The Best Way To Clean and Season a Cast Iron Skillet | Epicurious 101

i'm frank proto i'm a professional chef and a culinary instructor and today i'm going to teach you everything you need to know about cast iron care we'll be going over seasoning cleaning and storing your cast iron and everything you need to know to keep it looking brand new [Music] this is cast iron care 101 part of the reason i love cast iron is because they retain heat really well compared to the aluminum pan which is super light cast iron is dense and heavy you get a better sear better color on your food when you use a cast iron pan cast iron is super versatile it can go from the stove to the oven to the campfire if you bring it camping it's also really nice to serve in it looks really rustic you can use it for a range of different things hashbrowns are great you can do a dutch baby in it not only is cast iron great for cooking it's great for home protection too over the head you can pass these down to your kids and grandkids and as long as they take care of them they'll be around forever hey mom where's my cast iron pan she doesn't have any i know she doesn't even if your cast iron's in bad shape you can bring it back to life with these simple steps cast iron is iron you put it away damp it's gonna rust if your pan is rusted over you can use a chain male scrubber like this and you basically just get in there and scrape the pan down the chain mill really works well that'll bring it down to the raw metal you can also use this to protect yourself from daggers right but for the most part i like to use kosher salt which is a little milder of an abrasive it takes a little bit more work but i find sometimes with things like the chainmail it kind of marks up your pan so i want to just kind of keep it nice and flat nice and even sometimes people will heat the pan sometimes they will put some oil in with the salt i'm just going to go dry and i'm putting a fair amount of salt in there right and then i'm going to get a kitchen towel and i'm just going to get in there and scrub it and i'm just going to scrub around and just keep going in circles pull the salt in hold your pan down nice and firm and you can actually see the salt starts to change color gets that rust color to it this will also get off any debris on the bottom of the pan it's not ready yet i can still see a little rust right here and what i might do is this get rid of this salt because that's kind of getting ground up now and get a little fresh salt like i said this takes a little more elbow grease but i think you get a good finish on your pan it's looking much better now i think we're pretty much done here this salt unfortunately right now is garbage but you can see most of the rust is gone i'm not really worried about that once i season this that's gonna all go away now we're gonna rinse it down and get it ready for seasoning here we have some water and dish soap now i know i'm gonna get a lot of uh comments about this that don't do that don't ever put soap on your cast iron pan but the pan has the salt in it now it also has some debris left over from the scrubbing and i just want to get that clean before i season it you just get in there you don't even need a towel or a sponge or anything like that and any kind of chunks that are still in there get that out okay and look it's really nice i'm gonna rinse it i'm gonna dry it really well with a towel you can use paper towels for this i'm gonna dry the inside i'm going to dry the handle i'm going to dry everything and just get as much water off as we can now we're going to move on to greasing up our pan for seasoning what we're going to do is we're going to put some oil in it and we're going to bake the pan so that the oil kind of gets into the pores of the pan and seals it up that process is called polymerization polymerization is when an oil is heated at a high temperature and it forms a slick solid surface in our pan basically it means you're putting a non-stick coating on it most people season their pans with vegetable oil or canola oil and it works really well i like to use crisco crisco is just oil in solid form it sticks to the pan a little bit better i can see where it's coated it's a paste it's a little easier to work with so all i do is get a paper towel or a napkin and i just rub my crisco all around make sure that i get into every corner i'm gonna put a fair amount so i can still see the crisco and i'm gonna do the whole pan turn it over i'm gonna get the backside too because even though we're not cooking on the backside of the pan or the underside of the pan i still want it to be protected from rust when i put this in the oven i'm gonna turn it upside down so any excess fat will shed off the pan and give me a nice even coating this looks good i preheated my oven to 350 and we're gonna put it in there for about an hour this is what a properly seasoned pan looks like it has a nice black shine to it there's no rust spots let's move on to our next chapter cleaning your cast iron once your pan is seasoned you're obviously going to use it and it's really kind of gross let's talk about how we're going to get this back to its original season splendor the first step is getting all the big chunks out of the pan right i got a bowl i got some paper towels so i'm just going to wipe this out and get as many big chunks as i can out of this pan and this is why you should clean your pans right after you use them because otherwise it gets dried on and stuck there's a lot of ways to clean off this gunk you can use the chain mail that we use to get the rust off some people also use brillo with soap that's not really my preference part of the reason i don't like using brillo is that it'll ruin my seasoning that's why i prefer the salt this is pretty much the same type of step that we use to get the rust off this pan what i'm looking for is that all of the big chunks come off if you have any pieces that you're having trouble getting off the sides of the pan you can always heat it up and a little bit of heat will help lift that off as well next thing we're going to do is just rinse this in some warm soapy water [Music] if you've seasoned your pan right you have a nice hard coating on here and soap and water is not going to ruin that i'm not going to scrub it with anything more than a paper towel at this point just to get off any leftover flavors the last thing you want is your apple crumble to taste like fish i'm going to rinse this off and dry it on the inside and on the outside so there's no water let's move on to how we store and maintain these pans once it's clean and dry i always like to put a light coating of oil on not only is this going to help keep our seasoning it's going to make sure that this does not rust at all and this time i'm just going to put it on the cooking surface everything else is already seasoned and it has that nice coating on it i'm going to take this pan and put it in a warm oven and let the oven in the pan cool down together and that's where i store it now we have a perfectly seasoned cast iron pan i hope these tips help you keep your pan in great condition for your next cooking adventure don't come in my house i'll do a backhand right [Music]

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 3,759,724

Keywords: cast iron, cast iron care, cast iron cleaning, cast iron cookware, cast iron maintenance, cast iron pan, cast iron restoration, cast iron seasoning, cast iron skillet, cast iron skillet cleaning, cast iron skillet seasoning, castiron, clean cast iron, epi, epicurious, epicurious 101, frank proto, how to clean a cast iron skillet, how to clean cast iron, how to clean cast iron skillet, how to season cast iron, rusty cast iron, seasoning cast iron

Id: P4zW-C010oc

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022