This Old Skillet, Episode I

R

RobHerrington

Member
Hello all. I made this hopefully entertaining video after reading through many, many posts here, for which I am grateful. It is episode 1 in a 3-part series illustrating what will theoretically be my journey from utter cluelessness to journeyman competency in the care and use of cast iron. The primary audience is my Facebook friends and family, who know that I like to make funny videos. It is totally G-rated.

https://vimeo.com/197720185
 
Thanks everyone. Will have episode II ready later this week, and episode III the week after.

Someone here told me whether it's better to do the vinegar bath to treat for rust first, and then the lye/oven cleaner bath to treat for crud second, or maybe it was the other way around .... If anyone reading this knows, please sing out.

Now I'll tell you something really odd: did you notice in the video that I was "struggling" to get that fried egg out of the rusty skillet, this to illustrate that the skillet wasn't seasoned? Reality is that I let it cool in the pan for about ten minutes, and then when I went to clean up, I noticed that what was left of the egg slid right out, as though it had teflon on it! I couldn't believe it.

I don't know if this was due to 1) the lard, or whether 2) the little skillet at some point had an excellent and fully seasoned surface. It LOOKED horrible of course, all rusty and everything, but maybe that was just a thin coating of rust and there was a nicely seasoned pan underneath.

Let me know if you have an opinion as to whether episode II should be the vinegar bath or the lye bath. This particular skillet doesn't have a lit of crud, but I will doing others at the same time which do have crud and need a lye bath.

Thanks again for your input.

Rob from Deep in the Heart of Texas
 
The general advice given by those who use both lye and electrolysis, for a pan with both build-up and rust, is to let the lye remove as much crud as it will first, then switch to electro for the rust. The thinking being the pan can be left in the lye to do the heavy lifting and as long as is convenient, then moved to electro for a relatively much shorter duration. The same would then follow for those in a similar situation using oven cleaner and vinegar: de-crud first, de-rust second.
 
Thanks, Doug. Makes sense!

I don't have a battery to do electrolysis and won't be doing enough cast iron restoration to justify buying one just for that, so I'm going old school: lye first, then vinegar as you recommend.

One thing I learned quickly about the oven-cleaner-in-a-bag-approach to de-crudding, and to my knowledge this hasn't been noted elsewhere: the sides of the skillet were not significantly affected by the oven cleaner, neither the inner nor the outer surfaces, whereas the top (I mean the pan's actual cooking surface) and bottom got very clean fast, especially the cooking surface. I repeated twice with the same disappointing results on the sides.

I finally figured out that the oven cleaner rather quickly slides off of the vertical sides and down into the bottom of the pan, due to gravity. So the chemical works continuously on the pan surface, but relatively briefly on the sides.

So I am planning to fully immerse my pans in lye to do the de-crud. That way the sides can't escape contact with the lye.
 
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