
Chemistry of Cast-Iron Seasoning (2010) - Tomte
http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-for-seasoning-cast-iron/
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sevensor
Fascinating, but I'm not going to do it. I respect the people who take this
kind of care of their equipment, but I have an alternative that works quite
well for me: cook your food in an adequate amount of fat. If it sticks, you
don't have enough fat in the pan. When you're done, wipe the pan clean. If
food is stuck hard, scrape it out, using steel wool if necessary. Cast iron is
amazingly robust and develops a decent season on its own with daily use. As
long as you're not super-uptight about maintaining a polymer layer on top of
it, you basically can't do anything to hurt a cast iron skillet. And I'm far
too busy to spend a whole day thermal-cycling a chunk of metal.

~~~
vinceguidry
Cast iron is also really heavy. I have two cast iron skillets and I only use
them when my non-sticks and magnalite are already dirty.

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throwaway76543
The weight is an important feature: Cast iron has higher heat capacity and
won't lose heat as fast when food is added. This is why cast-iron should be
your go-to pan when searing a steak, for example.

The downside is that they take longer to heat, of course, so other pans can be
more suitable for some cooking tasks.

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deadmetheny
Cast iron also has an excellent use case in which you can do any searing and
such on the stove, then transfer it directly to an oven to finish. This is the
secret to making S-tier steak.

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eutectic
Reverse sear is even better; by going oven-first you dry out the surface and
get a better sear.

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deadmetheny
I look forward to trying this out!

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drderidder
Nice to see someone explaining drying oils, a discussion usually buried in
woodworking forums. That said, in addition to flaxseed oil there a few other
drying oils that can be food safe, depending on the additives, like safflower
oil, walnut oil, soybean oil and tung oil. In their raw forms those oils are
edible, but if they contain a metallic dryer catalyst to accelerate the
drying, they're not food safe. I've purchased raw linseed (aka flaxseed) oil
in a hardware store in fairly large quanity, labelled as being "safe for farm
animals". On the other hand the "boiled linseed oil" sold in the same store
contains the chemical dryer and has a label indicating it's toxic. The boiled
variety is better as a wood finish when you don't care about it being food
grade because it dries much, much faster. For wooden bowls, etc. the raw
linseed oil is preferable as a food-safe finish but it takes a very long time
(weeks) to dry unless aided by heat / sun.

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FooHentai
Good timing on this post, I was researching this last night after one of our
wooden bowls was placed in the dishwasher by mistake.

There's conflicting information out there about flax/linseed oil - All state
that the boiled variety is not food safe, but advice on raw linseed oil is
quite divided. Some advice says it's fine, some not. The bottle of raw I
currently own says not to ingest, so I'm taking it to be not food safe :)

One of the commonly suggested alternatives is to use mineral oil, or a
combination of beeswax and mineral oil. Knowing that mineral oil is a product
of crude oil refining really makes me uneasy, but at the same time I know
that's an appeal to nature fallacy.

Walnut oil is sounding like an expensive but worthwhile third option.

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likpok
Mineral oil is literally sold as a laxative. It does this mechanically, ie by
being indigestible and lubricating things along. That suggests that it’s
pretty safe to ingest.

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cr0sh
Perfectly safe to ingest. I've done it once, because, well - you know.

Taste? Literally tasteless. But it has the texture of plain oil; I can't
really describe it, but you have to have a very good gag reflex control to get
it down. Then you have in your mouth this "oiled" feel.

Not pleasant, but I was desperate and in pain, and it was all I had available
at the time.

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korethr
I discovered this site years ago, when searching for information about how to
season cast iron. I had a cast iron skillet I'd been using off and on for a
few years at that point, but was still having trouble with food sticking, and
so figured I'd made an error in seasoning the skillet initially.

I have to say, the techniques described in the article work well. I have a few
skillets I seasoned using this technique, and using only a little more as
cooking fat as I'd use in a teflon pan (1/2 Tbsp vs 1 tsp), I can cook eggs
and not have to worry about them sticking to the pan. Many a delicious
omelette has been made in my 8" lodge skillet after I seasoned it with this
technique. The same was not true beforehand.

sevensor does correctly note that this can be a lot of work and take a whole
day, but bmcusick also correctly points out that it doesn't have to. I
seasoned the 8" Lodge skillet mentioned above over the course of a week,
applying 1-2 layers in the evening while I was in the kitchen anyway to cook
dinner or clean up. And after that week was up, I then had a cast iron skillet
I could cook eggs in. Totally worth it.

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bmcusick
I've been using this technique for years and highly recommend it. I've only
had to re-season my main pan from scratch once in five years, after accidently
forgetting about it on the back porch for a week (that's Florida humidity for
you).

It's great. I've seen people warn you to not wash your cast iron with soap so
as to not damage the seasoning, but I use soap without fear. I've heard from
others they even put their cast iron in the dish washer, although I haven't
tried that personally. This creates a base layer of seasoning that's REALLY
hard to get off.

Maybe it sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn't as long as you're not
in a rush to get it all done in one day. I'd add a layer of oil, run the oven
while I gave the kids their bath, and turned it off after. Maybe 5 minutes of
work per day over 3-4 days.

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ucaetano
This isn't a "science-based" how-to, it's a "searched-about-science-on-google"
how-to.

