some salt and a boar bristle brush, dry it with a linen towel, then store it in a marble sepulchre facing North.
if I don’t have a sepulchre will a charnal house do?
If you’re not going to take this seriously, just get a Teflon pan.
Absolutely fucking not
That better be magnetic north
My sepulchre hasn’t been marble 100 percent of the time, I’ll try harder
And all the ley lines intersect there
Folks love to harp on about how “iTs So HaRd To CaRe FoR” but honestly Teflon pans (the more common option) are worse
Cast iron:
- be a little careful when washing it
- will last longer than your grandkids
Teflon:
- don’t get it too hot
- don’t use metal tools
- don’t use too much oil
- often not oven-safe
- will last like 10 years at most
Teflon Poisons the entire planet. Also when over heated, creates Florine gas that may be harmful if you are in close proximity.
The fuck? Nonstick lasts like one year, MAYBE two. It’s not worth it.
Also cast iron also cooks different. Not better, different.
You’re buying trash pans if they only last a year.
Acidic stuff will eat into the seasoning on cast iron, so that be careful with those.
Honestly I’ve been told this a bunch, but I cook so much tomato-filled Italian/Mediterranean food and then just leave the pan until the next day to clean, never seen any serious issues from it. Seasoning is also regenerative, so even if you do fuck it up a bit, a couple of meals later it will be basically back to normal.
I make shakshuka in mine fairly often and never had a problem, but if that’s all I used it for I could see it causing trouble
Yes this. Literally just handwash with soap and water. Season occasionally (clean & then scrub with steel wool to get an even surface, very small amount of oil/lard spread over pan very thinly, oven at 260c/500f until totally dried/hardened, repeat a couple times).
Oven safe, nonstick, durable.
Stainless steel pans are quite nice too.
The best ones imo. No microplastics, zero maintenance, extreme durability, not hard to wash and not so expensive nowadays.
My grandmother still uses her stainless steel pans that are like 50 or 60 yo, and they still look perfect, almost like new, if not for the scratches. They were a gift when she married, and she literally never bought pans for herself in her life.
They’re better than cast iron for some things in my experience. Acidic dishes, eggs (scrambled always stick to cast iron for me). But cast iron’s heat retention is superior, providing a more even cooking surface on electric ranges - good for searing meat and most other applications.
Also teflon is TOXIC
A common misconception, the teflon molecules are very stable and don’t react with almost everything, when ingested it usually just goes through your system in and out, no considerable interaction.
Now the other chemicals used to make Teflon ARE TOXIC, and are present literally, and I mean literally, everywhere on the globe.
Here’s an educative video from Veritasium about the subject, super interesting watch.
I exclusively use stainless steel pans in my kitchen. None of the weird chemicals from teflon, I can scrape the shit out of them with metal tools and I can toss them in the dishwasher with no second thought. The only downside is that I have to deglaze from time to time while cooking to get stuck bits off, but it’s really not that bad.
Can you explain the deglazing process and reasoning. I just got two stainless pans and I’m very curious.
Sometimes brown bits get stuck to the bottom of the pan while cooking and the best way to get them off is to toss some water into the pan before those bits can burn. Not much, maybe like a tablespoon - it dissolves all the brown bits into a very tasty brown sauce that coats the rest of the food in the pan. It’s really not complicated, but the added moisture sometimes makes the cooking take a bit longer and isn’t ideal when your goal is to cook something very dry and crispy (like when frying tofu)
Very interesting thank you. I’ll have to give this a try.
You can deglaze with alcohol as well, and then reduce it into a delicious sauce.
Now, that being said those browned bits are delicious and are the starting point for a lot of sauces. A dirty steel pan is an opportunity for loads of flavor (provided were talking about a seared or sauteed food, not like pasta or something.
I agree with you on the stainless. I do still have one cast iron pan that I swear by for certain things but I also don’t baby it in any way. I also have a couple of ceramic coated pans for specific things that love to stick to stainless. I mostly use the stainless and the cast iron, though.
I thought Teflon coatings were only good for 5yrs before the shit PFAS start leeching out.
It’s entirely possible, I’ve actually never even had one last even that long and just kinda guesstimated how long a pan that had been absolutely baby’d would last.
Sorry for linking R*ddit, but this thread seems to mirror my suspicions, 3-5 years on average, 10 if you treat it insanely well.
Sending this to my wife. How does she bake shit in so bad? Jump her shit
I was done with cast iron when I got a new cast iron pan that rusted the same day because it was humid and I didn’t get a chance to glaze it for just a few too many hours.
