Cast Iron Restoration and Maintenance | From Start to Finish

in this video today I'm going to demonstrate how you use the self-clean oven method to clean a skillet I'm going to be doing five skillets today these are ones that I've found over the last couple of days but there's one here really nasty that has a gate mark so I think it was made before 1900 this is a lot chef's skillet that I found it's not very dirty at all but it hasn't been used before you can even still see the sticker mark on the inside so I'm gonna go ahead and let that have a run through as well this I'm not sure what this is gonna be yet but it's really nice he's probably the nastiest coat that I've had to date so that's gonna go in some clean oven this is a Waggoner wear that I found yesterday it's not too bad and so that's going to get it get a run through and this is a really nice Griswold number 9 block heat bu logo that's in a really good shape if you're really really smooth and that's gonna go as well okay all the skillets have been loaded into the oven and usually I try to get as many in there as I can so I'm doing 5 as we said before and so I'm gonna go ahead and close the oven and let it go for two hours the self-cleaning cycle has ended and I'm waiting for the skillets to cool after they cool I will wash them with soap and water usually I use just some plain ivory liquid and I'll scrub them with some great double-0 steel wool I'll dry them with these scott shot paper towels they're great again them from Home Depot they're lint-free extra absorbent great for all kinds of cast iron maintenance after they're dry I'll inspect them and if they need it I'll go over each skillet with my wire cut brush that you see here ok the school except cold for the most part you're still a little bit warm that's why I'm wearing a butt so I'm gonna take the gate that one out first and when you first pull it newly to clean it's killing out of the self cleaned up and you're like oh man look at all this rust but it's not rust it's just it's just the stuff that's burnt off of the skillet so you can see you remember how grimy this one was and we're gonna take this over we're going to run it under some water and start to clean it notice that washes right off you never know what you're gonna get on the cooking surface and this one isn't quite as nice as I have hoped it to be but I still be a good user it takes an elbow grease on the inside but I'll scrape this for a little while and then take a few of the other ones out let you see those and then after we get these cleaned I'll show you how to wire a little skillet definitely will be one of my number one users but it is an interesting skillet it only cost me eight bucks so I'm not complaining so let's take one of the other ones out of the evidence see what they look like okay I have no idea what this one was but this one was really bad too so let's take this over and get this one and see what it is you guys get to find out the same time as me are you ready amiracle yeah that stuff just pours right off he's not mean unless you have made in USA nothing else yeah all right number eight b7 turn the quarter inch made in USA so you guys sure what this means friend of mine in the cast iron cooking group said he thought of lending him stolen items so maybe once he sees this he can positively identify it so alright we've added some light on the other side of this so in hopes that you can kind of see this a little bit better but this is a great skillet it's really really extremely smooth on the inside and what I am noticing is there's still some I guess this is kind of some factory we roughing us on the inside and sometimes when you go to season and you're using a paper towel maybe to wipe your skillet or two maybe wipe some well on it after cooking in it sometimes that roughness will make the paper towel pull over and you'll get some lint so we don't want that so this will be one that I'll take the wire wheel to but this is a definite user it's really flat on the inside there's no concave or convex warping you know really would like to know what this is once again it says number 8 - b7 I've never seen that before so but I'm sure somebody up there has so but this cleaned up nicely no rust whatsoever remember it did have a little bit of rust this spot did ok you can see there's a little bit of heat damage on the outside of this though will season right over that and this is a perfect skillet rape it's a deal one eight bucks not bad we're still scrubbing the skillet the Griswold skillet and let me asking yourself how clean do I need to get a skillet I think the thing to remember about when you clean the skeletons eventually you're gonna turn that skillet why and when it gets a few layers of that black Latino and it's gonna be totally black so I don't think it's bad to have some imperfections you know on the skillet right you can see I'm washing this and know that we're doing spreading it later there's some blackening here and if I stripping like more that thank you doing allocate you know you really just I don't know if you want to be that uptight about those type of imperfections on your skillet if you can get it clean great but if not don't worry if you remember before I don't know if I showed you this Wagner before but it did have some rust on the outside of it and one of the things about the self clean method is its effect on rust is really really minimal that's why I eventually I want to move to the electrolysis method because that's really effective as I've seen not rust so I'm gonna scrap this and we're just going to see how it did on the rust hopefully the steel will be enough to take care of it if it doesn't take care of it probably what I'll have to resort to with this skillet is a vinegar soak of white steel vinegar 50% of vinegar 50% water and so I'm gonna scrub this and we'll get back to you in a second let you see it okay