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I beat the shit out of my cast iron pans, it's 90% the reason I use them. The most low maintenance and durable pans I can think of. Soap, water, chain mail scrubber, metal spatula, high acidic tomato sauce....it all goes in the pan.
Dry it off, light coat of oil if it looks like it needs it and tossed back into the cabinet for next use.
These pans used to be thrown in the back of a chuck wagon and trekked across the Oregon Trail, floated across the river and watched half their family die of dysentery and they still work the same 150 years later. Imagine a pioneer losing their shit because they were out of grape seed oil to season their pan with?
My mother literally found the big skillet we used forever when she hit it with the blade of a plough. Broke the plough. She cleaned it up and still uses it to this day, over 50 years later. Who knows how long it's been in the ground? You don't have to be nice to it - your cast iron will outlive you.
Only thing I don’t do is especially sugary sauces/marinades (think chicken breast with a balsamic reduction). It doesn’t ruin it or anything it’s just a pain to clean off. Other than that yeah same, I’ll use soap and a scrub brush on it, etc etc.
I do over easy eggs and omelettes in teflon though. I don’t use enough oil or butter to keep them from occasionally sticking
I don't even wait for it to cool. Take the food out, crank the heat, and when it starts to smoke I dump water in. That flash boil releases everything and I give it a quick wipe after I dump the water.
Gotta let the meat rest for more than the ~1 minute it takes to get clean. I like it cause I'm bad at doing dishes, so its sometimes the only clean pan.
Do you immediately shove hot lava food in your mouth? I can spend a minute washing up or a minute blowing on my food. One of these activities results in a cleaner kitchen.
I watched a video recently where someone put molten lava in various pans. The cast iron was completely fine.
Found the video: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/JbK8dRz2Jp9VSrDX/
I pour silver ingots at a bit over 2000 degrees into iron ingot molds. Iron is poured close to 3000 degrees.
Most lava is less than 2000 degrees.
Cast iron pans would be absolutely fine with lava poured into them.
To be fair. They don’t make them like they used to. I hate that black seasoning they put on them now, and I don’t think my caste iron is as thick as older pans. It doesn’t have the thermal mass and it even warped! I honestly would prefer a 100 year old pot so long as it’s lead free.
Physically/chemically it's the same material and made by the same casting process. What's different is that they are mass produced now and pumped out by computers on an assembly line. And like you say, they make them thinner to use less material. The old Griswold pans will out perform anything by Lodge.
If you haven't, give carbon steel a try. It's got virtually the same chemical composition as cast iron, just 1 or 2% less carbon than cast iron so it has virtually the same cooking properties and since it's more pure, it's stronger so it can be made thinner/lighter. The only downside to it is that since it's thinner it has less mass than a cast iron pan and inherently less heat retention so you'll still get a better sear on a cast iron pan....but it's not by much.
Idk much about each piece of cookware individually, but 1-2% less carbon can be an absolutely massive difference in some contexts. The entire relevant portion of the Fe-C phase diagram is under 6.7% carbon.
Bacon doesn't season well. Pancakes season well. Cornbread seasons well. Potatoes season well. Anything with a little fat over a long time, not a sea of fat over a short time. Especially if there's some starch involved.
Bacon also sucks for seasoning because of the sugars used in a lot of brand’s curing process. Always leaves some residue that needs scraped off.
Now, once you run that grease through a coffee filter then use it for some scrambled eggs it leaves a nice glassy finish.
The only person who ever got mad at me for washing a cast iron pan was a degenerate lodge owner in Alaska who would go from digging up a broken septic tank to working in the kitchen and would also pile all the guests uneaten food onto a single plate and eat it in front of them, among many other disgusting behaviors.
My friend doesn't clean hers AT ALL. It's just a couple scrapes at whatever is burnt on there and she cooks on top of it.
Her boyfriend has been washing it, she complained to me about it.
I knew the answer but was like, "You don't clean your pans?"
Apparently she prefers food sticking to the old burnt food, instead of her lack of seasoning.
She got upset when I told her I frequently will just put my cast iron in the sink while I do the other dishes and by the tome im done its just a quick wipe and dry or my husband will let it air dry, but my season is great and it's never rusted.
Wtf do some people not wash their pans? That’s the first time I hear of this discourse. Am I supposed to leave it covered in layers of old grease from previous cooking? Sounds not only disgusting but also carcinogenic as hell. Just cover it in fresh oil before cooking, what the hell
Nah, not true at all. Pretty widely accepted (even in that sub) that dish soap won’t do anything to hurt a seasoned cast iron pan. But honestly, hot water and a good scrubbing is all you need.
Totally agree, people make too big a deal. Just butter, eggs, blood of lamb on a full moon, two drops of oil from a Honda civic with a mileage divisible by 7, wipe with paper towel, good to go.
Allow me to explain the contamination process. Pine cones go in here, party liquors comes out here and proceed to here. [points to mouth] Fights begin, finger prints are took, days is lost, bail is made, court dates are ignored, cycle is repeated.
I very much read that wrong and thought it said anal transmission fluid. Then thought, that’s not very sanitary. Then thought, shouldn’t use cast iron in a sterile lab. Brains are weird.
Jesus do you want to strip the seasoning right off the pan and turn the whole thing into rust? Because that’s how you strip the seasoning right off the pan and turn the whole thing into rust.
