How to Season Enameled Cast Iron Cookware

[Music] howdy jade from cook culture so last week we just finished our first ever virtual frypan trade-in one of the biggest questions that came out of the fry pan trade-in that i want to address today is seasoning enameled cookware this can be anything like your lucoze or stobe two biggest names in the world but anything else that's enameled so enameling is a glass-based coating that can be colored or black white whichever uh and it goes on the raw cast iron and it gets baked on incredibly hard and it takes a very hard like rock style finish to it great for keeping it looking elegant even though this goes a little bit dirty and needs some help um but what i wanted to address today is that people buy it because it's beautiful and also it's cared for and it won't rust quickly it's not as laborious to look after stove as it is raw cast iron but you can also season it so the the enameling should be and can be seasoned uh and a lot of people don't know that so they use it and they they you know it's okay it's not their favorite then they buy like a raw piece of cast iron and they season appropriately and it's like oh it's so much better the reason for that is that they just haven't seasoned the enameled uh cast iron uh so what i wanted to kind of go over today is if you have anything like this at home what to do to get it ready and then how we're going to season enamel cast iron the best way what's the best method for doing enamel so first what we want to do is inspect the surface look for anything that's a carbon buildup there's a little bit on this frypan but there's a lot on this uh oven so i've got a seven core oven here uh and there's lots of carbon build up in it so all over the edges all inside so what i need to do is i need to go to the sink with my chain male scrubby and scrub that down and get that as raw as i possibly can because we don't want to season over carbon this season will just peel off and it will just be really crappy so if you're ever re-seasoning a pan or you're taking a kind of a beat up pan and you're making it better just get something really abrasive not sharp but abrasive like a chainmail scrubby scrub it down sometimes it helps to warm the pan first scrub it down let it soak scrub it down maybe use some bar keepers friend or some comet and get it as clean as you possibly can before you start seasoning so we're going to do the oven method got the oven preheating now i'm going to get these cleaned up i've already done that in other videos so i'm not going to show you me cleaning pans but i'm going to get them prepared and ready to go and then i will show you the oven method for seasoning stove or location anything with an enameled surface okay so i've finished washing the pot uh it was in pretty bad shape i've washed the pan also that was in really good shape i'm just taking it out of a warm oven so i washed them and dried them in the oven this is the best way to dry them right up also what's really nice about drying them in the oven is that they get warm for the application of our wax so i i got quite a lot of the carbon out took a lot of the the feeling of it out there's some staining that's inside there um i can't feel anything anymore and that's the point so if you're cleaning it and you still can see little dark black bits if you can feel smoothness everywhere don't be concerned that's that's good sometimes you can spend a huge amount of time on a tiny little mark and you may never get it out so if you've gotten the majority you know i got probably 90 of though and i got 100 of the of the build up out of there um and it feels nice and smooth the same thing with the frypan um it was in good shape but i gave it a wipe down it definitely looks even like almost like brand new so we've got these guys now clean ready to go uh i'm going to use buzzy wax so buzzy wax we sell busy wax we also saw the field seasoning paste and i'm going to use budgie wax on this application for really no reason except that i have it and you know buzzy wax field it works as well each other the field container is larger when you're buying it that's the only difference so i'm going to take a little bit on my rag and i'm going to just make a thin layer over the bottom just all around so a nice thin layer make sure that it's shiny and coated come up the sides the sides are less of an issue you know if you have less sticking you're going to get less staining so it's really the bottom you want to make sure that is nonstick so we've got that all around so that's shiny ready to go we're going to take the fry pan take a little bit more wax just give it a wipe hot pan give it a wipe all around if i was doing a raw cast iron pan i would do the back side also but all you're going to do if you season the back side is you're going to make this black and yucky so on stove do not season the colored exterior so a shiny glaze all over that so now i'm going to take those two pans and put them into the oven inverted so i'm going to invert the fry pan and this guy's not as hot i'm going to invert the oven so we're going to now bake those off at 450 degrees for about 45 minutes it doesn't so much matter 35 45 55. what we're doing is we're causing polymerization so polymerization is where that wet oil that you just saw all the moisture evaporates and the leftover uh oil the hardened oil becomes hard and bonds together and creates a teflon type non-stick finish and we'll do this once maybe twice maybe three times depending on how it looks but once this is all done i'm gonna take them out we're gonna let them cool and then we'll take a look at [Music] them [Music] okay fresh out of the oven so when i took them out of the oven they had a little bit of spotting on them so even though i put a really really thin layer on the second time it had started to kind of um bead almost kind of like kind of group together and create a couple little of wet spots even though it was inverted and it didn't drip there wasn't an excess amount of oil if you have too much oil it drips out of the pan onto the bottom of your stove but what i did when it just first came out and these guys are still really hot is i grabbed my oily cloth and on the hot pan i just went around it and they've started to cool a little bit more now but it was uh piping hot and i took a tiny little bit of oil went around it and smooth it over and it started to smoke a little bit not a bellowing smoke just a little bit of smoke and it has coated it beautifully so i'm going to now let these guys sit and dry so it has two baked on 45 minute coats and i just put a fresh coat on it and it's going to dry with those on it so the heat will continue to dry that off so that is going to give it a really good solid base for seasoning both of these pans are really nicely seasoned and ready to go like that guy there so they look beautiful they look ready to use what we do now is we've done the oven method for the pre-seasoning post seasoning we would do the stovetop method so what i would do is that whatever i cooked in it however the pans finished i would either just wipe it out or i would take it to the stove uh and i would uh sorry to the sink and i would scrub it down and i would clean it up however i'm gonna get it back to normal if i've really caked something on it and i've had to really scrub on it i would have to start the seasoning process again but if i'm just taking a bit of carbonized food which isn't an issue off use my metal scrubby and wipe it down and get it onto the hob i put on some heat and then i put a little bit of wax sometimes there's enough wax just on my dirty cloth wipe it down let it just start to heat up so it gets to a bit of a smoke point turn it off let it go then it should look exactly like that again each time i do that i go through that process so i use buzzy wax i use field paste that is a seasoning cream grape seed oil works perfectly and those are the only things i ever use for seasoning i don't use olive oil i don't use anything else but i end up using paste because i find that the wax helps to adhere so end of the day we cleaned with some barkeeper's friend that carbonization that was on there was really intense i needed some support this is really toxic i really highly recommend not using this if you don't have to these needed that work well the pan didn't but the pot really really did i spent probably 10 minutes scrubbing this thing with bar keepers friend that's what happens if you ignore your cookware over time so i've put a lot of elbow grease grease into this guy to get him up and going he's now in really great shape the pan was in quite good shape anyways it just was really dry and it needed a good solid seasoning so if you have a pan that is in looking really nasty it's kind of brown and cakey and gets stuck all stuck to it and it just looks crappy and you think it's somehow not good or broken if it's cast iron you can recover it no matter how old it is no matter what piece it is if you have chipped and cracked enamel that's a whole different story but if it's just dirty you can get it clean so no problem and you can enameled with enameled coating finish you can season and be really successful cooking without the need of non-stick finish so i hope that was useful so let me know if you have any questions below and thanks so much [Music]

Channel: Cook Culture

Views: 198,795

Keywords: nonstick, staub, enameled cast iron, castiron, cast iron, how to season, how to season enameled cast iron, lecrueset, how to, dutch oven, le creuset, enameled dutch oven, cast iron skillet, cast iron cooking, cast iron dutch oven, enameled cast iron skillet

Id: g3224DONrRE

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020