All About Cast Iron Cookware | Cleaning, Maintenance & Re-Seasoning

foreign so so [Music] so [Music] so welcome back to the channel today's video is going to be all about cast iron whether it's dutch oven skillets you name it we're going to go over it we're going to talk about maintenance re-seasoning old skillets that haven't been used in a very long time we're going to talk about cleaning them all kinds of good stuff first things first we just made breakfast i have two pans over there i'm going to clean them up and i'm going to show you how we do that cooked a few different things this morning in this skillet this did the mousse steaks and this also fried our eggs and then the bigger skillet back there which is a 12 inch that one cooked our english muffins for us this is about typically how dirty they get they do get dirtier every once in a while but this is going to be a pretty easy clean this pan right here is still hot i just took it off the heat what we cooked with in this one was mustala which is moose fat and we also used some olive oil let's clean this one first i'm going to take it over to the sink dealing with a hot pan these little pot holders are really good to have this one got a little too close to the flame so it's a little burnt but i got two of these like i said this pan is hot it's going to take a real simple cleaning it is going to need water and a nice stiff brush and then we're also going to have to prepare this pan for the next time we want to cook with it [Music] okay that was simple very simple to clean a well-seasoned cast iron skillet that you just cook something with oil or fat we need to dry this off cast iron will rust if you don't dry it off and prepare it for the next time you want to use it to do that we usually just take it over to our wood stove if you don't have a wood stove or a fireplace we do it sometimes too just on our regular range you know you just fire it up get it nice and hot burn off all the water since we just cooked with a lot of oil and fat there's still a lot of oil and fat in this pan so we're not going to add any to it we're just going to let this water burn off this skillet will be ready for the next time we want to use it let's go and grab our next pan so this cast iron skillet is not a great example of an extremely dirty pan but we're going to treat it like one i'm going to show you one more trick that we like to use when we're cleaning these we're going to put it back on the heat we're going to do about a medium heat and we're going to put i don't know maybe a half a cup of water in here we're going to let it come to a simmer and then we're going to take our stiff brush and we're just going to kind of rub pan and it'll clean right up we do not want to use any soap or anything like that at this point if we were cooking something sweet maybe meat with like a glaze on it or something like that and there's some real like sticky stuff in the pan a little scraper comes in really handy we use this a lot and then we have this little kind of cloth dishcloth type thing not exactly sure what to call it but this is more just for real delicate pans that just need a light wiping as you can tell that cleaned up real quick i'm barely touching this pan i'm just kind of slowly circling around and this thing is clean almost i'm gonna take over the sink and rinse it out just like we did the other one so this pan is all ready to go we're gonna get it over on the range and i'll show you how we um burn all this water off since we just cooked our english muffins in this skillet there wasn't as much oil in the pan so we are going to oil this up just a little bit get ready for next time still a little bit of water in there let's let this go on medium heat for about two minutes until it's completely burned off and then we're going to use a little bit of olive oil and a rag this pan right here and then the smaller 10-inch that's over on the wood stove those are our go-to pans we use them every single day in fact we don't even have like a non-stick pan or a stainless steel pan we just use these two cast iron pans i'd say 90 of the time since we use them so much and we cook with a lot of fats whether it's lard or mousse tallow and we cook with a lot of oils usually olive oil the maintenance on these things is extremely simple they're very well seasoned so when we're done with them usually the food just comes right off when we're cleaning it and it's a very low maintenance when we go to re-season them all of our water has burned off we're gonna add a very very small amount of olive oil just enough to rub into the pan about that much let it get hot and this is kind of our dedicated cast iron rag it hangs up there by the cast iron skillets and it's pretty much just soaked in oil so we use this to kind of rub the oil into our pans and we're just going to rub it in to the bottom mostly and then you want to hit the sides a little bit and we're just going to basically rub that in until we you can't rub it anymore until it kind of disappears put a nice shiny coat on it i'm going to get the heat cranked all the way up and as you can tell it's starting to smoke that's what we want we kind of want to smoke off that oil we don't just want to leave like a layer of oil in there we wanted to kind of absorb into the pan so that's what we're going to do let this go for maybe 30 seconds and then it'll be done there we go a very hot but very nicely seasoned cast iron skillet we're gonna move this over the countertop and we're gonna go over all the cast iron gear that we owned this is all of the cast iron equipment that we own and every piece we have sitting here kind of has its own little story i'm gonna go over each one of these pants tell you a little bit about them what kind they are and how we came upon them this big cast iron in the back which i believe is a 12 quart and this little tiny one right here i think they're the same manufacturer they both just say made in the usa and both of them were given to us by a friend and she got them from her grandmother so i believe they are pretty old this one's great just for little jobs and when you got something a little bit bigger we bust this one out this one is great for rendering down lard or making moose tallow these two right here are the ones