~~~
1_2__4
The whole blog is basically just a Facebook feed.

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giardini
Nice to know somebody has (maybe?, yet again?) found the secret to seasoning
cast iron pans. I'm beyond trying to use cast-iron cookware now, thankfully.

I threw out most of a _second_ complete set of cast iron cookware. I kept a
Dutch oven, fantasizing that I'll someday carry it afield for camping. But I
probably won't.

Instead its heavy burden, like that of most cast iron cookware, will be passed
to the unlucky fool who inherits it. I have no doubt that in whatever future
time that occurs, there will be people posting articles like this anew on the
internet, encouraging the use of one of the most cantankerous and frustrating
iron-age technologies that ever existed.

Once upon a time I might have, as the article suggests, paid $17 for 50 cents'
worth of flaxseed oil in order to perform yet another tedious failed
organometallic chemistry experiment.

But instead I'll save my money for a new T-fal frying pan, which works
flawlessly, perfectly, year in and year out, without seasoning and without a
hitch. If Armageddon comes and there are no more T-fals, then I will cook with
sticks and stones before I attempt cast iron cooking again.

~~~
dogma1138
Stainless is a good alternative to cast iron as long as it’s thick enough.

Cast iron has only one major advantage and that is due to its mass it holds a
ton of heat which makes searing on it very easy.

This is important as the vast majority of thin and light cookware basically
goes cold when you dump food on it regardless of how hot it was.

So cast iron allowed you to control the temperature well and cooking or
searing food on low heat after a long pre heating period.

With good mass stainless steel cookware and a good induction cooker you can
easily achieve the same results as a good cast iron even better as a good
induction cooker would allow you much finer control over the temperature of
your cooking surface.

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SippinLean
Good stainless and induction cookware has a much more even distribution of
heat than cast iron, as well.

[http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/02/16/heavy-metal-the-
scie...](http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/02/16/heavy-metal-the-science-of-
cast-iron-cooking/index.html)

~~~
dogma1138
Yes cast iron doesn’t really heats up that evenly it just hold a lot of heat.

The problem is that a lot of cookware these days is made super super thin as a
cost saving measure and to provide fast heat transfer.

This means that you lose a lot of control as thin cookware overheats easily
and has hot spots, especially on direct transfer electric or gas stoves.

I do still own a large cast iron skillet and use it to sear large chunks of
meat but I actually polished the hell out of it with a few polishing heads on
a drill.

For seasoning I used vegan lard/cooking fat which is made out of pretty high
smoking point oils and it still holds up for 2+ years.

