Secrets to cleaning cast iron to keep it NON-STICK

in order to maintain the non-stick seasoning on our cast iron you need to know how to clean it the right way and soap and water on cast iron is a no-no unless you want to be re-seasoning your pan all of the time which most of us don't want to do that so with our cast iron pan you'll have multiple issues of ways that you're going to want to be cleaning it sometimes you have stuck on baked goods like delicious sourdough brownies and other times you'll have fat and oil and different food particles especially if you've been doing things more like meat sometimes vegetables or a mixture in your pans so if you can't use soapy water what's the best way to keep these clean and non-stick well honestly the fastest and the easiest way to keep them clean is to clean them while they are still hot before the food has had time to cool and really become stuck on but even if you can't get to cleaning it right then and there which is why i actually left these from yesterday so i could show you it's still very easy to clean them the first thing that we're going to clean is this one which has had multiple layers of butter a little bit of bacon grease and my son actually fried some burritos in this yesterday so it's been sitting for over 24 hours the first thing i like to do is it always cleans better especially when there's fat or grease when it's still warm so because it's obviously been cooled we're going to go ahead and bring this i'm just going to put over medium about right at medium heat and i'm going to add a little bit of water to this just because it's not just melted fat there's actually some food particles in here if it was just grease you could just heat it without the water just to get it in liquid form and then wipe it out and you'd be good to go but because this actually has some food particles in there i want to make sure that i've got a little bit of hot water to lift that out so we're just going to get that until it's nice and steamy okay so you can see there's like food particles and there's definite oil that's coming up on this so we're just going to go ahead and turn that heat off so you do not want this going down your drain because all of those fat particles are going to cool and solidify and nobody likes cleaning a clogged drain so one of the things that i like to do because this is obviously quite hot is kind of swirl it around so if there's any of the you know the oil that's kind of up on the side of the pans there on the pan to kind of get that and then to loosen anything that's still kind of stuck i love to use this little brush works really well and so i just kind of run this around and it is really hot water so don't go ahead and you know don't splash it up on your skin this was just at a boil and so i just will kind of use this and swirl that around and then i dump this outside our front door anywhere except you're seeing so you can see how dirty that is that's how much dirt there was in there we actually have right outside our front door some weeds that i'm trying to kill so hot water hopefully kills off the buttercups but it definitely then won't be clogging our drains so now we've gotten the majority there's still a little bit of grease left on here but not very much so you want to make sure that you're using hot tap water if you never ever want to use cold water on a hot cast iron pan even though cast iron is very very durable you can still crack it if you do an extreme temperature shock and a really hot pan that had boiling water to cold water could potentially do that so i just let this run and get nice and hot and then i'm just going to kind of swirl this back around here and now it's cooled off considerably but it's still warm so it's still lifting up some of that extra those little grease particles there so i'm just going to kind of swirl that to pick anything up that was on there and this is where i will actually just go ahead and use my dish rag it doesn't have any soap on it and i'm just going to kind of wipe along the bottom here to get any of that extra grease up into the hot water and then again i'm going to go dump this outside not down my drain because there's still fat in here so now we just went through two rinsings of hot water and you can see as you look in here there's no grease that's left there's no food particles left there's nothing left in this pan it's completely clean and it's still shiny and so that's the key when you still see the shine then that means you haven't affected your seasoning at all i don't need to add any extra oil or anything to this i just need to wipe it dry you never want to put your cast iron away wet because it can rust so i'm just going to take a cloth here wipe that out and because i can still see some of the shine on here i don't even need to add any extra oil right now just goes right back on the stove and is ready to use for whatever else we decide to cook up now sometimes you'll have where you have actual food really stuck on your cast iron pan so this can happen with scrambled eggs it can definitely happen if you use it to do baked goods in this is my sourdough brownies and let me tell you if you are not using your cast iron pan to do baked goods in you are totally missing out it's the only way that i bake brownies anymore is in a cast iron pan but you can get stuff that's stuck on and because we're not using soap how are you going to get this off well i used to use a salt scrub so a salt scrub can be a great way that is abrasive enough that it can help scrub stuff out but it doesn't damage or scratch your seasoning or your finish off however i have since found a much much better way to get anything that's stuck on that doesn't come off with just a little bit of heat and hot water and that is one of these bad boys so this is actually a wooden dough bowl scraper i in the past had plastic ones but i use mine a lot and in using it to clean my cast iron especially if the pan was a little bit warm or i'm putting pressure they would warp and i don't really like to use a ton of plastic in the kitchen if i can help it so my husband is a woodworker he works at a sawmill and after he saw what had happened over just a couple of months use with the plastic one i'm like can you please make me a wooden one so he made me this wooden one and it works fabulous as both a dough scraper but really works well for cleaning your cast iron pan so here you can see i've got just different stucked on i had this area really stuck on the brownies so you're just going to take the sharp edge of this and we're just going to scrape that off what's really nice about this because it's already rounded so that it will go and scrape out a bowl when you have wet sticky dough it'll also do the same thing along the edges of your cast iron pan here so i can really just get in there and scrape that clean so now you could just eat this part if you wanted to or you can toss it out whatever you choose to do with the crumbs so after we have dumped out our crumbs there's a little bit left on the bottom here from baking so at this point i actually will just use hot tap water and we're just going to rinse this clean really quick [Music] and you can still go ahead and use this and then again there's not anything left on there that didn't really have any fat in it from the baked good but we're just going to dry that and you can still see there's a little bit of a sheen which we're always looking for if this were to be really matte and dull then i would just take a little bit of oil and smear smear it on there before the next use but it doesn't even need it at this point this one is good to go so really just heat hot water and then a little bit of either scraping or scrubbing with the brush or with this depending on what it is that you've got in your pan it's really all you need in order to keep your cast iron pans in great shape and the scraper is the thing that comes in the most handy especially when it's really stuck on food and if you're interested in getting some of these my husband is actually making a very small run of these dough scrapers that also work fabulous for cleaning cast iron so if you are interested when we have these available it'll be a very small amount you can get on the notify list there's a link below the video and you can just go there pop your name and email in and then as soon as we have some of these available i will send out a notice to you and you can see if your cast iron pan is seasoned correctly from the beginning they are actually very very easy to clean but if you don't have a good seasoning it's going to make the cleaning process harder or if you haven't been cleaning them right go and check out this video to learn how to properly season your cast iron

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 586,628

Keywords: cast iron, cast iron skillet, cast iron seasoning, cast iron cooking, how to season cast iron, how to clean cast iron, cast iron pan, how to, how to restore cast iron, lodge cast iron, how to clean a cast iron skillet, cast iron skillet cleaning, how to use cast iron, seasoning cast iron, cast iron restoration, how to restore cast iron skillet, restoring cast iron, cast iron cleaning, how to clean cast iron skillet, clean cast iron

Id: Rd731Y_xWLQ

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021