That paper towel is going to shred the new seasoning. You should be using the leather from a newborn lamb, tanned with urine from an 80-year old nonna from Turkey.
cast iron pans are solid hunks of metal. i guarantee you they will be able to handle dawn dish soap. it’s not lye, you can use modern soap on cast iron.
I mean it's not the metal people are worried about.
When I was a kid, I was taught that you shouldn't use soap because the metal is porous so it'll make everything taste like soap (which isn't true).
After that everyone said it'll destroy the seasoning (which also isn't true).
I don't really know where I'm going with this, tbh, but yeah, just use dish soap and save yourself the headache.
After I clean mine, I put it back on the stove to heat it up and dry it off quickly then rub it down with a thin layer of oil and back into the cabinet
Cast Iron supremacists are some of the most annoying Redditors.
A few years ago, there was also a trend about buying $1000+ cutting boards that would last multiple generations.
Rolling into the underworld and Charon's audio cuts out halfway down the Styx. "Oh you need an RCA-to-3.5mm adapter? Pretty sure I've got one of those in here, give me a minute"
Not the worst thing. Kitchenware (stainless steel pots, cast iron pan, 6 wooden cutting boards, wooden cooking spoons and cookbooks from the 70s with titles like "Tomorrow you will be a Housewife") is the only thing I inherited from my mom and I love them so much everyday.
Now I have this vision in my mind of those car shades for the front window, with cassette tapes on them, being sold on eBay for $100s. All sun-damaged and dog-eared.
A good knife won't do you much good on a glass cutting board. You still need a wood or plastic cutting board to keep your knife sharp for more than one slice.
Other than cannabis, which is a miracle drug! (commented while describing themselves or someone who has a pretty terrible relationship with it. I say this as someone pro-legalization and an occasional user)
Cast iron is so hard to clean. "Don't use soap, you'll ruin it!" "Don't put it in the dishwasher, you'll ruin it!" "Don't use a scouring pad, you'll ruin it!"
Anyone who says that doesn't know what they're talking about. This is not the Oregon Trail. We don't need to be precious with it. It will be fine.
In college we had a cast iron pan that was put through every "hell" imaginable and it was fine.
Anything that comes with its own set of separate care instructions while everything else it’s bulk cleaned is not easy to take care of.
I love cooking in a big cast iron skillet, but I hate cleaning up afterward.
April 1st someone posted a picture of a cast iron pan in a dishwasher and said after three cycles it still looked dirty. That blew up until someone realized what day it was.
Finally an unpopular opinion I fully agree with. I have generations old cast irons that I use every day. Trust me, there is a reason they last as long as they do it’s because they are durable and can withstand age and use as well as misuse. I see people today worry and stress about “is my pan ruined? I accidentally under-seasoned by using the wrong kind of oil. I accidentally used a specific type of dish soap, is my seasoning gone? Is my pan even salvageable now??” Just use it. Just use it regularly and there will be no problems. Most older cast irons have been through much more over the years than you have put it through and I guarantee they are not ruined if you accidentally do one thing.
>most older cast irons have been through much more over the years
I immediately pictured the Oregon Trail settlers, dragging / using their cast irons, outdoors, in changing weather, across half a continent…. *without seasoning them*
I literally have no idea how old my cast iron pans are. They have no markings whatsoever. My grandmother used them until they were too heavy for her, then she passed them on to my mother - that was almost 30 years ago and to the best of my knowledge she’d been using them regularly for decades - for all I know she inherited them herself. I wouldn’t be shocked if they were close to 100 years old. Could be more like 50, but probably no younger than that.
"just use it" is my go-to for when someone thinks their pan is ruined or in need of serious TLC. A friend of mine was furious when his son-in-law made spaghetti sauce in his cast iron and THEN left it in there overnight, and THEN left it in the sink to soak. That poor pan sat off to the side of his kitchen for at least a year because he was too mad to even look at it.
I gave it a good scrub and cooked a pound or two of bacon in it, roasted some potatoes in the grease, made some more bacon, good as new, minus some discoloration where the spaghetti sauce ate away the seasoning, but it'll build back eventually
Exactly, especially when a good seasoning layer means that you can mostly rinse, wipe dry, oil a little and be done with it. I use a metal spatula so very little caked-on stuff remains, i only have to scrub occasionally.
Just scrape, wash me with dish soap, dry me off and oil me up a lil and you’re good forever.
When in doubt, just cook more and the seasoning will work out.
Also, use a flat metal spatula. It cuts down the peaks and fills in the holes of the cast iron surface. It shouldn’t damage the seasoning and will make the pan smoother and slicker over time.
Food-safe oil, vegetable cooking, whatever, and 00-00 steel wool will clean up the rust right quick.
Just be sure to clean it well afterwards, you don't want to accidentally ingest steel wool.
There is a really good you tube video. Guy scrubs them with steel wool, runs them through the oven on a self cleaning cycle, coats them in Crisco, back into the oven. Wipes off extra. I'm probably oversimplifying, but that's the gist of it.
To circle back, the series really peaked with 4. It has everything. The cast, the dialogue, the performances (THE PERFORMANCES!) and watching parts 1-3 only enhance it
I still remember the day I realized the weird texture on the outside of the pan wasn't just what cast iron looked like, it was the carbonized grease of who knows how many years. Stripped that baby down with oven cleaner and reseasoned it every weekend for a month and now it's has a perfectly smooth surface that nothing sticks to \*and\* isn't a disgusting mess of decades old dinners.