we found out at our other cabin this one is a 10 and a quarter inch i think this one's an eight inch this is a griswold i've done a little bit of research on this one and i believe it is a birmingham not positive on that but i think that's what we got here these two are completely dirty they need to be re-seasoned we're going to be doing that today this one is a lodge and this is a 12-inch this one i found in the garbage when i used to work for the garbage company back in oregon that was an awesome find it was brand new when i found it this is also a lodge this is called a dutch oven and i believe this is a five quart dutch oven we've had this one for about six years and this was actually a gift from ariel's stepdad and then this one right here which is probably our go-to skillet this is a large 10-inch skillet this is the first one we have ever owned and this was a gift from my mom all these pans kind of have different purposes for what you're cooking and how much you are cooking one of the best parts about cooking with cast iron in our opinion is the sear you get cooking with these they produce a really nice hot even heat it's great for cooking meat we love to cook eggs vegetables we do everything with our cast iron skillets couple cons about cast iron and cast iron skillets they are heavy they take up a lot of space and they do require maintenance but as long as you're using these pans daily the maintenance is really not going to be too bad at all we only have these ones because we can't really have just a ton of cast iron hanging around this might seem like a lot we don't use these all every day like i said we just use our 12 inch and our 10 inch we mainly have so many because they all have different purposes pretty much everything on the counter is in decent shape except for these two that we found at the cabin they're not horrible they're all rusted out or anything like that they did take good care of them but there is a ton of old seasoning on these pans and i have a feeling that they are not going to be non-stick so we're going to work on both these today we're going to strip them down to bare metal completely reseason them and we're going to give them the final test at the end which is frying an egg you can tell these ones need some work a good season cast iron skillet is going to be shiny and smooth these ones are more of like a flat black and they're very dull in color this one also has a lot of it looks like chunkiness or chipping in the pan and what that is is that is the old seasoning kind of coming off and we're going to remove all that today we're going to strip this pan and this one down to the bare metal there's lots of different ways to do this the way we're going to do it we're going to head over to the wood stove again the method we're about to use if you don't have a wood stove that's okay you can use a campfire you can also do it a different way in your oven you just want some really high heat we have our wood stove kicked down on low the thermometer on top is reading about 500 degrees got some nice coals in there we're basically going to throw these pans in the fire for about a half an hour we're going to flip them every once in a while and we're just going to get these pans down to bare metal they're going to look completely different than they do right now they're almost going to be like a silver gray color when we're done we got a big wood stove i'm going to be able to fit both these pans in there at the same time i'm just going to stick them right in there on top of the coals i'm going to leave the handles facing out so i can grab them we're going to set it and forget it we'll check in about 15 minutes at that point we should start to see the old seasoning kind of starting to flake off and we're probably going to give them a turn in there it's been about 15 minutes i don't know if you can see in there but the pans are really starting to change color the portion of the pan that you actually cook on which is seasoning on these ones is probably the thinnest is starting to turn like a gray or a silver i think i'm going to flip them in probably about 10 minutes and these are probably going to go for about 40 minutes altogether but we're looking good so far and i might add another piece of wood to get a little hotter in there it's been about 20 to 25 minutes we've flipped our skillets we got the other log in there this fire is ripping when you're using an oven mitt to move these things around you want to be really quick because these things are way harder than this oven mitt can take when we pull those out we're actually going to use a pair of channel locks to get them out of the wood stove the cast iron skillets are done they've been in there for about 35 minutes i'm going to take them out i'm going to put them on top of the wood stove where it's a little bit cooler we're going to let them cool down a little bit until we're able to handle that what we're doing with these pans is pretty extreme chances are if you have a cast iron skillet you're going to re-season it you're not going to need to do this but this is kind of like a last resort we really need to get these things clean we don't know where they've been who's used them and we're going to make them kind of brand new for us to use these have cooled for about an hour and they're now cool enough where i can handle them i'm going to bring them over to the sink and we're going to scrub them out with regular maintenance of a cast iron skillet you do not want to use soap to clean them what that is going to do it's going to strip the seasoning that you have on there off and your pan is going to start sticking and it's not going to work the way a cast iron skillet is supposed to work right now we are going to use some dish soap we want to strip this thing of everything i'm going to put some soap hot water and we have this metal scoring pad and we're just going to scrub this thing the best we can most of the little flakes of the old seasoning they just they just come right off they kind of baked off in the fire but there's a couple spots on this one where it was pretty thick so we're just going to keep scrubbing until we get this thing looking like new we got this thing nice and clean there was actually so much old seasoning on