as you can see the steel wool was more than enough to knock that rust off and once again this skillet is an absolutely perfect condition really really smooth on the inside alright this skill is are still really smooth but I do want to give out some of those visual imperfections in there and just and I do want to make it just a little bit smoother so I am gonna wire wheel this one so I'm going to show you how to do that alright I don't have a workshop so what I've done is I've got a couple cutting boards and I've got some weights that I used to work out with that are weighing down the skillet since I don't have like a work table and a vise and all that kind of stuff so I'm going to wire wheel this I've got a just a rag kind of protect them the cutting board from the skillet in there because of black marks from a nice booze cutting board and so I'm gonna go ahead and wire will this and so now you are going to know how to do this this is a like I said before a two-inch wire cut brush and I'm just going to go really gently inside the skillet get the visual imperfections off I'm not trying to grind the skillet down just getting shelf and that's it now one thing you notice this skill is starting to turn a silver color that silver color is the residue from this wire cut brush and I know when I first wire will my first skillet you know I thought that my cast iron was special like it was made out of some silver or whatever I thought it was going to stay like that but someone told me that that's just a residue so important you want to make sure that you get that residue off before seasoning your skillet so after each skillet is wire way old we always take it back to the sink and give it a light scrub with soap water and the great double-0 steel wool so we're gonna finish wire willingness and on this one I'm only going to do the cooking surface the walls of the skillet and probably the top of the hand I'm not going to worry about the back of that because we don't care so okay before I continue I want to show you a little bit about what I do to wire with the sides I've seen a lot of people use different types of wire wheels and on a skillet but really all you need is a cup brush it's good enough to do the cooking surface and the sides to do the sides you just want to kind of come up in here like that and then you could also come in and go up and down on them like that and they come out perfect but that's pretty much how you do the sides you can see that there's no wire wheel marks there's no circular marks in here it's just all really really smooth cast iron so that's a really smooth skillet would be great for cooking eggs or anything where smoothness is desired all right this is good enough for the inside and one thing I do like about the silver looking residue going onto the skillet is it lets you see where you've been and where you still need to go so I've got pretty much even coverage from the wire wheel or wire cut brush on the skillet cell now I'm going to flip this around and put the insides of the skillet under this so I can do the handle alright this skillet is dry and is ready to go into the oven what I'm gonna do first is all the skills I'm going to bring them up to a temperature of 200 degrees and I'm gonna apply a layer of Crisco and so once I get all the skillets in I will show you that so this is going into an oven that has already preheated to 200 degrees you want to preheat if it's a gas stove you want to pre-heat your oven to 200 degrees before you put anything in it because a gas stove is going to give off a little bit of water vapor when it first starts up and it will cause some flash rust on an unprotected piece so pre-heat your stove for 200 first the first skillet that we saw should just be about to 200 degrees and now when I season I use Crisco shortening some people use a lot of different things some people use lard some people use olive oil some people use coconut oil some people use flaxseed oil which I highly did not recommend oh it's a very inconsistent method I use Crisco it's worked great on just about all the 66 skillets that I have so far now like over 70 but I use Crisco it works great ultimately what you want to do to season your skillet is to cook in your skillet because bacon you cook hamburgers whatever every time you cook something with the animal fat in it it's seasoned your skillet just a little bit more so we're gonna take a little bit of Crisco on a rag and the skill is already kind of hot and we're just gonna rub it into the skillet now one thing to note when you season a fresh skillet like this it's almost like the skillet just soaks up the oil so I usually do two seasonings on a new skillet some people just do one and start cooking in it right away I like to so and if you want the skillet to look gorgeous with a nice shine to it you can go ahead and make me do you know do three or so but usually the shine of mine comes from the maintenance program that I have and I'll show you that either in this video or another video so we're just gonna rub that down good with Chris Keller and you can see I mean the skillet is just soaking the oil up right to the pores of the metal make sure you get your handle to get down crevice good ol Crisco good enough for my grandmother good enough for me now the qiam seasoning what I like what I see is in the pan is I want it to have a nice even black patina I don't want pools of oil of Burt oil running to look at my skillet I'm really really anal about to look at my skillets and so I want them to be a nice even black color and get evenly black over time one of the things I did I have learned about from many of the season methods that are out there now is you need to wipe your Crisco off once you wipe it off and somebody might say huh the yep that's the secret to having a nice seasoning on your skillet is to wipe it all off so what I'm going to do I've just coated the