Seasoning Skills

W

W. Hilditch

Active member
What is the best way to season cast iron for cooking? Unfortunately, there isn’t just one. There are many; too many. It can get very confusing. Lard or oil? What oil? How much? What baking temperature? How long? How many coats? And so on? You aren’t the only one out there looking for the best or a better way to season.

Of course what works for me may not work for you, or for your desired usage. Experimenting seems to be the best way to find what gives you the results you want. The more you experiment the more your skill level will increase and this isn’t just with cast iron. Steel, aluminum, tin, stainless steel and even teflon can be seasoned. Look at an old cookie sheet.

One of my best learning tools has been a SS cookie sheet that taught me a lot over the years. The first thing it taught me was it didn’t like a thick lard coating. Then I learned trying to save the lard coating was useless. etc. Expansion, heat warpage (popping) and contraction took their toll. We are finally getting along rather well now and I learned a lot along the way.



Play outside the cast iron box some and what you learn can be applied to your iron. Do you want your seasoning hard, soft, flexible, thin, thick, brown, black, textured or smooth? You need to find what works for you. Everything you do with seasoning will help you get there and you may be rewarded with Toll House cookies that don’t stick and release themselves.



Hilditch
 
CJ Lucas said:
With all the variety, I think most people over-think it.
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My thoughts exactly. What I have found most frustrating, in the pastimes and hobbies I have enjoyed over the years, was seeing others constantly overthinking the processes, unnecessarily wasting their time focusing on minutiae, and, worse, leading newcomers to those interests to believe they would be unsuccessful in them unless they did so as well.
 
Well said.

If you watch any of the Cooking channels, the pans that true chefs use are black with seasoning and I doubt that they spent any time pondering "Which fat?" or "Which oil?"
 
I have a rather large nonstick pizza pan that I hated cleaning due to burnt crud always sticking to the "nonstick" surface. After finally having enough of that nonsense I thoroughly washed it one last time, oiled it, and had it tag along in the oven with a couple CI pans I was initially seasoning. Now I rarely spend more than 30 seconds cleaning it, and that almost never involves more than a few scrapes to get any unwanted globs of burnt cheese off and a quick wipe with my CI cleaning rag. Its seasoned enough now that I'm no longer afraid I'll wreck the factory coating and pollute my food with it if I run a pizza wheel across it.
 
Ty, I normally make bakery pizza in a 1/4 sheet pan with a loaf of Italian bread dough. It appears that it has been washed too aggressively as the pizza wheel has left its mark in the steel sheet.



You have my curiosity up. So the next one will be in the half sheet above and we’ll see how the seasoning holds up to the pizza wheel. No more soap on the sheets. Thanks.

Hilditch
 
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