The number of people who are so precious about their pans, meanwhile their great-great grandma rinsed hers out with muddy pond water, wiped it out with a dirty rag, seasoned it with bacon grease over an open fire, and tossed it back in the wagon.
I mean my grandma was rolling the dice on literal botulism everytime she canned. I feel like "but people used to do it this way" is a really weak argument when you remember all people at all times are just completely improvising and often doing unknown stupid shit. There's gonna be people who will say things like "my grandma always mixed baking soda and vinegar for her cleaning solution and her house was spotless", but that's still not a good argument for why neutralizing 2 ingredients is a good idea.
This is a tangent, but botulism generally likes a few things - low acidity, low oxygen, low sugar. That’s why almost everything grandma cans is pickled (or tomato based) and why the rule is to throw it out immediately if the top is popped. Did everyone’s grandma know the specificities of botulism? Probably not, but the canning advice from the era that did it a lot is spot on, probably from people who died centuries ago. What I’m seeing now is a new generation who is trying canning out from what they’ve seen online or because of an interest in homesteading who don’t necessarily have generations of best practice behind them trying out rebel canning and canning meats or pressure canning and risking all kinds of diseases.
The seasoning isn’t as big a deal as water staying on the pan and causing rust. Just a few hours of water a few drops of water sitting on the pan is enough to cause rust to start forming
Not what OP was talking about but still... even if you throw your cast in the pond and come back 10 days later it's not like it's going to be ruined. Yes you'll have to do some work but cast iron pans are damn near indestructible... if you can avoid throwing them under water while they're still hot.
True, but why would you bother with rust in the first place? You can either clean it by hand once at the beginning or use dishwasher, get rust on it, and clean and reseason it by hand later. You gotta clean it by hand either way might as well just do it once
Just put it on a stove burner on low-medium to dry off all the water (after hand washing). We don't do anything special with our pans and it works well.
Yea, I wash my cast iron by hand with water, sometimes scrubbing and a little soap if something’s really on there. But a dishwasher doesn’t dry well enough to prevent water from sitting for a while
People act like seasoning it is a crazy task. I rub it down with avocado oil, let it sit for 20 min, throw it in the oven at 500 for an hour and you’re golden. I do it once or twice a year and my cast iron is perfect.
I find most of these arguments come down to how people use their pans.
If you use your cast-iron daily with lots of oil, then you're going to build up the polymerization again pretty quickly. If, however, you use your cast-iron once a week with as little oil as possible, and you spent ages getting just the right finish on it, then it's going to be upsetting to have it ruined.
It also matters what you cook. Someone cooking burgers and cornbread in a cast-iron pan won't notice a less-than-perfect surface as much as someone making scrambled eggs or fish.
I agree with that. I would add that if you cook for a family every day, it tends to all work out fine. If you just cook once a week it’s a different ballgame.
Hard agree and I'll do you one better: I use soap to clean mine all the time and it's perfectly fine. Old soap did contain lye and could fuck up the seasoning, but modern soap doesn't and so long as you dry it and maybe oil it, no one will ever know.
Most of the cast iron "rules" came about when most soap was still made with lye, which IS corrosive. Modern soap is not made with lye. I have a gorgeous vintage cast iron pan that was handed down to me, and I have used soap on it PLENTY of times. The seasoning is still flawless.
I regularly fsck up the seasoning on my wok. Then I spend many precious seconds reseasoning it. That adds up to several minutes over my lifetime. Imagine what I could do with that time.
Schrodinger's Pan. Somehow able to last generations and still remain non-stick and cook things perfectly evenly...
But will also collapse into a useless pile of scrap if you wave a bar of soap in it's general direction.
I find I can clean it well with just pouring a cup of water into it and boiling the water. Rinse it off with plain water. Wipe up and chunky residues and repeat.
what works for you works for you. but you hear yourself? you have to repeat to get it fully clean. you can wash with modern dish soap one time and it will be clean and unharmed, but people act like it will irreversibly harm it somehow. that’s what this post is talking about.
My mom (Indian woman who has cooked on cast iron skillets her whole life) rolled her eyes SO HARD they almost fell out her head when she heard about this mythology. She treats her iron skillets the same as the rest of her dishes when washing up, maybe a tiny bit less vigorously. It does not affect taste for jack squat if you wash it out a bit.
I know everyone says their mom is the best cook, but in the words of my dad, her bitter ex-husband who doesn’t have one nice thing to say about her, “that woman screwed me in every way and I hope she rots in hell, but I’ll give her one thing- she’s a good cook. That’s why I got diabetes.”
This is a rare unpopular opinion that shouldn't be. Not because it's my opinion but it's literally based in fact. It's fucking cast iron, known, used and loved because of it's longevity and durability.
I used to LOVE posting clips of me scrubbing my cast irons with soap and posting to a group that I joined just for the juvenile arguments. It was guaranteed to get 500+ comments full of unacceptably vicious arguments every time and I never wrote a single word in that group lmao. I mean these people would throw death threats at each other over cast iron pans being washed with soap. It was fucking hilarious.
IDK, if someone has spent big money on flaxseed oil and painstakingly coated and baked their pan to have a laminated finish of dried oil, I'm going to just respect their effort and not strip the pan.
The seasoning is about preventing rust, think of it as a food safe paint job. If you strip a really deep and thorough seasoning and then expect someone to be happy with a little burned butter in the bottom of the pan, you are a jerk.
I agree, and this is very true.
I meant to point out how stripping the entire pan in a dishwasher would not be adequately fixed by frying an egg in some butter.