It took like almost a day to get it done with 8 layers of seasoning, if I’ll
have to completely redo it I would likely just say fuck it.

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pnathan
> flaxseed oil is the only drying oil that’s edible.

Ahem. Oil painter materials nerd speaking up.

The other drying oils are walnut, safflower, and poppy. They are all edible.
Although poppy is sometimes classed as semi-drying, along with sunflower, to
be pedantic...

anyway. interesting writeup. :)

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jandrese
Maybe the results are better, but this seems like an overly elaborate
technique to season a pan. It's a full day of heating/cooling/rubbing the pan
to season it? F that. There is a whole lot of handwringing over "zomg free
radicals cause cancer" in the article that's all about the nearly impervious
coating on the pan. If the coating is getting into your food in nontrivial
quantities you're doing something wrong.

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NoNotTheDuo
I think I might try this over the next few weeks. No one says you have to do
it all in one day. Do one layer a night before bed and it'll be seasoned in a
week.

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AceJohnny2
How can I find cast-iron re-seasoning services?

I have a cast iron pan that I love. It's heavy as fuck but it's just the one I
like cooking with the most. I've taken pretty good care of it, but still the
seasoned surface is pocked and scratched after years of service.

I'd like to have it reseasoned from scratch, blank-slate style. I've found
many guides on how to do that, but honestly I don't want to have to deal with
lye or electrolizing to remove the old stuff off. Nor do I want to spend a
day/weekend baby-sitting the pan in the oven as I put 3-7 layers of seasoning
on it.

Who could do this for me?

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bmcusick
I have no idea whether there are services for this. I'll just offer this,
based on my experience-

1) Electrolyzing is overkill. Steel wool and elbow grease is fine. If you
really want to go to town, get a steel whisker brush for your hand drill.

2) Don't try to re-season it all in one day or weekend. After dinner in the
evening, before you start watching some Netflix or checking Twitter, rub a
coat of oil on it and run the oven for an hour. Set a timer so you don't leave
it on by accident. In the morning the pan will be cool and ready for the next
coat. Maybe 2-3 minutes of work per day that's easy to fit into your schedule.

~~~
dminor
I used a wire brush cup on my angle grinder, very fast and no need to deal
with lye or anything caustic.

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jonbarker
If I read this correctly the second best option which is much more cost
effective is canola oil? Also can someone find out from Lodge why they chose
soybean oil? That would probably be informative. [http://www.lodgemfg.com/use-
and-care/what-is-seasoning](http://www.lodgemfg.com/use-and-care/what-is-
seasoning)

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pchristensen
Saw an article about seasoning cast-iron. I was going to find the article I
refer to for my pans - turns out it was this one. +1 would recommend. I did as
other people have mentioned in the thread - coat it, put it in the oven around
9pm, turn off around 10:30 (preheating to 500 takes a long time), take out in
the morning, repeat for the week. Easy peasy.

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ucaetano
From the manufacturer:

" _Lodge seasons all of its cookware with soy vegetable oil and nothing else.
Any food-safe cooking oil /shortening will work for maintaining your cookware.
We recommend vegetable oil or canola oil, like our Seasoning Spray._"

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Zigurd
If you can't get this consistently right, get a ceramic or vitrified iron pan.
If you are not worried about the color getting dull, you can even safely put
vitrified iron pans in the dishwasher.

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RandomInteger4
Best Solution: Just get a non-stick ceramic pot and cook nothing but rice and
beans. Season lightly with the tears produced from flavor boredom and possibly
malnutrition ...

EDIT: Also student loan debt ...

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foxyv
Came for some chemistry, stayed for the obsessive perfectionism.

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tjr225
Lodge also makes a carbon steel skillet that I cannot recommend enough. In my
opinion there is no noticeable difference in performance and a lot lighter. My
favorite pan.

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magic_beans
Does anyone know if this would work with a wok?