Oh well, I prefer to do big batches of one-pot cooking anyway. Simple, easy, efficient.
You can just scrub the rust off and glaze it, it’s fine
Yeah i dont wanna bother having to sort through all the misinformation and contradictory advice on cast iron pans at this point. Cuz I’ll read someone say “I wash it all the time” and then the next comment will be “I washed mine and it rusted instantly”
I just use carbon steel and it treats me right.
I mean, carbon steel is basically the same thing in terms of how you care for it.
Even with rust, it can be fixed with a decent scrubbing. Small trace amounts of rust shouldn’t harm you either, just give you more small metals than usual.
Of course it’s going to rust instantly, that’s why you hit it with the brillo pad and then re-season it immediately after.
Eh, a little extra iron in your diet ain’t the end of the world. I just boil some water in it, pour it our, hit it with the chain mail, then rinse and smear around a decent sized dollop of pig fat in it and call it a day.
Ain’t nobody got chain mail and pig fat lying about!
Really??? You can get a chainmail scrubber at most places that sell cast iron pans, and pig fat is leftover Bacon grease. Lots of people have that, right?
Had to Google the chainmail scrubber, that’s really cool. Maybe they haven’t made it over to Ireland yet haha. I want one.
Yeah except it only rusts instantly if you royally fucked up lol. This is not rocket science. It’s not even slightly challenging. A six year old can do it.
Well all that other than lift it
You need to really be into cooking before something like cast iron versus whatever else will ever be an issue in your life.
I yanked my set of cast iron out from under an abandoned single-wide trailer in the desert next to a junk-yard, they were partially buried in an ant mound. Over the last couple decades I have abused them hard, both in restoration and in cooking/cleaning, they’re just work-horse cookware I don’t have to be too concerned about, but if I put a little extra effort in I can use them to get a perfect crust on a ribeye when I cook meat for friends and family. If that kind of thing is important to you… well don’t worry, you can also get that with steel!
People who obsess about their cast iron just either really, really enjoy micromanagement in their lives, or have nothing else that makes them feel special.
Hallelujah!
more expensive?
I once had a girlfriend whose mom bought a 300€ cast iron pan that she was talked into at one of those marketing events. Eastcon is a fucking con.
I have a set of cast-iron I found under an abandoned trailer next to a junkyard. They cost exactly nothing and I got to have nerdy fun restoring them over a weekend afternoon, I have been using them for 20 years.
That sounds like the best set of cast iron.
Lol a few minutes with an angle grinder and a flap wheel will take it back down to metal real fast.
Sure, but not having those tools, I used the wonders of SCIENCE.
Some washing soda, a steel rod, a 12v battery charger and a tub of water and overnight all the rust had migrated to the steel rod.
It’s in the name.
Yeah, I understood that, but try saying that to a woman in her 50s in eastern Europe ~10 years ago lol, it’s not like she spoke English
300€ WTFFFFFFFFF!!! For a pan??
So what they do is they tell you you won a free lunch (the irony is not lost on me) from like a raffle or something, which you can claim at location x at time y. Aaaaand then it turns out the free lunch is actually a marketing event where they make you (and the people who come with you) barely any food, while extolling the virtues of their ridiculously overpriced products.
I’d just gone through it with my grandma who’s luckily a moderately sharp pencil and invited me and my mom along. We just outright refused to buy anything and ate the cookies and shit (they were demonstrating a cookie maker lmao, made like 3 cookies). But my ex’s mom went there I think either alone or with someone who yes-manned her into spending money on the pan. And I think she did it in installments too.
This was like 10 years ago. It’s a proper scam, idk if they still do it, but I bet they do.
And yes, the pan was excellent, it came with a removable handle and a kinda cone shaped lid that had a hole in the center, which was useful (lets humidity out, but fat doesn’t splatter everywhere). But I was still flabbergasted to hear someone would spend 300€ on a pan. In like 2015 or 2016 Estonia. Her net salary was under 1000€ a month.
I can be tempted by cast iron with a nice image on the base, though probably not for that much.
Vintage, or nicely finished pans with polished surfaces or extra greebles and nubbins can be expensive.
Something liked a lodge pan will be cheap but the bottom of it kind of sucks without being ground down ether by long usage or by tools.
My gigantic cast iron had a rather annoying raised ring around the bottom. It was fine on a coil electric range, gas stove, or campfire, but when I moved into a place with a flat top, it was annoying since it didn’t actually make contact. I took an angle grinder to it and ground it flat. Night and day differerence.
