TheMudbrooker's Guide to Cast Iron: Answering Comments and Questions

hi the mud broker here today I'm going to do a video answering some of the questions and comments that I've been getting on my other cast iron videos I'm gonna try and answer them as best I can but I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail because most of these topics I intend to address in more in depth videos over the coming weeks and months some of the stuff is gonna have to wait until I can do it outside so it's gonna have to wait till spring but in the meantime I'm pretty sure I can cover a lot of stuff indoors before we get started I would like to thank my patrons on patreon I really appreciate their support and I'm gonna have a little bit of blackberry branding in their honor I'd like to thank Eileen edge Benedict riggers keys kissed Damian boomer Dan Sturgill Joe Jones Leo Subic Theodore Engelke Valentin Pullman and Tiana Jones I really appreciate all the support that you give me and hopefully you'll continue to do so thank you much anyway well the best place to start is in the beginning people have asked what I recommend for people who are just beginning to use cast iron and if new cast iron has worthwhile the answer is yes a lot of new cast iron is for a beginner just starting out with cast iron I highly recommend you get yourself something made by lodge this is a 10-inch live skillet you could find them almost anywhere that sells housewares or camping Goods even because a lot of times you'll find cast iron pans in the outdoor department this is like I said this is a 10-inch Lodge these cost about 20 bucks brand-new you can find you can find them cheaper on sale and it's pre-seasoned all you got to do is wash it and you can start using right away a weight is a little bit of a concern for some people with cast iron and this is a fairly hefty pan this pan weighs rate of all 5 pounds I'll get into that a little bit more later what I highly recommend beginners avoid is something like this this is a cheap little pan you can get at the dollar store or a Dollar General Walmart it cost eight or ten dollars and you're more than likely gonna have problems with this I'm not sure if the camera can really pick up the difference in the texture between the lodge and this one where the lodge has a pebbly texture it's still fairly smooth to the touch this has a very abrasive very gritty rough texture and you're gonna have a hard time with this because they can just about guarantee you're gonna have problems with things sticking to this and getting this to season very well that's not to say something like this is completely useless I plan on using this for a guinea pig and a lot of the experiments and hideous torture tests I'm going to be doing here shortly but with some work you might be able to get this to where it's usable and they're good for camping and things like that where if you forget and leave it behind you're not really out anything did you do like I said weight can be a concern but I still suggest that you start off with a large skillet find out if you like cooking with cast iron if it's something you want to continue on with and once you get a little experience do a little bit of research then you can start moving into more vintage pans which are much much later like I said this 10-inch large pan weighs about five pounds a number eight Griswold pan which is the same size from the 1950s weighs about four pounds this skillet here you'll see a little more of this later it's next size bigger this is a number 9 skillet it was made in 1906 this pan even though that's larger weighs a little under three and a half pounds now that's a considerable difference in weight like I said once you get a little experience once you decide if cast iron is something you want to continue on with then you can start looking at the lighter older pans get that set aside that's my next question check my list here okay people were wondering do I even really need to strip down a used pan that I get you see this Dutch oven it's got a fair bit of build up not really much it's got some build up on the outside you know and your great aunt Flossie gave you a bunch of cast-iron pans that she's had and they got a ton of crud built up on the outside of them do I really need to strip them not really it's up to you if you know where a pan has been and you know what's been used in it it's okay to leave it as it is although when you have a heavy build up on the outside it can get to be a problem on the on the outsides of the pan it doesn't hurt anything but a heavy buildup of carbon on the bottom of the pan acts as an insulation and the pan will heat up a lot slower and since it's usually worn a bit thinner in the middle than it is around the sides the pan will heat unevenly and that can cause it to warp and your make your panel where it wasn't necessarily wobbly before so even if you don't want to clean the sides of the pan off you can take a stiff putty knife or something that sort and scrape the stuff off the bottom and get the carbon off there it's gonna take some doing it's not easy but you get the stuff scraped off the bottom it'll heat evenly again and you'll avoid some of the risks of warping it and you might find out that it's some kind of a treasure you'll be able to see if there's any maker's mark sonot get that set aside No which brings us to stripping pans Oh probably the biggest question I get the most comments are can I use some sort of abrasive to strip down my pan sandblasting wire wheels grinders Sanders sanding discs on a grinder or that sort of thing as a general rule even though there's very few absolutes in cast iron and most of the things I'm going to tell you I'm going to turn around and contradict in one way or another but as a general rule you do not want to use abrasives on cast iron until you know exactly what you're using