skillet with Crisco and now I'm gonna use my blue absorbent scotch up paper towel that I get from Home Depot for about $2 a roll and I'm gonna wipe it all off and when I say wipe it off I mean wipe it all off you can see that and the surprising thing is even when you wipe it all off there's still something on there so we're gonna wipe it all off and then we're gonna put it back in the oven and do the rest all the skillets that have been wiped with Crisco and then wiped off with my blue absorbent paper towels so now they're going to go into the oven and at this point I'm going to up my temperature to 300 degrees and I'm going to set my timer at this point for 15 minutes okay fifteen minutes has passed and we're going to wipe our skillitz one more time usually when I use these blue paper towels I use two of them then increases my absorbency and I can also I can use one side the other side and turn it in like that one side and the other side so I can effectively wipe I don't know four to five skillets so I'm gonna take these out and I am going to wipe the ones at the bottom of the oven first because those are the ones that are getting the most heat from the other okay Chrisman get close on this now if you can see this but you thought we got all the oil off when we wiped it and what you see here is excess oil that was on the skillet that has started be poured if I let this go like this that all would burn in and then I would have this design on my skillet and that's not what I want I want a nice black even patina so at this point after 15 minutes this is what happens so I'm just going to take this and we're going to wipe it and you can see it kind of evens out and that is why you need to wipe your skillet twice once at 200 heat it to 300 for 15 minutes and then wipe it again and now this and the rest after I wipe it will be ready to go at 400 degrees for two hours okay the skillets have completed their initial round of seasoning and they look pretty good I'm probably gonna go back and do one more round of seasoning on these I usually like my skills to be kind of glossy and kind of have a sheen to them so I'm gonna do one more round of seasoning and I will let you see what it looks like after I completed ok the skillets have finished their second seasoning and you can see they look great all of them are perfectly dry not sticky or tacky and they have a nice luster to them they look really beautiful okay cast-iron maintenance this is gonna be a really quick section of this video but when I clean my cast iron I use three things hot water from the faucet a scotch-brite scouring pad if I need it and this Lodge scraper this launch scraper is like gold it gets just about anything off with just some hot water from the faucet and just a scrape or so just those three things that's all you need that's all I've ever used and so that's all you need I never boil a skillet which means putting water in the skillet and let it boil to me that destroys your seasoning and I never ever ever used soap okay this is a freshly washed skillet and I'm going to show you what I do after each time I wash a skillet what I'll do is I'll turn this burner on and I put it on maybe about medium to medium-high you know let the skillet feel a little bit now once it's heated slightly I'll coat it with a thin layer of Crisco inside and out this is almost kind of like a little mini seasoning every time you cook but I guarantee you if you do this every time your skillets will be beautiful in a really really short period of time if they're not already beautiful all right so once that oil is on there I'm going to take my super absorbent Scott paper towel and I'm gonna wipe it all out put a really really good pressure on this make sure I get all that on Wow and like I said before I do this every time I wash a skillet do you have to do it every time no but you know I'm really particular about how my skillets look and so I go ahead and I go through the trouble of my in this way that's pretty good it's pretty dry it's got a nice luster to it but we don't want the skillet to be wet which it is right now so I'm going to put that on the burner and I'm going to Jack my heat up a little bit to about medium medium-high once the skillet starts to smoke then I'll turn it off if you find after your skillet cools that it's still a little bit maybe sticky or tacky just put it back on the heat sometimes what I'll do is I'll just put it on medium heat and I'll just let it stay there for 15-20 minutes and that usually does the trick but if you do this in between every cleaning you're gonna have a drop-dead gorgeous skillet you

Channel: The Culinary Fanatic

Views: 1,616,938

Rating: 4.897028 out of 5

Keywords: Cast Iron Restoration, Maintenance, Griswold, Lodge, BSR, Birmingham Stove and Range, Seasoning, Wire Wheel, Crisco, Cooking, The Culinary Fanatic, Jeffrey B. Rogers, Steel Wool, Cast Iron, Skillet, Self Clean Oven, Strip, patina, antique, vintage, skillet, cooking, care, cast iron care

Id: j6Tz3HnnCFs

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/DigiAirship]

If I don't have a self cleaning oven, is it possible to do something similar by just throwing the pan in and putting the heat on max for a few hours?

I have an old cast iron skillet that has been neglected badly and I've been wondering how to fix it.

[u/jASHIK]

Interesting video on cleaning, curing and maintenance, but it made me wonder... why does someone have over 70 skillets? Where/how does he keep them all? Also in the maintenance part at the end, if he does all of that every time he cooks something, exactly how much time in a day is spent on cooking, eating and cleaning his skillets? Seems like one could spend the whole day doing only that.

[u/fleeting_FOX]

As someone who learnt how to care for a cast iron pan while using it - this is a godsend. Going to try this method to reset my cookware. Thanks for posting.