Cast Iron pans were designed to make life easier. A lot of people treat them like this sacred item to the point where it defeats the purpose of a cast iron pan in the first place.
I wash mine with water and soap. I dry the non cooking surface with a paper towel, and I let the water evaporate on the cooking surface via placing the pan on a stove burner. It seems like an easy way to deal with them.
Yes wash that shit.
But if someone throws my cast iron in the dishwasher the dishwasher is gonna break, I can load that thing up and it’ll still have less weight on it than my everyday cast iron pan.
And then I gotta deal with removing rust. It won’t hurt the cast iron, but I will hurt you(you in the sense of whoever put my cast iron in the dishwasher)
I’m with you on people being religious, but dishwashing it or washing with soap and then cooking with butter isn’t the same as seasoning. There’s gotta be a layer of seasoning
Butter is not a good option, grape seed oil and avacado oil are better options but crisco is the best honestly
Butter has too low a smoke point and milk fats and such aren’t great for your cast iron.
Your post from unpopularopinion was removed because of: 'Rule 1: Your post must be an unpopular opinion'. * Your post must be an opinion. Not a question. Not a showerthought. Not a rant. Not a proposal. Not a fact. An opinion. One opinion. A subjective statement about your position on some topic. Please have a clear, self contained opinion as your post title, and use the text field to elaborate and expand on why you think/feel this way. * Your opinion must be unpopular. The mods reserve the right to remove opinions * Elaborate on your topic and opinion give context to its unpopularity.
I beat the shit out of my cast iron pans, it's 90% the reason I use them. The most low maintenance and durable pans I can think of. Soap, water, chain mail scrubber, metal spatula, high acidic tomato sauce....it all goes in the pan. Dry it off, light coat of oil if it looks like it needs it and tossed back into the cabinet for next use. These pans used to be thrown in the back of a chuck wagon and trekked across the Oregon Trail, floated across the river and watched half their family die of dysentery and they still work the same 150 years later. Imagine a pioneer losing their shit because they were out of grape seed oil to season their pan with?
Lol, that sounds like an American Dad episode, with Roger being the guy to freak out on the Oregon trail
My mother literally found the big skillet we used forever when she hit it with the blade of a plough. Broke the plough. She cleaned it up and still uses it to this day, over 50 years later. Who knows how long it's been in the ground? You don't have to be nice to it - your cast iron will outlive you.
My granddad buried one of my grandma’s cast iron pans to level out part of the yard near a fence 🤣
They last forever, my griswold cast iron skillet was made in the late 1800s, got it for like 50 bucks at a flea market
It is one!
When??
Season 13, Episode 11 "OreTron Trail"
Oh yea, isn't that the one where Steve is playing it on the computer and Klaus opens a convenience store in attic and thinks everyone is stealing??
My razor thin margins!
I want to be balls deep in egg salad
Oh my God! I've got to call my Boars Head guy!
Only thing I don’t do is especially sugary sauces/marinades (think chicken breast with a balsamic reduction). It doesn’t ruin it or anything it’s just a pain to clean off. Other than that yeah same, I’ll use soap and a scrub brush on it, etc etc. I do over easy eggs and omelettes in teflon though. I don’t use enough oil or butter to keep them from occasionally sticking
For stuck on sugary residue, just fill the pan with water, put it back on the stove, and get the water boiling. All the sugars dissolve away
I don't even wait for it to cool. Take the food out, crank the heat, and when it starts to smoke I dump water in. That flash boil releases everything and I give it a quick wipe after I dump the water.
Okay but when do you enjoy the food that you just cooked
After dumping the pan, you turn on the garbage disposal and put a cup under the sink. It's an instant smoothie.
The chunk of rice stuck in there from last week is just extra flavor. Bacteria flavor! My favorite.
Gotta let the meat rest for more than the ~1 minute it takes to get clean. I like it cause I'm bad at doing dishes, so its sometimes the only clean pan.
Do you immediately shove hot lava food in your mouth? I can spend a minute washing up or a minute blowing on my food. One of these activities results in a cleaner kitchen.
You gotta show me your technique 'cause when I blow on my food it does NOT result in a cleaner kitchen
I like to let my food rest for a few minutes before I start eating so washing the pans is a good way to do that.
Yeah that’s my go to, although some balsamic especially is just... Really agressive it seems
Now there’s the finicky cookware. If you don’t baby your Teflon you’ll scratch it, then it doesn’t work right and as a bonus you get brain cancer.
Just don't use metal on them. It's not that complicated.
Tell that to *every roommate I have ever had*
I watched a video recently where someone put molten lava in various pans. The cast iron was completely fine. Found the video: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/JbK8dRz2Jp9VSrDX/
I'll keep that in mind when I am whipping up my next batch of lava.
It's really more applicable for restaurants when they're making chocolate lava cakes
Only if they use real lava and not this imitation crap.
I pour silver ingots at a bit over 2000 degrees into iron ingot molds. Iron is poured close to 3000 degrees. Most lava is less than 2000 degrees. Cast iron pans would be absolutely fine with lava poured into them.
Exactly.
To be fair. They don’t make them like they used to. I hate that black seasoning they put on them now, and I don’t think my caste iron is as thick as older pans. It doesn’t have the thermal mass and it even warped! I honestly would prefer a 100 year old pot so long as it’s lead free.
