TheMudbrooker's Guide to Cast Iron: Seasoning and Cleaning

hi the mud broker here this is the third and final video in my series on cast iron and today I'm going to be covering cleaning and seasoning cast iron pans in the couple of months it's been well how long has it been four months since I made my first video I have been doing really well in my cast iron hunting the most expensive item I got was this that's a nice cast iron come along here so you can read it Griswald Buffington I paid 25 bucks for that that's more than I usually spend on things but I goes worthwhile cuz that's pretty cool to have you set them aside I got a couple nice little pans this one this one is a Vollrath you can tell because the number is at a right angle to the handle and this one is a peak well where favorite peak well we're number three people where prices have gone through the roof lately on all the auction sites you see him selling for over a hundred bucks for a number eight pan which is about ten inch but this one is a smaller one spot six inch pan and both of these pans I got the two of them for ten bucks got a bunch of cool big fans - these are mostly number eights and one number nine you'll be seeing more of that number nine one later this one is a Wagner where chicken fryer chicken fryers are extra deep skillet made for frying chicken this one is a really old Wagner this is from about 1910 to 1920 when I got it it was rusty as hell it was really nasty looking took quite a bit of work but I got him cleaned up pretty good this one hard to tell but this is a Griswold pan this one came from probably the same time as that Wagner about 1910 to 1920 you'll notice that corrosion on the back that's what's known as sulfur pitting that would happen when a pan was used on a wood cook stove that was burning coal you take the eye off stove set the again set the pan over it and the sulfur and the coal would react with the iron and cause pitting you see that quite a bit on really old pans kind of a shame that you can't see the logo but it made it a lot cheaper to buy and it was deeply encrusted when I got it and that was I think twelve dollars this one is really cool this is a Wagner where national national was a name that Wagner mayor produced for about 1900 up until 1945 up til 1922 they just set national on them in 1922 they added the Wagner we're logo to it but it was a little different it just had the size number on the back now in 1924 they added they took the size number moved it around to the handle and put a four-digit catalog number on there but I can tell it this pan comes from 1924 1925 because I'm not sure I'll try and zoom in a little bit if you can really see it below the catalog number you can just see the outline of a number 9 and the number 9 in the screen there the number 9 on the handle you can see looks kind of rough and hand-cut that's because when they changed over look one of the old patterns zoom back out they took one of the old patterns ground the nine off put the number on and move the nine around to the handle patterns would wear out fairly quickly because the mold forecasts and cast iron is made out of sand they packed sand around the pattern which was the form looked like the pan that you wanted to make they would make the mold separate it take the pattern out put it back together and pour the pan the sand was abrasive so it warm or the pattern is Dawne fairly quickly so it cost money to make patterns whenever they could they would reuse them so this is kind of a transitional fossil which shows both the old and the new style of pan anyway I'm gonna season this one these all need to be seasoned I just oiled them to keep it from rusting but this was nice and bare so I'm going to season this one for this video and if we look over here I have two dirty pans I'm going to show you how I clean my cast iron and from here on out I'm gonna vary quite a bit from what a lot of cast iron purists consider the correct procedures so it may give some of you the vapors have a fainting couch and some smelling salts on hand and once I get set up over by the sink I'll be back well I'm back and now we're going to show I'm gonna show you how I cleaned my cast iron now some of you might be saying well my great-great-grandma never ever washed her cast iron pans well your great-great grandma had to carry water in from a well heat it up on a wood stove and clean things with homemade lye soap so I can guarantee you there's a lot of things that she didn't clean unless she really had to but that being said you only need to clean cast iron as much as you need to clean it this little pan here I used earlier today to make a couple of eggs there's nothing stuck to it there's a couple bits egg in there a little bit of oil all this needs to be cleaned is just to be wiped out I'm gonna use paper towel paper towel is fine for pans that have a smooth texture to them but if you have a lot which is a bit more pebbly or if you have a pan that's a little rough on the surface you might want to use a lint-free cloth a little more durable than paper towel but you can see there's an old lint in there I'm gonna give that one more white because you don't want to leave a real excess of oil on the surface what you're looking for after you get done wiping it down kind of buff it a little bit there you're looking for okay let me see if I get a good light on that you're looking for more of a dull satiny Sheen you don't want the wet oily look but this pan is perfectly clean and ready to be hung back on the wall in case you're wondering that is a iron mountain range Griswald pan they