it on the point what I mean by that is a pan like this I got this for $20 it's a nice pan I could tell it was an old pan he had a heavy heavy buildup on it but once I cleaned it off why I discovered that this is what's known as an artistic logo eerie skillet it's a number nine these were made for one year in 1906 it's a hundred and fourteen years old and had a sandblasted they're done something terribly abrasive to it it would have greatly reduced the value when I get done with this pan get it all cleaned up and Reese's and it's worth about three hundred to three hundred and fifty dollars had I gone and groaned away on that I could have really reduced that down to just the price of a generic old pan of 30 or 50 dollars there's no sense in needlessly destroying the value of something even though this still would have been a perfectly usable pan would have been tremendous cooker it really you really hurting yourself badly to go ahead and use braces on this sandblasting I've done a fair bit of sandblasting and it would really roughing the inside surface of this now there are other media that you can use for blasting glass beads baking soda walnut shells things of that nature which are much less abrasive or even supposedly non abrasive but I don't have any personal experience with them and that's one of the experiments I'm going to try over the summer and see what happens with it however there are times when using an abrasive is the right thing to do this is a little Wagner ware pan made in late 60s early 70s by the late 60s early seventies the quality of Wagner where pans had really dropped the iron was still fairly good but they were fairly poorly made you can see the inside of this pan is really rough and I'm pretty sure that I can smooth this up with a little sanding little grinding and that'll be one of the subjects of my videos later on and I also want to try and smooth out a large pan like that one I showed you earlier just to see if what sort of things work best if there's any real benefit to doing that I know that using a wire wheel can cause problems because it burnish is the surface burnishing you're basically smearing the metal smooth and it seals up all the little ridges and pores and things that grab onto the seasoning when you see is in a pan a pan that's been wire wheeled it can be very difficult to get to season and I'm gonna see if we can get around that with some various things and wire wheels can also wear off raised lettering and things like that really quickly a brass wheel is softer than cast-iron but if you use a brass wire wheel it'll leave brass residue on your iron also you don't want to use abrasives because it might remove various letters this you probably can't see it very well but there is some lettering on this and it's not very deeply cut I'm not quite sure what it says and I'll have to clean this pan up the mother has got away from abrasives a little bit stripping pans like I said it isn't automatically necessary to strip an old pan just because it's old and cruddy but in this case I got this in a box of stuff from a state sale this is actually the top or the bottom of an old double skillet set and although the inside isn't too bad it would take very little to get this up to the point where you could cook on it I washed it off and dried it on the stove and it stinks if you smell it but you can't it smells like a musty old basement so this is gonna have to be stripped down to bare metal find out what it is and to get rid of that nasty musty smell this is another pan that I got I got this at a garage sale and it had been stripped down at some point and then just given a heavy coat of grease or oil and it's sticky thick nasty stuff again this will clean up pretty easy but I have to get that off of there no matter what else I'd do it this well there's just nothing you can do with this as far as cooking on it now that's got to be cleaned off and if you don't know what a pan where a pan it came from and what's been put on it just as a general rule it's best to strip unknown pans down to bare metal because at flea markets and sometimes antique dealers there's no telling what they put on them to keep them from rusting or trying to make them look better than they actually are so if you don't know where the pan came from strip it down if you do you don't necessarily have to unless you want to or if there's a heavy buildup of carbon on the bottom well we're on the subject of stripping I get a lot of questions about burning pans off in a wood stove in a bonfire or putting them in a self-cleaning oven I have burned them off in open fires and in my wood stove a few times and I managed to break a pan doing that and it wasn't because of the fire is because I forgot it was in there through a big chunk of wood on top of it but heating pans to a very high temperature you run a small risk not a huge one but a small risk of either warping or cracking the pans heavier pans are much less vulnerable to that but a very light very thin pan like this like this old Erie here there's a good chance that you could cause some sort of damage to it and don't want to do that but I am going to do some experiments I have some fairly thin cheap little pans that I can sacrifice and by experimentations and see if we can make them warm see if they can make them crack and generally try out some of these ideas and see what actually happens it could be I'm wrong and everything is perfectly fine to do that way but we won't know until I actually find out clear down some my visual aids here which brings me to my next subject LED believe it or not I've had people say you have to be careful using those enamel pans you're gonna get lead poisoning that isn't exactly true enamel pans made after 1900 do not contain a lead so this pan this chicken fryer is a Birmingham stove in range and it's a century series mid-1950s