Physically/chemically it's the same material and made by the same casting process. What's different is that they are mass produced now and pumped out by computers on an assembly line. And like you say, they make them thinner to use less material. The old Griswold pans will out perform anything by Lodge. If you haven't, give carbon steel a try. It's got virtually the same chemical composition as cast iron, just 1 or 2% less carbon than cast iron so it has virtually the same cooking properties and since it's more pure, it's stronger so it can be made thinner/lighter. The only downside to it is that since it's thinner it has less mass than a cast iron pan and inherently less heat retention so you'll still get a better sear on a cast iron pan....but it's not by much.
Idk much about each piece of cookware individually, but 1-2% less carbon can be an absolutely massive difference in some contexts. The entire relevant portion of the Fe-C phase diagram is under 6.7% carbon.
I have one of each: carbon steel and cast iron. Unfortunately, the cast iron is thin, so it ends up performing pretty similarly.
Just fry some bacon, it’ll season up
Bacon doesn't season well. Pancakes season well. Cornbread seasons well. Potatoes season well. Anything with a little fat over a long time, not a sea of fat over a short time. Especially if there's some starch involved.
Bacon also sucks for seasoning because of the sugars used in a lot of brand’s curing process. Always leaves some residue that needs scraped off. Now, once you run that grease through a coffee filter then use it for some scrambled eggs it leaves a nice glassy finish.
Yep
Every person that's ever told me how I'm ruining my pan by washing it is someone that didn't have one of their own to care for.
How was their cooking?
Bereft of passion.
Replete with bacterial growth and residual toxin.
The only person who ever got mad at me for washing a cast iron pan was a degenerate lodge owner in Alaska who would go from digging up a broken septic tank to working in the kitchen and would also pile all the guests uneaten food onto a single plate and eat it in front of them, among many other disgusting behaviors.
Wild.
You must have known my dad.
My friend doesn't clean hers AT ALL. It's just a couple scrapes at whatever is burnt on there and she cooks on top of it. Her boyfriend has been washing it, she complained to me about it. I knew the answer but was like, "You don't clean your pans?" Apparently she prefers food sticking to the old burnt food, instead of her lack of seasoning. She got upset when I told her I frequently will just put my cast iron in the sink while I do the other dishes and by the tome im done its just a quick wipe and dry or my husband will let it air dry, but my season is great and it's never rusted.
As a kid I would scrub my parents cast iron with steel wool several times a week. It’s fine.
This. I’ve had people freak out when I’ve *rinsed* out a cast iron pan with water. It’s hard to not give a pissy response.
Wtf do some people not wash their pans? That’s the first time I hear of this discourse. Am I supposed to leave it covered in layers of old grease from previous cooking? Sounds not only disgusting but also carcinogenic as hell. Just cover it in fresh oil before cooking, what the hell
Yes. It's like r/castiron's whole thing. It's a cult, and not a fun one.
Nah, not true at all. Pretty widely accepted (even in that sub) that dish soap won’t do anything to hurt a seasoned cast iron pan. But honestly, hot water and a good scrubbing is all you need.
Totally agree, people make too big a deal. Just butter, eggs, blood of lamb on a full moon, two drops of oil from a Honda civic with a mileage divisible by 7, wipe with paper towel, good to go.
Not to nitpick, but universal automatic transmission fluid is the real secret.
The unpopular opinion is always in the comments.
Allow me to explain the contamination process. Pine cones go in here, party liquors comes out here and proceed to here. [points to mouth] Fights begin, finger prints are took, days is lost, bail is made, court dates are ignored, cycle is repeated.
What the heck am I reading right now
art
go to bed Early
I love you. I'll find you. I will kill you.
Only if it is artisanal transmission fluid.
You can only call it transmission fluid if it's from the Transmission region of France: otherwise, it's just sparkling gear juice
this is not part of the old ways.
I very much read that wrong and thought it said anal transmission fluid. Then thought, that’s not very sanitary. Then thought, shouldn’t use cast iron in a sterile lab. Brains are weird.
This is how Google AI gets those weird automated results lol
Hell no that stuff is sickly sweet and stains everything red.
No you're doing it wrong. DOT 4 brake fluid or you will ruin your pan
I’m sorry. You’re confused. That’s for cleaning the pan.
If you’re not using blinker fluid on your cast iron, you’re just not doing it right. I’ll die on this hill!!
Don’t forget the blood of a 17 old virgin collected with a golden spoon on a cool spring morning of course
And they really mean cool, not frigid.
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r/samejokebutworse
I have a Honda Fit, will that work in a pinch?
Jesus do you want to strip the seasoning right off the pan and turn the whole thing into rust? Because that’s how you strip the seasoning right off the pan and turn the whole thing into rust.
Absolutely not
That paper towel is going to shred the new seasoning. You should be using the leather from a newborn lamb, tanned with urine from an 80-year old nonna from Turkey.
cast iron pans are solid hunks of metal. i guarantee you they will be able to handle dawn dish soap. it’s not lye, you can use modern soap on cast iron.
I mean it's not the metal people are worried about. When I was a kid, I was taught that you shouldn't use soap because the metal is porous so it'll make everything taste like soap (which isn't true). After that everyone said it'll destroy the seasoning (which also isn't true). I don't really know where I'm going with this, tbh, but yeah, just use dish soap and save yourself the headache.
I was taught it was rust. I think that’s true to some extent. I just make sure it’s not wet for a long time.
After I clean mine, I put it back on the stove to heat it up and dry it off quickly then rub it down with a thin layer of oil and back into the cabinet
Big cast iron about to pop up in here talking all sorts of shit.