don't say Griswold on the back anywhere doing the wrong way on my camera they don't say Griswold on the back they have kind of italicized numbers on them but they have a distinctive shape to the handle that kind of long oblong instead of a grounded tapered one but that pan is good to go no this other pan I fried up some hamburger in last night you have to get the idea out of your head that cast iron can be made truly nonstick there's an old secret formula no magic oil that will allow it to become Teflon but you can make it 99% nonstick what stuck there isn't actually the hamburger that's the juices that cook down in the hamburger and burn down to the pan no most people say you should never wash your pans in hot soapy water but I'm gonna do exactly that oh no not how it's helped you water no no yes yes you're going in there I'm gonna make things even worse by letting that soak for a couple minutes so I'll be right back here I am back again it's been soaking for about five six minutes you got a stainless-steel scrubber and you can see that stuff comes right off dunk in there and get in there to scrub it so now this pan is really clean I don't know why I kind of bleach it in the middle there but I should be able to dry this in Rio oil it again but I'm gonna make things even worse I'm gonna put a little dish soap in there and really scour you know [Music] oh he hits back a little bit knock it off nice and clean I'm gonna put it in the nice hot water over there you leave it sitting in there until I get set up over here and I'll be back again all set up again just pull this out of the sink take a towel wipe it down and run into your camera while you're at it and then put it on the burner on medium ish eat and let that warm up no I just realized why that has a little stripped spot in the middle the hamburgers are made last night I mixed a fair bit of hot sauce in with the meat the hot sauce has vinegar in it acidic foods will tend to remove a little bit of your seasoning from the pan this is nothing serious this pan is truly well seasoned and I'll explain what I mean by that later but you can go ahead and cook acidic foods in cast iron don't worry about making spaghetti sauce or something like that but you really should wash them off right away I forgot all about that and let it sit overnight to do this video and that's what happened that's no big deal that'll turn black again after a couple three uses and you'll never know it was there anyway waiting for this to warm up it's getting there and what I'm going to do next is take some clarified butter I use clarified butter for most of my cooking and frying I'm gonna put that in there see in so it's warmed up you don't need very much just a little little bit there and let that melt get rid us a touch more if you don't use clarified butter you can use Crisco lard whatever sort of cooking oil you usually use for cooking now with oils you do have to be a little bit careful because some of them will get sticky none of them will right away but over time if a pan sits for a couple of months or gets put away oils can get sticky olive oil is a really bad one for that now that this is warmed up enough that it's melted that butter I'll turn my stove off and I'll wipe this around the inside I'll get a little bit on the back you don't need much on the back and the outside but you do need a little bit and I'll get a little touch on the handle we put that back on the heat and let it warm up now I'm going to show you something that most youtubers seem to take pains to avoid I didn't get very much but you see that little bit of black on there especially after you scrub a pan and you oil it down again you might get actually quite a bit of blackness sometimes but that is nothing to worry about it's mostly some of its carbon that you've lifted off the surface of the pan and some of it is black iron oxide now you might be thinking is an iron oxide red rust well yeah but iron that oxidizes under heat is black and when people talk about some of the health benefits of cast iron they mentioned that you get dietary iron from it the iron that you get from cast iron is the black iron oxide your body does not absorb red iron oxide it absorbs black iron oxide it's not going to turn your food black why well because you just wipe most of it off but there's still enough there that you're gonna get a benefit from the presence of the iron in your diet now I'm gonna let this cool down a bit and I'll wipe her down again and I'll be back when I do that I forgot to mention when I put this back on the burner the burner was off but it's still fairly warm so I usually put it back on the burner and let it cool down slowly and use that extra heat to kind of help the oil soak in a little bit now you can see that still has a really wet look to it I'm gonna use the same piece of paper towels even get a little more blackness off of it but I probably wall usually get most of it the first time around so you got a little bit more there but I'm gonna need a clean piece to get the last of the oil off of this like I said with a smooth textured pan like this this is a small level Griswald pan with a smooth textured pan like that paper towel works just fine you're not going to get any significant amount of land on there but on something that's a little rough you might want to use a cloth now we have that down to a nice dull satin machine you don't need a whole lot of excess oil on your pans because excess oil will really get them sticky faster and there you have it that pan is ready to be put away until next time I need it I believe in scrubbing my pans