I cook on gas, couldn’t care less about the smoothness of the bottom but I get people would if cooking on glass top
In general thought, cast iron is cheaper than any pan equivalent in performance… the cheaper stufq they sell at grocery stores are practically dispossable
They don’t mean the underside.
They mean smooth on the inside. The bottom as In where tu out your food to cook.
My brother has one like that that was ground smooth brand new. I had mixed opinions when I uses it.
I mean like, the interior cooking surface is rough.
I’m not sure if you are joking or not but when you buy the pan you are supposed to do the first seasoning in the oven a half dozen times. By the end of that the pan should be smooth. I tend not to look at new cast iron since I have so many I yhrisfted over the years. I suppose the import mass produced stuff might look awful on close inspection.
Nah, you’re not gonna smooth that out with seasoning. Like, it’s the texture of the sand mold just like the rest of it, zero sanding or grinding on the cooking surface to smooth it out and this isn’t a “cheap import” kind of thing, the brand I’m thinking of, lodge, are made in America. Like, they’re functional pans, but the roughness makes them harder to use than something with a polished or even sanded cooking surface, stuff just catches on the nooks and crannies regardless of seasoning. Like a quick pass with a sander or grinder improves them immensely, but that’s not really something most people are going to bother with.
I’ll keep an eye out then. Wild that something that quality survives on the market.
What they’re talking about sounds like the pan I have. Bought it in the camping aisle, and it was much cheaper than the ones in the kitchen aisle. I haven’t found the roughness to be much of an issue; I probably have to use more oil than I would otherwise. It has gotten smoother over many years of use.
I mean, there are a bunch of American cast iron companies still making really good stuff, most are just kinda pricy, like 100 bucks for a skillet. Lodge is just notable for being super cheap, 20 bucks for a skillet, and having a very crude finish compared to the others.
The glass cooktops are insanely scratch resistant. I use a metal scraper to clean mine.
If you consider the lifetime, it’s the cheapest type of pan by far.
Also you can clean them stop spreading misinformation pls 😘
If it’s too heavy for you there is stainless steel or carbon steel which also last but those aren’t as cheap.
Yeah I’ve been using my mom’s cast iron pan since she died like 7 years ago. Barring a level of fuck up I don’t think I can manage it should last the lifetime of the person who inherits it from me
I’ve got a little pan that’s on it’s third lifetime now, and no idea what it originally cost, but guaranteed it was worth the price for a multigenerational product.
You basically have to drop them from a second story window to break them
I did warp one slightly one time by getting it super hot and allowing it to cool unevenly. I still have it and use it. It might not sit flat on a cooktop but it’s just fine for camping.
And you will break the floor too
Preferably the street
The lifetime is usually about 1 week. I can leave all my other pans soaking in the sink for a day without rusting… I don’t have the time or energy to do dishes every day.
Okay even if you forget to clean it and it rusts, you can just use a steel sponge to get all the rust off and then you just need to re-season it for a few mins and you’re good to go again
Don’t soak it if you aren’t going to wash it… like just leave it on the counter or if you want to really get ahead for it pour some salt in the pan and let that sit until you feel like cleaning it. Because you can use metal on it without damaging it it’s not even hard to clean.
Teflon pans are disposable with a limited life that releases toxins into your body which is bad
Stainless steel is much less non stick but can at least stand up to soaking
Carbon steel also shouldn’t be soaked
Copper is expensive and also has care requirements
This. Just leave it on your stove with oil / food in it til you’re ready to clean it. Then use soap water and a chainmail scrubber. Be as aggressive as you want. The smoother it is the better. If you have a cheap lodge, taking the time to actually use a sander will bring it to high quality smooth like a more expensive finex or other.
After cleaning toss back on the stove on the heat for like 1 min to dry it out and you’re good to go. Ideally toss a little oil in the pan after heating and use a paper towel to rub it around, but if you are in a rush don’t even have to do that.
Honestly I just swipe it with a dish sponge until everything is off, rinse, then swipe it with a dish towel
Lol.
A) yes you do. You’re conflating not wanting to slightly alter your habits with not possible.
B) you can also leave it on the counter or the stovetop. You shouldn’t leave any metal object soaking in the sink for a day. Leave them on the counter and then put them in the sink to soak like 5 min before you start cleaning them.