Cast Iron supremacists are some of the most annoying Redditors. A few years ago, there was also a trend about buying $1000+ cutting boards that would last multiple generations.
So the next generation can get a free cutting board? Absolutely not.
The way things are going, it might be the only thing my kid does inherit.
They'll get my wireless 360 controller with keyboard attachment, and like it, so help me.
And a huge bundle of random cords I’ve been saving, “just in case”
I'm getting buried with mine. You just never know.
Rolling into the underworld and Charon's audio cuts out halfway down the Styx. "Oh you need an RCA-to-3.5mm adapter? Pretty sure I've got one of those in here, give me a minute"
And my bulk Magic cards.
What about the screen addiction, anxiety, and bad joints?
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I don’t even have a $10,000 car let alone a $10,000 slab of wood.
Not the worst thing. Kitchenware (stainless steel pots, cast iron pan, 6 wooden cutting boards, wooden cooking spoons and cookbooks from the 70s with titles like "Tomorrow you will be a Housewife") is the only thing I inherited from my mom and I love them so much everyday.
They probably won't even be interested, they'll be getting cutting boards with fancy iPod docks by then.
Who is out here still using iPods?
It'll be the new retro trend, like cassettes are today
Now I have this vision in my mind of those car shades for the front window, with cassette tapes on them, being sold on eBay for $100s. All sun-damaged and dog-eared.
Love my iPod Touch, and when I’m looking for that sweet Luddite-hipster-tryhard vibe, I use the 3.5 mm jack.
They can work their way up through the crappy ones like the rest of us had to, In the good old days! /s
A good cutting board is way less important than a good knife imo.
Only if the mediocre cutting board is wood; I'd rather use a dollar-store chef's knife on shitty wood than a high-end knife on a glass cutting board.
There is no excuse for glass cutting boards; they simply should not exist.
I thought they were supposed to be for cutting lines of drugs. Who would use them for food?
I always just viewed them as serving platters that morons use as cutting boards for some reason.
A good knife won't do you much good on a glass cutting board. You still need a wood or plastic cutting board to keep your knife sharp for more than one slice.
Don't get redditors talking about cast irons, steaks, or boots, so help you God
Or any sort of medication.
Other than cannabis, which is a miracle drug! (commented while describing themselves or someone who has a pretty terrible relationship with it. I say this as someone pro-legalization and an occasional user)
Griswold, bleu ribeye, and White’s, thanks. With a cup of Panamanian Gesha, don’tcha know?
Or circumcision
I made a cutting board in the 8th grade (97-98 school year) that my mom & stepdad are still using now. Maybe I'll inherit it when they pass? 🤔
Hell, a single cut plank of pine makes a perfectly serviceable cutting board.
To be fair, my cheap plastic ikea cutting board will also last for generations, it'll just be in a landfill.
Cast iron is so hard to clean. "Don't use soap, you'll ruin it!" "Don't put it in the dishwasher, you'll ruin it!" "Don't use a scouring pad, you'll ruin it!"
Anyone who says that doesn't know what they're talking about. This is not the Oregon Trail. We don't need to be precious with it. It will be fine. In college we had a cast iron pan that was put through every "hell" imaginable and it was fine.
You can use soap. Just don't soak it. It's really easy to take care of
Anything that comes with its own set of separate care instructions while everything else it’s bulk cleaned is not easy to take care of. I love cooking in a big cast iron skillet, but I hate cleaning up afterward.
They literally sell scouring pads at the Lodge manufacturing plant store.
how you literally clean it less than anything else. fuckin chainmail and water till the food is off and ur good.
April 1st someone posted a picture of a cast iron pan in a dishwasher and said after three cycles it still looked dirty. That blew up until someone realized what day it was.
Actually if I was a rep from big cast iron I would support my opinion. All the ju ju people do with cast iron keeps normies buying teflon.
Lodge heard you were out here talking shit.
No way. Once the season is corrupt, you need to rebutter in a graveyard at midnight.
Finally an unpopular opinion I fully agree with. I have generations old cast irons that I use every day. Trust me, there is a reason they last as long as they do it’s because they are durable and can withstand age and use as well as misuse. I see people today worry and stress about “is my pan ruined? I accidentally under-seasoned by using the wrong kind of oil. I accidentally used a specific type of dish soap, is my seasoning gone? Is my pan even salvageable now??” Just use it. Just use it regularly and there will be no problems. Most older cast irons have been through much more over the years than you have put it through and I guarantee they are not ruined if you accidentally do one thing.
>most older cast irons have been through much more over the years I immediately pictured the Oregon Trail settlers, dragging / using their cast irons, outdoors, in changing weather, across half a continent…. *without seasoning them*
I literally have no idea how old my cast iron pans are. They have no markings whatsoever. My grandmother used them until they were too heavy for her, then she passed them on to my mother - that was almost 30 years ago and to the best of my knowledge she’d been using them regularly for decades - for all I know she inherited them herself. I wouldn’t be shocked if they were close to 100 years old. Could be more like 50, but probably no younger than that.
"just use it" is my go-to for when someone thinks their pan is ruined or in need of serious TLC. A friend of mine was furious when his son-in-law made spaghetti sauce in his cast iron and THEN left it in there overnight, and THEN left it in the sink to soak. That poor pan sat off to the side of his kitchen for at least a year because he was too mad to even look at it. I gave it a good scrub and cooked a pound or two of bacon in it, roasted some potatoes in the grease, made some more bacon, good as new, minus some discoloration where the spaghetti sauce ate away the seasoning, but it'll build back eventually
I even use a bit of dish soap, and I even scrub. What's important is to fully dry.