this pan i didn't even see that six on the handle this is a griswold number six i'm just kind of feeling it and i'm looking for spots where i haven't gotten it off there's a little bit here still on the handle so i'm gonna do a little more soap and some elbow grease and we'll get this thing cleaned up this is bare metal now and we need to get this heated up burn all this water off there i'm going to put it on the range crank it on high and i'm going to clean that other skillet [Music] the griswold that we have over here all the water has evaporated you can really tell the color difference this thing is just bare metal now at this point these pans are just about ready to be re-seasoned we're gonna preheat our oven to 400 degrees and this is going to take a few hours so this is what we're starting with and this is what we're going for we're going to get both these pans in the oven like i said i got it set at 400 degrees fahrenheit and we're going to put them in there for about 10 to 15 minutes get them nice and hot and then we're going to pull them out and we're going to start actually oiling them as far as seasoning your cast iron there's different oils you can use we pretty much just use what we have we're going to use olive oil and mousse towel today these seem to be the ones that work the best for us but if i'm cooking something sweet like maybe pancakes or something at that point i usually use coconut oil pans are nice and smoking hot and we're going to kind of alternate our oils first round well let me kind of explain what we're doing first we're basically going to oil them up we're going to put them in the oven on 400 like i said we're gonna smoke off the oil kind of like we did earlier on the stove top this works really well because it gets the whole entire pan kind of evenly hot so all i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take a little oil on the first round i'm gonna rub it into the pan inside and out handle and everything we're going to put in the oven smoke off the oil should take about 15 or 20 minutes pull them out i'm going to switch over to the lard we're going to do this multiple times it might take you know five or six times depending on how bare of metal you have in your pan but we're going to get it good enough to where these pans are not going to stick anymore doing a little more well i'm probably doing like a teaspoon in these at this point you can use a rag you can use a towel you're probably not going to want to use something that you're going to keep so we have these little shaft towels we like to use for this nice coating of oil on these let's get them back in the oven it's been about half an hour it's getting real smoky in our little cabin that means these things are ready to put more oil on i'm going to pull them out we're going to do a little bit of moose towel on this round this is exactly what i'm looking for kind of getting the oil to smoke off burn off we don't want to make it look like there's like oil pulled up in there or anything we kind of want to see the bottom of the pan so this looks good do a little bit of mousse towel in them we've got these hot pans oiled up and we're just going to keep repeating this process until it's done we've oiled our pans a total of five times and i'm going to bring them out i'm going to fire them up on the stove on high heat we're going to finish them off with oil one more time well i can already tell these pans are starting to look a lot better than when we stripped them of all their seasoning and pulled them out of the wood stove as far as the black color goes that will come in time we need to start using these pans daily and they're going to get a real nice seasoning and get that nice dark black shiny color we're going to do a little olive oil in them they're starting to smoke pretty good here and i switched over to our rag that we like to use basically all this is doing is it's kind of baking into this cast iron skillet it's absorbing into it and it's gonna create our non-stick finish and it's gonna help protect our pans and we're just going to smoke this off again this is part of the reason we do it in the oven because you do on the stove top the whole process you're really going to smoke the house out let these go a little bit longer we're going to let them cool a tiny bit we're going to add a little more oil and we're going to see how we did see if we could fry egg up in these pans just by looking at these pans we've never used these ones the ones we found out the old cabin this one right here which i believe is the birmingham looks like a lower quality um cast iron skillet and the griswold that one looks really nice so let's see how they do well both pans seem to be performing about the same which is they're actually doing pretty good tiny bit of stickage when you first season these pans like i'm doing today you're going to need to keep cooking with them this happened when we did our old ones and it's going to happen with these ones the more you use these skillets the more non-stick they're going to get i'm very happy with the progress we've made with these ones so far we're going to put these eggs aside and we're going to make some dinner cast iron skillets are extremely versatile like i said before we use them for everything we do desserts cookies we cook a lot of bread with them we cook pizza we do quiches with a nice crust very multi-purpose we do pretty much all of our cooking on these things and you can cook with them over a campfire which is awesome and tonight we are going to make some beef stroganoff we hope you enjoyed the video and we'll see you guys next time [Music] so [Music] so you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 226,347

Rating: 4.946557 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, off grid cabin, homestead off grid, daylight alaska, tiny house alaska, off grid cooking, woodstove cooking, cast iron cooking, seasoning cast iron, using cast iron, cast iron sticking, old cast iron, how to use cast iron, stripping cast iron, cooking with cast iron, cast iron skillet meals, season cast iron, how to season cast iron, how to cook with cast iron, non stick cast iron, restore cast iron, clean cast iron

Id: KGJI5GAHssE

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021