A) you don’t know someone’s situation so don’t pass judgement when there are very valid reasons theg may not have the time of energy, as if mental health isn’t a valid reason already
B) soaking for 5 minutes is definitely not the same getting a good long soak
deleted by creator
I usually put water right into the hot pan. Flakes all the food off instantly, and it’s a lot of fun to quench it. Then a squirt of dishsoap (I keep a bottle of diluted dish soap by the sink, super handy!), scrub, rinse, and you’re done in actual seconds.
If you’re soaking it to get stuck on stuff out of it… well stuff shouldn’t be sticking to it that aggressively. and if you’re soaking it to keep stuff from drying on, well, just rinse it out before leaving it to clean later.
I put mine in the dishwasher like maniac. And I don’t season it, I just spray pam on it. Works fine, purists are just being weird about it.
I don’t put mine in the dishwasher and I don’t use soap when cleaning mine (cleans easy enough with hot water, dish rag, and sometimes steel wool), but I don’t season either. I just use a refillable oil spray bottle.
There are a lot of myths and legends around cast iron that are due to older circumstances that are no longer applicable. And spray on oil seems like a pretty efficient way to season given that it’ll apply a fairly light and even.
I seen a quote yesterday that I liked and it seems fitting here.
Tradition is not an excuse to not think critically.
I heard tradition is the dead telling the living what to do.
Not that all tradition is bad, but many are out dated or were never made for a good reason.
While you are technically correct, I think essentially tradition IS the excuse to not think rationally.
Most spray oils are high smoke point for frying, which is the opposite of what you want for seasoning
What? You want high smoke point oils for seasoning. You want to season the pans in temperatures higher than you would be normally cooking in, which means higher smoke point oils. I season all of my cast iron and carbon steel with canola, works great.
If you season with Extra Virgin Olive Oil, it’s going to burn the seasoning off under normal circumstances.
https://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-for-seasoning-cast-iron/
tl;dr Flax oil is best, low-smoke-point oils in general polymerize better, resulting in better and tougher non-stick coatings, but there’s more to it than just smoke point
I mean, there are a lot of types of spray cooking oil I’ve seen. Coconut, olive oil, and soybean (vegetable oil) are what I see most commonly, and none of those have particularly high smoke points.
A good seasoning should withstand some pretty brutal punishment. And even if it doesn’t, you can easily reseason the pan which you’ll have to do from time to time regardless.
I season my cookie sheets the same way. I’ve put them in the dishwasher, hit them with those steel wire soapy things, used barkeeper’s friend, not much has taken the seasoning off once it’s on there.
Except for lemon juice. Lemon juice fucks it right up.
Lemon juice. Tomato sauce. That one egg that for some reason decided to be a real motherfucker.
I love my cast iron cookware, but it can be a fickle bitch.
Never really had a problem with frying eggs on cast iron, often do pancakes on it.
If the yolk directly touches the surface, the emulsifiers could potentially mess with things?
I thought the concern was rust more than anything
It is, it’s important to dry them quickly. Some dishwashers have a heated dry that could help, but I wouldn’t trust it personally.
I got a fridge magnet like this a while ago for a friend:
…why are you not cleaning your cast iron pan?
It’s old wisdom from way back when soap was made from lye.
That kind of soap is much harsher and can dissolve the seasoning, which is just a bunch of layers of polymerized oil that protects the metal from rust and gives it a glossy, almost non-stick coating.
Modern dish soap is nowhere near that harsh and is completely safe to use on a seasoned cast iron pan. It’s just that your grandparents and great grandparents beat that lesson into their kids and it stuck.
Cast iron is fine to cook on, but I much prefer stainless steel. It’s a bit harder to get the results you want, but it’s way easier to maintain.
They say high temp stainless basically becomes non stick. I just get stuff sticking then immediately burning and smoking out my kitchen.
no, medium-ish temp.
stainless steel has pores that close at the right temp so food wont stick.
you need to practice it on your cooktop yourself to find out what setting. after its heated, drip a big drop of water on it and it should dance around and sizzle. too hot or too cold it will stay where it is in the pan. theres prob a video you can watch to see what the drop of water should look like
Lower your temps. Stainless only sticks like that if you get it too hot.
This but also stop trying to unstick stuff when its not finished cooking yet.
That was one thing i had to learn when moving to stainless, you need to wait for the protein to unstick itself. Which when you’re so used to cooking on non-stick seems insane and risky.
Oh yeah good call good call. I’m so used to doing that with cast iron I didn’t even think about that. But yeah it’s harder with stainless for sure.