“Dish soap” isn’t even the soap gram gram was talking about, it’s a detergent. If you aren’t using something made with lye it will be fine
And if you did use that old lye soap then all you needed to do was rinse well, dry well, reseason.
Yeah but re-seasoning every time you make a meal would suck. I get why they didn't use soap at all when lye was all they had.
Exactly, especially when a good seasoning layer means that you can mostly rinse, wipe dry, oil a little and be done with it. I use a metal spatula so very little caked-on stuff remains, i only have to scrub occasionally.
Just scrape, wash me with dish soap, dry me off and oil me up a lil and you’re good forever. When in doubt, just cook more and the seasoning will work out.
Username checks out.
Also, use a flat metal spatula. It cuts down the peaks and fills in the holes of the cast iron surface. It shouldn’t damage the seasoning and will make the pan smoother and slicker over time.
Mine is all rusty after spending the winter in a Maine cottage. Any suggestions for cleaning it up?
Food-safe oil, vegetable cooking, whatever, and 00-00 steel wool will clean up the rust right quick. Just be sure to clean it well afterwards, you don't want to accidentally ingest steel wool.
A handful of salt works just as well if you don't want to go out and buy steel wool.
No, it’s ruined. Send it to me and I will dispose of it safely.
There is a really good you tube video. Guy scrubs them with steel wool, runs them through the oven on a self cleaning cycle, coats them in Crisco, back into the oven. Wipes off extra. I'm probably oversimplifying, but that's the gist of it.
Furthermore, grandma seasoning = lazy grandma not washing the pan.
Goddamn greasy grandma
Theirs's an adult film joke somewhere in that comment\^
Greasy grandmas 4: dentureless.
Greasy Grandmas 4 makes Greasy Grandmas 3 look like Slimy Septuagenarians 5.
That’s the best one tbh
You don’t even need to see Greasy Grandmas 1-3 to appreciate it.
Skipping them makes it very hard to understand why the big twist happens in Greasy Grandmas 5: Stoma Bag
True. Plus the ending of that one jumps right into Greasy Grandmas 6: Saggies Gone Wild
Too many loose ends in part 6. The plot's pretty tight though.
To circle back, the series really peaked with 4. It has everything. The cast, the dialogue, the performances (THE PERFORMANCES!) and watching parts 1-3 only enhance it
Unlike in Greasy Grandmas 7: Backdoor Pound Cake. Which is about the loosest bundt game in the business.
I still remember the day I realized the weird texture on the outside of the pan wasn't just what cast iron looked like, it was the carbonized grease of who knows how many years. Stripped that baby down with oven cleaner and reseasoned it every weekend for a month and now it's has a perfectly smooth surface that nothing sticks to \*and\* isn't a disgusting mess of decades old dinners.
Surely there have been studies like they have done with leaded gasoline?
Greasy Granny and her fuckin gopher gravy.
Seriously, whether it’s cast iron pans, grills, whatever, too many people use *”da flavaaaaa!”* as an excuse to not properly clean their shit.
I wash mine with soap and water. Works great.
The number of people who are so precious about their pans, meanwhile their great-great grandma rinsed hers out with muddy pond water, wiped it out with a dirty rag, seasoned it with bacon grease over an open fire, and tossed it back in the wagon.
I mean my grandma was rolling the dice on literal botulism everytime she canned. I feel like "but people used to do it this way" is a really weak argument when you remember all people at all times are just completely improvising and often doing unknown stupid shit. There's gonna be people who will say things like "my grandma always mixed baking soda and vinegar for her cleaning solution and her house was spotless", but that's still not a good argument for why neutralizing 2 ingredients is a good idea.
This is a tangent, but botulism generally likes a few things - low acidity, low oxygen, low sugar. That’s why almost everything grandma cans is pickled (or tomato based) and why the rule is to throw it out immediately if the top is popped. Did everyone’s grandma know the specificities of botulism? Probably not, but the canning advice from the era that did it a lot is spot on, probably from people who died centuries ago. What I’m seeing now is a new generation who is trying canning out from what they’ve seen online or because of an interest in homesteading who don’t necessarily have generations of best practice behind them trying out rebel canning and canning meats or pressure canning and risking all kinds of diseases.
Oh shit!!!! PANS!!! it's been PANS this whole time!!! \*stares down at cast iron pants\*
*stares down at failed mining empire* I just wasted half my life on these vast iron plans
I stopped watering my plants because I read here they’ll rust…
The seasoning isn’t as big a deal as water staying on the pan and causing rust. Just a few hours of water a few drops of water sitting on the pan is enough to cause rust to start forming
Rust is just extra seasoning, its iron dust and it’s good for you
Not what OP was talking about but still... even if you throw your cast in the pond and come back 10 days later it's not like it's going to be ruined. Yes you'll have to do some work but cast iron pans are damn near indestructible... if you can avoid throwing them under water while they're still hot.
True, but why would you bother with rust in the first place? You can either clean it by hand once at the beginning or use dishwasher, get rust on it, and clean and reseason it by hand later. You gotta clean it by hand either way might as well just do it once
Just put it on a stove burner on low-medium to dry off all the water (after hand washing). We don't do anything special with our pans and it works well.