occasionally even pans that have just been wiped out for several uses never had anything that's stuck to them because you do not need an excessive buildup of polymerized oil on there whenever you expose a cooking oil or a fat like lard or Crisco or clarified butter to heat the molecules form long stringy chains kind of like plastic and that will cult and buildup on the pan most people think of that as seasoning not really that is just a coating Cru seasoning is a combination of coating and carbon the carbon works into the pores in the pan that's my oven beeping the carbon works into the pores of the pan and it seals the pores and that is a really big part of the seasoning and the nonstick properties of cast-iron pans the oil is important at first and a little bit of coating is important at first but even if it's just coated over time that oil will carbonize and it's really the carbon that seals up the roughness in the pan the microscopic pores and little tiny grooves and pets and that is what keeps things from sticking so when you see people going on and on about building up layer after layer after layer of seasoning on their pans they're really just building up in excess of coating and over time that can build up to the point where it starts flaking off and you don't need that to happen so even pans that don't really need a scrubbing do benefit from them every once in a while especially once they've become truly seasoned with carbon worked into the pores the blackness you see on cast iron is carbon is not as much on the back because it doesn't get as much use as the front but that's what that is that's why a cast iron turns black with use now we're ready to season this pan this is bare iron that's at Wagner national transitional fossil pan and what I'm gonna do is put this in the oven I have my oven set as low as it goes it's a hundred and seventy on my oven I'm gonna put that in there for about 10-15 minutes so it heats all the way through and once it's heated through I'll come back and get you again and here we are back I had this in the oven for about 20 minutes it's heated all the way through and what I'm gonna do now is give it a good application of clarified butter like I said you can use lard Crisco or the oil of your choice a lot of people make seasoning cast iron a lot more difficult than it really needs to be they always focus at least on YouTube on the coating aspect of it and like I said coating is an important part of it but it's really only part of the process that's melted a little bit take some paper towel or a lint-free cloth and wipe her own good you want to make sure that you get any dry spots give it a good thorough coating or whatever fat and royal you're using this is still pretty warm so I'll have to use a hot pad to handle it get the front get the back get the sides and give it a good generous application make sure that there's no uncoated dry spots on there it there and set it down get both sides of your handle good now I'm gonna address flaxseed oil it's become all the rage among the cast iron community flaxseed oil is nothing more nothing less than a food-grade linseed oil now you may have heard of linseed oil it's been used as a base for paints and varnishes and a wood preservative for centuries when you use flaxseed oil you're supposed to strip your pan down to bare iron then apply a very very thin layer of it put it in your oven as high as it'll turn it up as high as a little gull bake it for an hour turn it off let it cool down a bit apply another coat bake it on high for another hour and repeat the process at least 12 times now flaxseed oil is fairly expensive and it has a short shelf life it's not incredibly expensive it's but it's still eight ten dollars for a little 4 ounce bottle usually and I can guarantee you running your oven at full blast for 12 hours is gonna show up on your utility bill I have used flaxseed oil on a couple of different pans and it does work done properly which is tricky because you have to use extremely thin thin layers done properly you do get a hard slick surface it works best on pans like a lodge or a pan that has a pitted surface from a little bit of rust that you removed but a really smooth pan like this it it just doesn't adhere very well eventually it will flake off even on a lodge pan because at some point you leave there simply wear through it or you'll scratch the coating and it'll get moisture under there and that moisture will turn to steam and it'll lift the coating off and it will start to flake and you're going to have to your pan probably every six twelve months a properly seasoned cast-iron pan needs no more maintenance than what I did to that pan that I washed anyhow like I said it does work good to help fill in the roughness and it adheres a lot better to a pan that has more of a textured surface like a lodge or something that's got some minor rust pitting in it but what I'm going to do now I've given this a good cold I'm gonna put this in the oven at 300 degrees i season my pans at a lot lower temperature than most people do and I only usually give them one at most two cycles in the oven so I'm going to turn off the camera turn up my oven to 300 degrees and throw this in for about an hour this is been in the oven at 300 degrees for just over an hour and I forgot to mention when I put it in you should put your pans in upside down that'll keep any excess oil or fat from pooling in the bottom take it out that down and of course I have my paper towels out of reach and I put the camera back on the tripod because I need both hands for this this is still very