1) use a good skillet with a glassy-smooth cooking surface. The new stuff with the rough cooking surface is gonna be frustrating.
2) keep it dry!
Using water short term (minutes, not hours) has its uses. When the time comes to put the skillet away, give it a few seconds on a hot stove, just to make sure all the water is out.
3) use a little oil or grease
4) a little smoke is a good thing
5) too much heat on an empty skillet can ruin the surface or even crack the skillet
6) clean immediately after each use leaving a very thin layer of oil/grease
7) avoid soap!
There is a myth about how you should never use soap. Details on that below. The reality is that you can use soap, but it is better if you didn't.
8) use a stainless steel spatula with a perfectly flat edge and rounded corners.
9) putting a "season" on a skillet is nice, but you probably don't need to worry about it.
Now for the verbose details
A lovely homage to a cast iron skillet:
Do you have a black iron skillet? You are a southern mountain girl, I can't imagine you would not. Put it on the kitchen table. Turn on the overhead lights.
Look into the skillet, Clarice. Lean over it and look down. If this
were your mother's skillet, and it well may be, it would hold among its molecules the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love.
Sit down at the table, Clarice. Look into the skillet. If it is
well cured, it's a black pool,
isn't it? It's like looking down a well. Your detailed reflection is not at the bottom, but you loom there, don't you? The light behind you, there you are in a blackface, with a corona like your hair on fire.
We are elaborations of carbon, Clarice. You and the skillet and
Daddy dead in the ground, cold as the skillet. It's all still there. Listen.
-- Hannibal Lector sends a letter to Clarice Starling in "Hannibal" by Thomas Harris
Cooking with cast iron is one of those things where I failed utterly and repeatedly until I finally reached out to people for help. While the mighty internet had lots of advice, my eggs still stuck! I needed the collective wisdom of dozens of people to just be able to fry an egg without a big cleanup job. I can now get that egg to slide off the skillet every time. This article is my feeble attempt to relay what I have learned so far. I should mention that at the time of this writing, I have updated this page more than a hundred times.
I want to emphasize that getting stuff to slide right off of cast iron is easy - once you get the hang of it.
A little knowledge and a little practice will give you a skillet that will last a lifetime and will never poison you.
Why use cast iron?
There are many things that drive me to use cast iron:
I'm convinced that "non stick" surfaces, such as teflon, are toxic. Newer products come out that sound better,
but I cannot help but think that folks just have not yet learned how toxic the new surfaces are. At the time of
this writing, I feel comfortable cooking with iron, some steels, and glass. I avoid all chemically treated cooking
surfaces, aluminum and copper.
Cooking with cast iron helps folks get more iron in their diet to build more red blood cells. Doctor's recommend that those with anemia cook with cast iron.
Many of my happiest memories involving cooking, involved cast iron. I remember my grandad cooking almost everything we ate in a cast iron skillet.
Using cast iron is a skill from a simpler time.
Cast iron can last hundreds of years. Many moderm skillets/griddles last only a few months to a few years.
Start with a good piece of cast iron
I bought a new cast iron skillet at some department store. I cleaned it, seasoned it, used lots of oil ... sometimes it worked,
sometimes it didn't. I gave google a big workout and I found lots of internet forums to ask lots of questions.
The most common feedback was to take a close look at the cooking surface of this new skillet. It's rough. Apparently, long ago, there
were two grades of cast iron one could purchase. The first is where hot iron is poured into a mold and that's it.
The second is where they take the first and machine out the cooking surface to make it much smoother. But that machining
process usually doubles the price.
Today's new cast iron is all the first kind. The surface is rough. I shopped around for a long time to try and find something
new with a machined surface. The closest thing I found was a griddle made from sheet steel.
Many of the experienced cast iron folk recommended buying a heavily used skillet. The most popular brand being "Griswold" -
a company that went out of business in the 1950's. Not only were these skillets machined, but if they were heavily used,
their cooking surface would be downright glassy!
I bought a Griswold number 10 skillet for $20 plus shipping on ebay.
This was a huge improvement over the other skillet. I have to mention that I
tried to buy a similar skillet for a friend a few months ago and the
price was more like $50! But I easily found other old cast iron skillets for $15.