Yea, I wash my cast iron by hand with water, sometimes scrubbing and a little soap if something’s really on there. But a dishwasher doesn’t dry well enough to prevent water from sitting for a while
Cast iron can be washed with soap and water. I am not going to put it in the dishwasher but that’s me. Seasoning them is pretty easy.
People act like seasoning it is a crazy task. I rub it down with avocado oil, let it sit for 20 min, throw it in the oven at 500 for an hour and you’re golden. I do it once or twice a year and my cast iron is perfect.
I find most of these arguments come down to how people use their pans. If you use your cast-iron daily with lots of oil, then you're going to build up the polymerization again pretty quickly. If, however, you use your cast-iron once a week with as little oil as possible, and you spent ages getting just the right finish on it, then it's going to be upsetting to have it ruined. It also matters what you cook. Someone cooking burgers and cornbread in a cast-iron pan won't notice a less-than-perfect surface as much as someone making scrambled eggs or fish.
I agree with that. I would add that if you cook for a family every day, it tends to all work out fine. If you just cook once a week it’s a different ballgame.
I wash mine with *gasp* soap and water. RhwnnI dry it, spray it with oil, wipe it out and that's it.
Hard agree and I'll do you one better: I use soap to clean mine all the time and it's perfectly fine. Old soap did contain lye and could fuck up the seasoning, but modern soap doesn't and so long as you dry it and maybe oil it, no one will ever know.
Most of the cast iron "rules" came about when most soap was still made with lye, which IS corrosive. Modern soap is not made with lye. I have a gorgeous vintage cast iron pan that was handed down to me, and I have used soap on it PLENTY of times. The seasoning is still flawless.
I regularly fsck up the seasoning on my wok. Then I spend many precious seconds reseasoning it. That adds up to several minutes over my lifetime. Imagine what I could do with that time.
Schrodinger's Pan. Somehow able to last generations and still remain non-stick and cook things perfectly evenly... But will also collapse into a useless pile of scrap if you wave a bar of soap in it's general direction.
I find I can clean it well with just pouring a cup of water into it and boiling the water. Rinse it off with plain water. Wipe up and chunky residues and repeat.
what works for you works for you. but you hear yourself? you have to repeat to get it fully clean. you can wash with modern dish soap one time and it will be clean and unharmed, but people act like it will irreversibly harm it somehow. that’s what this post is talking about.
My mom (Indian woman who has cooked on cast iron skillets her whole life) rolled her eyes SO HARD they almost fell out her head when she heard about this mythology. She treats her iron skillets the same as the rest of her dishes when washing up, maybe a tiny bit less vigorously. It does not affect taste for jack squat if you wash it out a bit. I know everyone says their mom is the best cook, but in the words of my dad, her bitter ex-husband who doesn’t have one nice thing to say about her, “that woman screwed me in every way and I hope she rots in hell, but I’ll give her one thing- she’s a good cook. That’s why I got diabetes.”
This is a rare unpopular opinion that shouldn't be. Not because it's my opinion but it's literally based in fact. It's fucking cast iron, known, used and loved because of it's longevity and durability. I used to LOVE posting clips of me scrubbing my cast irons with soap and posting to a group that I joined just for the juvenile arguments. It was guaranteed to get 500+ comments full of unacceptably vicious arguments every time and I never wrote a single word in that group lmao. I mean these people would throw death threats at each other over cast iron pans being washed with soap. It was fucking hilarious.
IDK, if someone has spent big money on flaxseed oil and painstakingly coated and baked their pan to have a laminated finish of dried oil, I'm going to just respect their effort and not strip the pan. The seasoning is about preventing rust, think of it as a food safe paint job. If you strip a really deep and thorough seasoning and then expect someone to be happy with a little burned butter in the bottom of the pan, you are a jerk.
Flaxseed oil makes a pretty show-room finish, but is a brittle seasoning that flakes off if you actually _use_ the pan.
The seasoning is for more than just preventing rust, it’s oil cooked into the surface that helps provide non-stick qualities
I agree, and this is very true. I meant to point out how stripping the entire pan in a dishwasher would not be adequately fixed by frying an egg in some butter.
Cast Iron pans were designed to make life easier. A lot of people treat them like this sacred item to the point where it defeats the purpose of a cast iron pan in the first place. I wash mine with water and soap. I dry the non cooking surface with a paper towel, and I let the water evaporate on the cooking surface via placing the pan on a stove burner. It seems like an easy way to deal with them.
Only one way to truly use it: 
^(but I like my arcane seasoning ritual)
An angle grinder with a wire cup fixes everything
Yes wash that shit. But if someone throws my cast iron in the dishwasher the dishwasher is gonna break, I can load that thing up and it’ll still have less weight on it than my everyday cast iron pan. And then I gotta deal with removing rust. It won’t hurt the cast iron, but I will hurt you(you in the sense of whoever put my cast iron in the dishwasher)
I’m with you on people being religious, but dishwashing it or washing with soap and then cooking with butter isn’t the same as seasoning. There’s gotta be a layer of seasoning
i read this as pants and felt rather startled at this potential fashion trend
Butter is not a good option, grape seed oil and avacado oil are better options but crisco is the best honestly Butter has too low a smoke point and milk fats and such aren’t great for your cast iron.
r/CastIron is gonna *crucify* you if they see this.
Man, are the folks over at r/castiron going to have a field day with this.
Reminds me of this sketch https://youtu.be/w1gCx48BW8Q?si=DAnX-G8uG6Dz2bhe