I can’t wait to see her face. She honestly deserves it after all she’s done.
This is why people get hit with a frypan.
Yeah, right, haha! I can’t wait to see her face after such a stressful trip!
seeing this will almost certainly top whatever stress she thought she had before.
Thanks! I hope you’re right and that this takes her mind off all that other nonsense! ❤️
I got hit with a frying pan when we were trying to replace my wife’s mother’s non-stick pans that were starting to flake. My mother-in-law is legally blind, and after we gave her the new pans she showed me the old one, saying, “look at it, it’s perfect!” My response of, “it’s even worse than she said!” was the wrong thing to say to an elderly woman holding a pan.
Watched a video years ago of someone doing this before re-seasoning and baking the pan in the oven.
The end result was actually pretty fabulous.
Yeah, this is the first step in properly refurbishing cast iron.
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Please someone explain!
Cast iron is “seasoned” to make it nonstick. That means many layers of oil build up as a sort of polymer. The point is to keep it “dirty” in this way. Cleaning it down to bare metal means she’d be forced to re-season it, which can take considerable time/effort depending on frequency of use. A true disservice.
Isn’t the “seasoning” PFAS?
Edit: I admit, I was wrong.
Seasoning is just oil baked onto cast iron through a process called polymerization. It gives your cookware that classic black patina. Seasoning forms a natural, easy-release cooking surface and helps prevent your pan from rusting.
- Lodge (as I understand it, they’re the gold standard for cast iron cookware)
In the case of non-stick stuff, it’s less that they’re seasoned with PFAS and more that they don’t need seasoning because they have PFAS (at least in theory).
Cast iron pans have to be burned in with oil to create a non-stick patina. If you use aggressive cleaning agents or steel wool, this patina gets stripped, and the process has to be repeated
Could do with that on mine tbh, seasoning starting to flake in patches. Shame as it was getting pretty good.
My Grandma’s 90 year old cast iron looks like that and I have no idea how to season it.
Most surefire way I know is preheat your oven to 450, put a tiny but of canola, rapeseed, or another neutral oil on it, wipe off as much as you can with a paper towel and toss it in the oven for half an hour, the nrepeat 3 or 4 times. When I say remove as much oil as much as you can, I mean the towel should come away juat about dry. Then to cook with it, let it get hot first, add some form of fat, butter, oil, bacon grease, etc. and then add your food. Waiting for it to get hot first is the key.
Rapeseed the pc term is struggle snuggle seed oil
Canola oil.
Canola is a modified version of rapeseed developed in Canada. I might see a bottle or two of rapeseed oil next to the 4L jugs of canola from 3 different brands in stores here but that’s apparently not the kind of ratios you’ll see in other countries across the pond.
I’m not actually sure how popular it is but my mom used it for a time, but overall sunflower oil won out and was the default cooking oil in South Africa
Rapeseed oil has rebranded as Trumpseed oil.
saseed
Waiting for it to get hot first is the key.
Exception: bacon
Isn’t canola or rapeseed essentially the same oil? I mean not all rapeseed oil is canola, but most food-grade rapeseed oil is canola I think? As canola refers to a particular cultivar of rape that is better for human consumption.
Just nitpicking/wondering.
Anyway, do you have suggestions on how to clean it after use and also when do I need to re-season it?1
I got my first ever cast iron pan as a birthday present and I’ve been scared of it so far, haven’t seasoned it yet, because the instructions vary quite a bit in different places and honestly I haven’t had a lot of time either. But I hear cast iron pans are the best for making a good steak or burger indoors2. And apparently great for frying other things too, just not great for simmering sauces for several hours because sometimes sauces are acidic because tomato?
1 I know, I know, I can just google or chatgpt or local-deepseek it. But I like talking to strangers online, and I like getting people to share their advice, particularly on the fediverse so that maybe it’ll show up on someone’s search results a decade from now on a non-commercial search-engine that favors non-commercial websites. One can only hope.
2 I’m a grill guy, but in Estonia the weather between the beautiful -20C and snow and the beautiful 20C and sunshine, is disgustingly wet, smoggy3 overcast where you not only don’t want to be outside, you don’t even want to live in the country anymore. And there’s max 6 hours of daylight. If you can see the light behind the clouds. It’s fine grilling in the spring, summer and proper winter when it’s frozen over and snowy. But much of autumn and winter, I don’t want to even step out of the house when I have to, let alone voluntarily.
3 Outside of soviet-built commie blocks districts or new developments, a lot of houses are older and have wood furnaces. It’s being reduced slowly through grants for people who convert their heating systems to less smoky ones (newer furnace, chimney reconstruction, heat pumps, or joining a remote central heating network), but that takes time, many many more millions of euros than are currently being pumped into it by the government, and it doesn’t stop my neighbour from burning construction leftovers in his sauna furnace that’s entirely separate from his house. He owns a construction company and us Estonians love our wood-burning saunas over the newer electric ones.
I mainly listed them separately because of availability. I’m in canada and rapeseed doesn’t really exist unless you’re specifically looking for it, so it was only last year I found out what rapeseed is lol
Preheat the oven to ~450-500, throw the pans in for five minutes to drive out any moisture.
Pull the pans out, and apply a very thin coat of oil using a paper towel or lint-free cloth. Flax oil is best, low-temperature oils in general are better than frying oils here. Put the coated pans back in the oven for ~45-60 minutes, then remove. Repeated coats will significantly increase the strength of the coating
Seconding Pissman’s advice. The only other tip that I know of is to encrust it with salt as well as oil, but that seems to be expensive and unnecessary. Honestly just cooking several pounds of bacon in it will do the same thing.
we do the salt to help clean, not with original seasoning
Electroplate it with chrome and nickel.
I think I see where you’re going with this and I love it. Adding some nice badges as a finishing touch:
MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT CRUFT!!!
She will be disappointed
My cast iron cooks better eggs than a nonstick. It’s that iron, man, nothing else even comes close for frying.