Time passed and I thought "Why not take the skillet with the rough surface and grind it down myself?" I bought a bunch of sandpaper designed for use with metal and figured 20 minutes with my different power sanders and some elbow grease should fix it right up! Three hours later I had burned through way too much sandpaper and the results were so-so. It was a messy, icky experience that left me numb and wobbly with a ringing in my ears for a few days. The skillet worked okay for a few weeks and then cracked.
I think a person could buy a new skillet, follow all of the advice on this page and if used twice a day for six months it
would probably be just as good as an old skillet. The most important ingredient would include the use of a stainless steel
spatula with a flat edge: as it is used over and over, it will take the "peaks" off of the rough surface as the "valleys"
fill with "seasoning". (more on the spatula and the "seasoning" below) It's just that the first few months will have more frustration than if you started off with a great skillet.
I think the best thing to do is to
buy a Griswold skillet from ebay
(try for a number 10 skillet for about $35 plus shipping). The other techniques are just too much work
or add too much frustration. I've bought stuff with a lot of crusty stuff that I managed to get off with a fire. And I've bought stuff that was seriously pitted that seems to work okay - although I far prefer the stuff that is not pitted. I see ads mentioning "no warp" or "not warped" or "level" and am grateful that I have yet to encounter this sort of thing. There are people that collect Griswold cast iron, so there are sometimes pieces that have something interesting going on that sell for something like $500!
This might be a good time to point out that I also picked up a
Wagner brand cast iron skillet
for a dollar at a yard sale last summer. It seems like the iron is a little thinner, but it works great!
Seasoning cast iron
"Seasoning" is the act of creating a hard layer of petrified oil/grease on cast iron or steel. Maintaining a good seasoning is the most important aspect of keeping stuff from sticking to cast iron. Each time you cook with oil/grease and don't have to scrub the skillet afterward, you probably add another layer. Scrubbing, scratching or soaking the skillet in water probably removes many layers. Some layers of seasoning are better than others. What makes better layers probably has to do with what kind of oil/grease was used, what temperature created the layer and how thick the oil/grease was when it was put on. A well seasoned skillet will have dozens of very thin, very hard layers. So many that the skillet will appear to be black instead of the silvery gray of the raw cast iron.
I think the best way to season a cast iron skillet is to use it. In the beginning, you might use a little more oil/grease than you would normally use - just to make sure that you don't have to scrub afterward. Once you have some seasoning layers built up, you can use less oil/grease. That's it! All of your seasoning needs are taken care of by just simply using the skillet.
And most folks are gonna be unsatisfied with that.
Most folks believe that "seasoning" means that you put some oil/grease on the skillet and bake it. Seasoning recipes include varrying temperatures from 100 degrees to 550 degrees. And processes from an hour to several days!
Okay, okay, okay .... to please the masses that need some sort of oven based ritual .... If I was gonna try this sort of bake style seasoning again, I would:
Put on a thin coat of oil/grease all over the skillet. Inside and outside.
Put foil under the skillet to catch any dripping oil.
Turn your fan on, because this is gonna smoke!
Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.
Wipe out as much grease as you can with a paper towel.
Bake for another 45 minutes, then turn the oven off, leaving the door closed.
After an hour or more, remove from oven.
The nice thing about the oven approach is that you get a layer of seasoning all over the skillet all at once.
I became a bit obsessed with understanding this stuff and was getting more confused by the minute until this fella Alan straightened me out in a forum: "What you want is a layer of heavily polymerized fat which typically includes a fair bit of carbon black bound up with it." So it is polymerized fat which is hard and slick. The carbon is the black stuff. A couple of chemistry savvy friends explained to me that "polymerized" means that the substance re-arranged its molecules to be in a different state (I hope I have that right). In this case, slick liquid oil becomes slick, rock hard solid oil. Apparently, this is very similar to how paint works.
This is the beginning of my education. It turns out that there are an infinite number of kinds of seasoning layers. It depends on the type of oil, the quantity of oil, the temperature, the duration of the heat. Some have lots of carbon, some not so much. Some make a glassy layer and some make a "sticky" layer that turns squirmy slick when heated. Some stick to the skillet better than others.