something like this is perfectly safe to use there's no lead in the enamel however you might come across an old bangle you might come across an old pot like this this I'm not exactly sure when it was made but I suspect it was made before 1900 because it has a gate mark on the bottom a gate mark is a scar left by the opening in the mold where the iron is actually part in most skillet manufacturers got away from doing that in the 1880s by about 1890 it was pretty much gone but for bigger things like kettles and pots like this using the bottom fill gate mark hung on for a while longer some up into the 1920s for really big things like really large cauldrons scald hog scalding pots are always barred from the bottom because they're huge but kettles for boiling down sugar cane or sorghum that held 1520 gallons a lot of those were poured from the bottom right up into the 30s and 40s but anyway this also has the style of these little ears where the bale attaches you know over here this particular style was mostly made before 1900 so I suspect this is old enough that it may have lead in the enamel not all pans made before 1900 had lead in enamel but 3m makes a lead test swab I don't have any on hand right now to do it but you can test to see if there is lead in a non-porous surface like this enamel on this the other thing you might run across is big kennels like this one very often got used at some point in their life as flowerpots a lot of times they got painted you'll find them they got old paint on them a lot of commotion on the inside this one didn't happen B but if you find a painted pot unless you know for sure that it wasn't painted until after about 1985 or so you have to assume that they use lead paint on it there's a lot of ways of stripping off the paint but you have to be concerned about there being a lead residue and again they make test kits where you can test for the presence of lead if you have something that you don't know whether it has lead in it either in the enamel or an old paint residue don't use it for food you can use something like that for display restoring you know utensils and whatnot in but don't use it for food unless you're sure that there's no lead in it you're not going to run into much of a problem unless it's been painted or it's an extremely old enamel pan and you're not likely to find a lot of those anyway okay I've had people ask me about using things other than lie or oven cleaner for stripping down pans using things like ammonia lactic acid or citric acid people know that acidic foods like citric acid from tomato sauce or lactic acid from something like sauerkraut tends to remove seasoning from the pan and they were wondering if that would be a good way of cleaning a pan it might be I don't know I haven't tried the ammonia is a strong base and alkaline will dissolve grease and oil and it should take off the built-up crud but I got to do that outside so they'll have to wait until summer and I don't know if it would rust the iron or not you gonna have to try it and find out the same goes with a citric acid well it's not gonna stink I'm not going to use tomato juice either because by the time it does any good it's probably going to get moldy so I'll use citric acid powder and we'll get into that later on when I give that a try it shouldn't work out though or at least it might be useful for D rusting or something like that I don't really know and I won't know until we give it the experimental try I've had a couple of questions about electrolysis in finding battery chargers shortly after I made the video on using an electrolysis tank the state of California passed a law that all battery chargers sold in California must be fully automatic which means that as the battery charges the current put out by the charger reduces until it eventually shuts off and the battery is fully charged the problem with an electrolysis tank is it doesn't put enough of a load on the charger for the charger to put out anywhere near its full capacity or even at all for an automatic charger manual Chargers are getting harder to find they're still out there but it's going to be much much more common to come across the automatic charger because manufacturers don't want to mess around having to ship one kind of charger to one state and another kind everywhere else so I'm going to try some experiments putting a battery in the circuit to provide a load on the charger basically the battery will provide the current for the electrolysis tank and the charger will simply keep the battery charged but again wait till spring what I can do that outside I am going to set up though a lie bath and demonstrate how to use that I can do that get away with doing that inside in a vinegar bath for removing rust so those will be in the fairly near future well I just remember something else imported cast iron I've given kind of an impression sometimes that a lot of the things made in China are junk and that isn't necessarily true the quality varies quite a bit about Chinese made cast iron a lot of the celebrity chef brand names a lot of storage are fairly decent but there is some stuff that is absolutely junk and I'm going to get into that in a video where I try and show some of the good and bad stuff that's imported mostly from Asia I have some European imported stuff which is kind of nice and we'll get into that later on too because that's something I can do before spring gets here anyway I hope you've enjoyed the video and I look forward to doing some of these experiments that might prove myself wrong out a lot of stuff and hopefully I do if it is actually wrong but if I prove myself right I'll be much more confident and what I know I'll see you all later good bye

Channel: TheMudbrooker

Views: 10,651

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Id: LlywsAlqIkU

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020