hot so you got to be careful but go over wipe it down again and you should get a nice even coating all around your pan you can see it's a little bit wavy look in there but that'll pull any excess around do any dry spots wipe it down and you can see you get a little bit of iron off of it too but wipe it down until you have that nice satiny Sheen and I'll let this cool off for a while I'll come back and I'll show you and final and most important step in the my seasoning process yeah that looks nice all right I let this cool down it's still a bit warm but you can handle it and I wipe it down one more time and now we do the most important stage of the seasoning process we start using it so I'm going to turn my heat back on get that heated back up most people say that the best thing you can cook for the first time the newly seasoned pan is bacon it's not a bad choice lot of oil it's got some salt in it it soaks in good as you're cooking but I prefer as you should probably figure out by now I'd do things a bit different I prefer potatoes why because as you cook them potatoes will shed starch you ever notice you get a white residue on your cutting board after you slice up a bunch of potatoes that residue is starch and what I want to do is get some of that starch worked into the pores so that it can begin to carbonize and it will carbonize a bit as we cook this first batch let me see if we're heated up yet not quite but anyway well I'm doing this I have some notes that I wanted to go over from my last few videos first I want to talk about thick pans versus thin pans it's mostly a matter of personal preference whether you like a thicker heavier pan or a thinner lighter one you know if you have bad wrists arthritis in your hands or something like that absolutely go with the thinnest lightest vintage pans you could find but as far as performance goals you can use either pan for any purpose really but a thicker heavier pan works a bit better in the oven because it acts as a buffer when your burner kicks on to heat stole to eat the oven up and it holds the heat and releases it slowly into your food when the burner is off a thinner lighter pan tends to work better for browning things and for searing meat the heat up faster and they'll recover faster when you put your cold food in there whoops hit my tripod but either way you the kind of pan will work for either purpose and that is wound up good put a generous amount of whatever sort of fat or oil that you normally use you don't want to deep fry these but you still want to have a fairly generous amount of oil in there and I'm gonna need a bit more because my spill sits nowhere near the level it tends to pull up a little more on one side but we'll get that melted let's see that's almost enough I'll give it a little bit more the next thing I want to talk about was sources for finding cast-iron pans like I mentioned before your best bet for cheap vintage pans like I said I only paid I think 10 bucks for this one is second-hand shops like a goodwill st. Vincent de Paul and I should also mention you'll probably get a little smoke the first time you use this off the bottom because you still have a little bit of oil on there I'll give that just a little bit more and I'll throw in my potatoes I kind of lengthwise so they cover better just be careful dropping them in small ones here just been guys going we do need a little bit more oil it looks like quite a lot and it kind of is because this is a pretty big pan and like I said my stole doesn't really set a level so I need a little bit extra get some salt and pepper pepper a little bit of salt and let little start frying up anyway sources for pans second-hand shops eBay could be kind of good source you tend to run into things where people really overpricing you'll see a number eight Griswold pan that's legitimately worth seventy seventy-five dollars but they'll have enlisted rare vintage Griswold pan only one hundred and forty nine ninety-five well when nobody buys it bill realistic markdown only one hundred nineteen ninety five so they tend to be a bit overpriced but if you watch things and you get a little bit of practice of spotting good deals you can still get some good deals on ebay antique stores are another source but you're gonna pay the price for that usually although most antique stores in this area are the antique mall type of stores and you can often find the same thing at a different price in different vendors stalls so just a little bit you can often find different things for different prices but the biggest advantages if you need to find something specific there's a better chance they'll have it and if you need like a lid for a pan or something or a Dutch oven you can take your Dutch oven with you and match it up and see if it actually fits right that in there before you buy it ah see what's next on my list there's some good reference books out there the book of Griswold and Wagner there's two volumes it's called the book of Griswold and Wagner and the book of Wagner and Griswold but they cover a lot of other manufacturers they're really great for identifying the different kinds the different things that manufacturers have made the prices are on a date on I think the newer Edition is like 2016 and the first edition is 2005 but even though the prices aren't accurate they do show the relative rarity of different sized pans you'll find that even among the same level the same manufacturer different sizes tend to be more common than others number three number five and number eight are the most common sizes for a small medium and large pan the other