The oil/grease will often go through a sticky phase before becoming a seasoning layer. If you have too much oil/grease, you might never get past the sticky phase! The moral of the story is that thin layers are best.
I once tried to do a thick seasoning layer. It came right off as gross black stuff all over my food.
One time I watched a fella seasoning a commercial steel griddle by patiently pushing some oil around the hot surface. In the beginning, it started to get yellow blotches. By the time it started to get brown blotches, the fella started to make pancakes. The more pancakes he made, the more seasoned the surface became. I think variations of this are the best approaches.
If you bought used cast iron, chances are that it is already seasoned with years of hearty use. You probably don't need to
worry about seasoning it.
An interesting thing about seasoning: It is usually quite mottled, or spotty, or spider-web-ish. Once in a long while I can get one consistent/contiguous/plain layer - but I have yet to be able to repeat it when I want to. I wish I knew the secret here.
Removing the seasoning layer
There are three reasons I know of for why you might want to do this:
Your skillet has crusty blobs on it. I suspect that this comes from not using the right kind of spatula. I once got a griddle over ebay that arrived with a big crusty blob on one side of the cooking surface.
You have a brand new skillet from the factory. Modern skillets have a layer of gick on it that the manufacturer has decided to label as "seasoning". I suspect that the stuff on that skillet has a lot more to do with marketing, shipping and profit margins than what you or I would want to eat. I think you really want to get that gick off. It's pretty common advice on the forums that you should get that gick off.
There is rust on the skillet.
While I have read of many ways to do this, the technique I use is to toss it in the fire. I have a stove for wood heat. When the fire gets to the point of being just coals, I toss the skillet on the top. The next morning I fish it out. All of the crusty or rusty stuff is turned to ash. I brush the ash off with my hand, then dribble a little oil on it and wipe that all over the griddle with a paper towel. Then I start using it.
I got a fascinating e-mail from "Shannon in NC" telling me about how you can start a skillet over by using a self cleaning oven. I've heard of this about a half dozen times in the past. I've also heard of some people saying they tried this and their skillet cracked. Since this is the most complete information I have seen on this topic, I'm posting it here:
I stumbled on to your info about cast iron cookware and wanted to let you know my experience with the self cleaning oven method. There isn't another method in the world that can beat it! I have used oven cleaner (yuck), sandpaper, even a drill powered rotary wire brush and NOTHING even comes close to how clean a self cleaning oven gets it.
Out of curiousity, I had called my oven manufacturer last month wanting to know exactly how hot it gets and was told around 900-950 degs during the (roughly) 3 hr cycle. It reduces everything to ash which is easily wiped off. However, when you first open the door, don't be alarmed if the pieces look terrible. The ash residue is rusty looking and can be quite thick, but after a good washing the piece looks almost brand new. If you want to take a piece back down to the bare metal and start over with the seasoning process, this is the way to go. It even loosens rusted areas. You can scrub them with steel scrubbies beforehand if you want to cut down on the smoke or you can put the pans in as is and let them smoke a lot - but either way they will turn out the same. Spotless.
Since leaving the racks in the oven will turn them dark and change the finish on them, I take them out. Be sure and remove any aluminum foil as it can melt or burn in the high heat. The pans need to be placed on something, not sitting directly on the bottom of the oven, so you could stand some bricks up on end and put the pans on those, one brick per pan. I wouldn't trust anything that says it's oven safe, though, because "oven safe" items are only safe up to 500 or 550 degs, not the 900-950 during the cleaning cycle. What ever you use to prop the pans up must be dry - this is extremely important. Any trapped moisture in a brick can change to steam and explode in high temps! If you aren't sure if it's dry, leave it in the oven set on the lowest setting with the door cracked for a few hrs to be certain. This cannot be stressed enough. Personally, I use the kiln posts for my ceramic kiln (I am a part time potter), but I doubt many people would want to buy a special post just for cleaning cast iron cookware. The posts are really cheap, though; less than a dollar each. If you did a lot of restorations it would be worth it.