It takes practice and making sure it’s at the correct temperature. If I can fry eggs in stainless steel without sticking you can too friend. Follow the instructions on this page to get you started:
https://theskillfulcook.com/how-to-know-when-stainless-steel-pan-is-ready/
Heat up the pan on medium setting and then apply oil, if it smokes it is too hot. And don’t use olive oil, use an oil with a reasonably high smoke point. And you need to use more oil/fat than you’d normally do on other (non-stick) pans.
Don’t use extra virgin / virgin olive oil.* Regular olive oil has a higher smoke point.
There’s a good chance the dry detergent for a dishwasher can still strip the seasoning off cast iron. Especially generic brands. They’re supposed to have buffers in them to prevent it, but every additive, and mixing time, adds cost.
Your typical hand dish soap is probably safe as long as you’re not scrubbing with steel wool.
IIRC, powdered dish washing detergent is mildly abrasive, and it gets jetted around at relatively high speeds (compared to hand washing). That’s also why it’s bad for knives.
Thats interesting, I heard it was a smear campaign by marketing companies to sell Teflon pans.
Godort’s grandma probably: come here Godort. Grandpa’s gotta beat you again for using soap on the cast iron pan
at least Godort didn’t use The Good Scissors
AHHHHH NOT THE GOOD SCISSORS
sEaSoNinG
They last forever and don’t contain forever chemicals.
The old cast iron skillets might have lead.
IIRC the forever chemicals are not the coating that stays on the pan. The Teflon coating is inert, the toxic part is the water soluble PFAS they use to apply it that would go away (away meaning everywhere, each and every corner of the planet) while or shortly after manufacturing, or with the first uses.
So if you already own non-sticky pans don’t get rid of them, but look for another alternative when you buy a new one tho.
Don’t they release microplastics as well?
It’s not quite inert, a too-hot Teflon pan will release toxic gasses that can kill smaller pets like birds.
And cause flu like symptoms in humans
It’s still inert.
Inert simply means that the chemical bonds are relatively stable, not that they’re indestructible.
You can decompose anything if you get it hot enough.
Everything contains chemicals, and if it lasts forever it must contain forever chemicals.
But it doesn’t have PFAS which is good.
no, cus it is just iron. the “seasoning” is the cover you make yourself which is why most people say you can’t clean it.
Even cast iron pans have toxic things in them like lead, cadmium, and antimony. https://www.mychemicalfreehouse.net/2025/08/le-creuset-toxicity-review-lead-cadmium-pfas.html
It’s just very unlikely to get into your bloodstream and even then it’s an incredibly small amount. Completely different than PFAS where you’re getting double dipped on toxic chemicals: those dumped by the chemical companies into nature and those that offgas into your home.
lead
I’ve seen multiple people recommending to test the lead levels of any cast iron pots you buy secondhand, since apparently a common use for them is melting down scrap lead to make your own bullets and family members sell them off after their owner dies without knowing they’ll now poison anyone who cooks with them.
Yeah that’s good to do, but the link I provided was testing brand new pans. Turns out metal doesn’t just come out of the ground as one big blob, but mixed together with lots of other metals that are hard to separate! 🤷
But yeah good to check.
I think they just meant “chemicals” in the sense of “chemical element”, as in “to last forever, it must be made of something that lasts forever, and everything is made from chemical elements, so this must contain ‘forever chemicals’”. It was just a joke… And the PFAS statement that followed made it pretty clear that they know what they were talking about.
yeaa, okay that makes sense
Well but that seasoning is also random collection of polymers, probably not very healthty either when dissolved in a tomato sauce
it’s just an oil? like rapeseed oil is what I used – like you make it yourself you know 😁
Yeah start out as oil but with temperature end up a bioplastic
That’s like saying wine is just grapes. Cast iron seasoning is a highly temperature resistant biopolymer made by burning thin layers of oil onto cast iron (or carbon steel). There’s no evidence it’s harmful to ingest or that it offgasses at cooking temperatures, but it is a polymer. If it was still oil it would still be liquid.
Once again, no evidence it’s harmful and if I had to bet on the health and safety of popular cooking surfaces it would only be beat by glass because that shit is stupid inert without flaking. Then cast iron and carbon steel (same seasoning). Then stainless in the middle (I’m not certain I trust all the metals to make it stainless. And Teflon and copper vying for last place as known to contain risks to health if misused.
Holy crap, people really don’t get your joke it seems. Guess my upvote can only give so much relief, but I thought it was funny if that helps.
deleted by creator
It helps with iron deficiency.
This can look like a joke for some, but it’s actually true. For anyone skeptical, search fr academic articles on the matter and see it for yourself.