I replied asking for permission to put this here and got one more tidbit of useful information:
I was thinking of other items that could be used to set the cast iron cookware on while going through the self cleaning cycle and ceramic coffee cups came to mind. As a potter, I do know that the temps reached in the cleaning cycle can not harm a ceramic item in any way and would be something almost everyone would have available to them already. Using a coffee cup would also help avoid the dangers of trapped moisture.
Which oil or grease to use?
I think that any edible fat will probably work fine. Oil, lard, shortening, animal fat, butter, etc. I'm still doing a lot of experimenting and asking around. Lately, I've been favoring the use of bacon grease - the kind that is saved after frying bacon. I think a big part of this is that it is solid at room temp. Somehow, I think that that makes it harder and slicker as a seasoning.
I tried olive oil exclusively for a few months. If the skillet needed scrubbing, it seems that the scrubbing would take off some seasoning! I could see fresh cast iron (silver color - not black!).
Some people swear by shortening (Crisco). But I've heard some scary things about shortening, so I avoid it myself. I have used "organic shortening" which is actually palm oil. I've researched it pretty thoroughly and I like it!
I inherited my mom's fifty year old cast iron, and for a few years I always used crisco on them. I had pretty good results, most of the time, but once in awhile something would stick.
Last year I finally made some lard and we have been using it ever since on all of our cast iron- it is so much better than crisco. (I won't even address the use of veggie oils here, lol).
Our pans have a beautiful, deep black finish that is a hundred times better than any non-stick finish you could buy. It also helps that we use the pans frequently. I'll never go back to crisco.
My obsessive searching for information on this led me to this page which compares many different oils for their different strengths and weaknesses. Of note is "Grape Seed Oil" where they make the following comment "One caution: it's a fast drying oil so you want to clean up splatter right away because cleaning will be a lot harder in a few days. On the other hand, this makes it very good for seasoning bare steel and cast iron cookware." - this is the only oil where they even mention cast iron.
So I tried grape seed oil for a couple of months. Everything started to get a gummy residue on it. I have switched back to bacon squeezins, palm oil and sunflower oil. I'm looking around for organic lard (since I'm not raising pigs right now).
Let's fry some eggs!
For most folks, this is the big test. When I first started tinkering with cast iron, I thought "I just season the
skillet and then the eggs won't stick!" When the eggs stuck I figured I must have seasoned it wrong. So I reseasoned
that skillet about a dozen times and sometimes my eggs would stick and sometimes they wouldn't. I started
looking for more information on the internet. The gold mine was forums. People offered tons of advice.
I'm pretty sure that I currently use all of the
advice I was ever given. At times I try to skip some of the advice only to discover that every little bit helps.
1) Skillet history.
a) The more seasoning, the better!
b) Oil/grease has been used regularly. I don't use oil/grease for pancakes,
but there is a tiny bit of oil in the pancake batter. I think it somehow comes out of the pancakes as they are cooked.
c) No soap or scrubbing for the last several uses. Sometimes something happens and you need to scrub. And the
next time you try to use it, it just doesn't seem as slippery.
d) Used recently (a few days without use and it starts to get kinda sticky).
2) Use oil/grease. It doesn't have to be a lot. One teaspoon should be plenty. Try to spread it around evenly.
3) Preheat. Maybe about three minutes? I've found that medium,
or a little lower than medium is the right temperature for almost everything.
Somebody told me that if you flick a little water on the surface, that if the water
dances, the skillet is ready! I usually wait until I see a little smoke.
4) Add spices before the eggs. If you are using a little salt and pepper, sprinkle that on the cooking surface before the eggs.
Cleanup
Most of the time, everything slides right out and there is no cleanup. Sometimes, I'll use a paper towel to mop up a bit of excess oil/grease and take out any leftover food bits. As long
as the skillet looks clean with a thin film of oil on it, it's ready to be put away!
Sometimes something sticks to it and a bit more cleaning is required. The first thing that rolls through my mind in
this case is to figure out why it stuck and see if there is a way to prevent that in the future.
The mission here is to try and get the yucky stuff out and leave as much of the seasoning on the skillet as possible. It is possible to scrub away the seasoning. So, try the gentler approaches first.
For any skillet I have cooked anything with, this is the complete list of things I have ever done to clean a skillet. The gentlest (best) approaches are at the top.
Do nothing: You have served the food and the skillet looks plenty clean. There is an oily/greasy residue and that is perfect! Try to shoot for this kind of clean up every time!
Wipe with a paper towel: Sometimes this is all that is needed. If this works, you're all done!
A little salt: If there is just a little bit of something sticking, and a paper towel alone doesn't do the trick, put a little salt on the little bit of sticky stuff. The salt usually gives just the right amount of abrasion to remove the sticky stuff without scratching off the seasoning. If this works, you're all done!
Boil water: Put a quarter inch of water in the skillet and boil
the water in the skillet. About 80% of the time, whatever was stuck just lets go. You could use the flat edged spatula for a little help. Pour out the water and then wipe out
the skillet with a paper towel. Follow the instructions below for "Drying a clean, wet skillet."
Scrub: First do the boiling water trick - complete with the spatula treatment. Drain the water. If there is still food stuck, use a plastic scrubby thing. I like the kind that is a green rectangle about a quarter of an inch thick.
Using a metal scrubby thing is going to take off the seasoning. I think that any kind of scrubbing is going to take off
some seasoning - so the trick it to take off all the food bits and leave as much seasoning as possible. Follow the instructions below for "Drying a clean, wet skillet."
Drying a clean, wet skillet
If you ever use any water, make sure that you thoroughly dry out the skillet right away. Otherwise you will get rust!
It is really important that you use heat to dry the skillet. A towel just isn't going to get it dry enough.
I place the skillet on the stove and turn it to high. When the visible water is all gone, I turn the heat off.
Keep your full attention on the skillet while the heat is on! I've had people over for dinner that insisted on "helping me" by cleaning my cast iron. I would mention drying by heat, and they would turn the heat on and get busy with something else. Suddenly the kitchen is full of smoke and the seasoning is all gone! This has happened three times now! This is also a great way to crack a skillet. So I say it again: Keep your full attention on the skillet while the heat is on!
Always leave a thin layer of oil/grease
There is moisture in the air that can rust your skillet. A thin layer of oil/grease will keep your skillet safe from this. Since most forms of cleanup leave some oil/grease all over the skillet, then you really don't have to do anything here. What's there is just fine. If you did some cleanup that leaves the skillet looking pretty dry - with no oil/grease layer, put a few drops of oil on the skillet and spread it around super-thin with a paper towel.
Never:
soak cast iron in water
wash cast iron in a dish washer
leave cast iron outside
leave food in cast iron
Avoid soap
About half of the people that use cast iron are sworn to never let soap touch it. This concern comes from folks that tried to make soap in cast iron containers. All soap is made using lye. The lye will destroy the seasoning layer. Lye is a really nasty substance and the only reason I have never tinkered with making soap. Once the soap is made, there is no more lye danger. You can even use soap on your skin. Lye on your skin will probably take your skin off. The bottom line is that soap and detergent used on cast iron will not harm the seasoning layer.
So use soap if you want. Most people don't. I don't. Since the mission is to try to not hurt the season layers, and to try to leave a thin layer of oil/grease behind, there isn't much value in soap. One could say that soap helps to remove bits of food smaller than you can see. I think there is some truth to that. Of course the residual oil will help to preserve that food. And the future fry will kill anything funky that might have grown on that food. And the food is so small that it cannot be seen, so it really isn't too much of a problem to begin with. I think this is a case where the upside (preserving the season and the oil layer) has more value than the down side (removing 0.001% more food).
The Right Kind of Spatula
This is sometimes called a "pancake flipper."
It has to be metal. I wouldn't use anything but stainless steel. Some folks will get concerned that the metal will scratch the surface and ruin the skillet, and their thinking is spot on, but the wacky thing is that in this case, we want it to scratch the skillet. But not just any scratching. We want just the right kind of scratching. Because with just the right kind of scratching, the surface of the skillet will get better and better. Smoother and slicker. Flatter. Bumps will be scraped off and any pits will be slowly filled in with seasoning.
The spatula pictured below is a really sexy spatula that has all the right stuff. If you click on it, you can see a bigger picture. The important attributes are the stainless steel, the perfectly flat edge and the rounded corners.
Let's get into some details about what makes for a good spatula. First, the material. Not plastic ....
As I travel and people show me their cast iron, I sometimes see a piece that has big black tumors on the cooking surface. And then I put on my Sherlock Holmes deer stalker cap and deduce "You use a plastic spatula, don't you?" - Gasp! "How did you know!" .... At some point something kinda stuck to the skillet. The plastic is not able to scrape it off. And then other little bits got stuck to the first bit. As time passed, this bump got bigger and bigger. If a metal spatula were used, the first little bit would not have been more than a few minutes old before it got scraped off. These skillets with the big tumors are going to have to have all the seasoning removed and started over.
So now you can see the value of avoiding plastic, or anything other than metal spatulas. Stainless steel is all that I use. I have seen some steel spatulas that rust. Yuck! I have seen spatulas that have some sort of chrome-ish covering - you really need to avoid that - that stuff flakes off into your food! Yuck again! Stick with solid stainless steel.
Now for a bit of focus on the shape. There is the edge of the spatula that will contact the surface of the skillet, and there are the corners of the spatula that will contact the edge of the skillet.
Spatula edge: Nearly all metal spatulas have a slightly rounded edge - those will scratch the surface of our cast iron in a bad way. The surface will end up uneven as the scratches accumulate over the years. With a flat edge, the surface will become flatter. Some spatulas have a very slight rounding to the edge. That won't work either. It must be a perfectly flat edge. Nothing else is acceptable. This can be a bit challenging to find, but don't compromise on this point! A perfectly flat edge will make you much happier in the long run.
Spatula corner:
The rounded corners are important because the inside edges of the skillet are rounded. I have a spatula now that is really great, but the corners are really sharp - not rounded. With years of use, they are starting to get rounded, but I know now I would have been much happier starting with rounded corners. Hmmmmm ..... maybe I should take it out to the shop and grind the corners a little ....
The right spatula just makes all of your cast iron evolve to perfection as time passes. It is well worth it. When I happen to be in kitchen supply stores, or at the thrift store, I always look for a good spatula and I never find one. This is where the mighty internet has been of fantastic value. The pic below links to a decent spatula you can buy.
Bacon Squeezins
When cooking bacon, I like to save the grease, then use the grease later for eggs, or corn bread, or whatever. This is the
way my grandad did it. He had a little metal container that had a sort of filter at the top. Without the filter,
sticky, chunky bits end up in your grease and leads to cleaning hassles. I found a similar contraption that I like much better
than the one my grandad had. Mostly becase it is stainless steel and I think my grandad's was aluminum.
But this one also uses a screen for a filter instead of a .... well ... pan-like thing with a bunch of holes
in it. See the picture below.
If you use the grease regularly, you can keep it on the counter - just a little ways away from the stove.
Otherwise, you should probably keep it in the fridge.
I've heard of folks using a canning jar for this. Some people use a tin can - but I cannot help but think this is a bad idea: The can might leach something into the grease. The jar is far better than the can, although I have to admit that I really like the results that the filter gives - and the jar doesn't have that.
When googling for this contraption, the best phrase is "grease keeper". This is another item that is really hard to find at kitchen supply stores. I've tried a few and I have to say that the one below is the best. Some of the others are really flimsy. And some have lids that stick. Some are made of materials that I don't care for, and look like they will probably rust. This one is pure stainless steel and just well made. It's under twenty bucks too. If you click on the pic, you will be shown one you can buy.
Odds and ends
Note that tomatoes, tomato sauces and other acidic foods eat away at the seasoning. I would generally avoid cooking these in cast iron.
Some bacons leave petrified goo on the skillet. This is actually sugar that is used to cure the bacon. The heat causes it to come out and turn into a sort of caramel/candy. Some people call it "bacon brownies" and they fight over who gets to eat it. Frying this kind of bacon almost always leads to needing to boil some water in the skillet to get it all out.
To help demonstrate the massive evolution of this page, an older copy can be found here.
A vid of me frying eggs
This is my first digital movie. The sound has lots of pops and it took me a really long time to edit it. But the important thing is that it gives you a really good idea of how slippery good cast iron should be - and how easy the cleanup is.