sizes are a bit less common in some like number twos they're real small they're only about a four-inch pan they never made very many of them and they never sold very many of them so those are really scarce amongst pretty much every kind of pan you're gonna come across but like I said it'll show you you know the relative value even if the price itself isn't really accurate okay buzzy wax there's a lot of different products on the market for seasoning cast iron pans one of them is called buzzy wax I've never actually used it so I can't give you a review one way or the other but I've heard a lot of good things about it and maybe one of these days I'll actually get around to trying but some of the other products that are available you have to watch out for it there's different kind of pastes and different kinds buzzie waxes beeswax grapeseed oil and one other oil which escapes me at the moment it comes in a little hockey puck shape thing and you put it on your pan and sees it in the oven but there's pastes and other tight deals you want to avoid anything that has paraffin wax in it or any other petroleum product if it doesn't say on the label what the ingredients are don't buy it just because it says all-natural that's meaningless marketing ploy arsenic and asbestos are all-natural products see o warpage making a pan wobble if you have a nice flat pan you'll want to be kind of careful with it so that it doesn't that's all that I won't solve it anyway if you have a nice flat pan you want to be a little careful with it so you don't make it warp and you turn that down some warpage never used to be a problem in the old days on a wood cook stove because you set the pan flat on top of the stove and the entire bottom heated evenly or you took an eye out that was the same size as the bottom and the same thing the whole bottom heated even with gas ranges in electric stalls the burner would be smaller than the bottom of the pan and if you turn it up too high too fast the middle of the pan would heat up and try to expand while the outside edges of the bottom are still cold the expansion had nowhere to go and it would Bowl the bottom downward and you get a wobbly spinny pan like I said for a cook that's not a problem but for a collector's item it can be what you can do to avoid that especially with larger pans that are a bit bigger than your burners is you heat them up slowly you start them off on two or three you know kind of a medium low heat for a couple of minutes and then you slowly warm them up and give the time give the heat time to spread out to the entire pan and that'll generally prevent warping in the bottom of a nice pan I don't know if I pointed this I'll kind of rub them around the bottom a little bit and that will help work that starch in loose on these towards the middle so they cook even come here you always got to be one doesn't there there let's see what else do they have oh wire wheels it's all teeny to use a wire brush on your pan and by a wire brush I mean something like this a hand wire brush that you can scrub with they work really good for scrubbing stuff off of your pans don't use a wire wheel on a grinder or a handheld grinder what that tends to do is it'll burnish the surface of the pan it'll take the stuff off yeah but if you have raised lettering or even indented lettering it'll wear that down fairly quickly because cast iron is a lot softer than steel you'll also like I said you'll burnish the surface of the pan which means it basically smears the metal around turn em out a little bit more it smears the metal around and it seals up the pores and it makes it hard to season the pan the oil and starch and whatnot will just sit on the surface and it won't really penetrate like it should so don't do that if you happen to get a pan that looks like it's too shiny too buffed up and you think it's been attacked with a water wheel fill the inside of the pan with vinegar and let it sit overnight wash it off the next day and then try and season it and see what happens the vinegar will etch the surface of the pan it'll open the pores back up okay what's next on my list here using old iron for cast iron to stay in the best possible shape it needs to be used now and then I make a point I have that old Wagner waffle iron that thing somewhere between 115 and 127 years old I make a point to using that at least three times a year just to keep it in good shape this pan here is going on a century it's well into its 90s never be afraid to use old cast iron because like I said it needs to be used and you went through all the effort of finding and restoring some old pan there's no sense of just hanging it on your wall and leaving it there that guy's done now put there on the pit cast iron can take good bit of patience I showed you all those ones I've fallen before I didn't find those every time I went out looking forms sometimes you're not gonna find anything sometimes they'll be cast iron pans there that just aren't worth buying they're cheap nasty wrought iron and they're pretty much useless but every now on the end you will come across something like that that's really worthwhile to have so just have some patience keep looking and eventually you'll come across something this is a great example of buying the pan rather than the name when I bought this there was enough crud on the back I had no idea what could possibly be there for markings but I could tell by looking at it that it was an old pan it was thin it was light and I could see on the end of the handle that was good high-quality iron so even at worst even if this turned out to be nothing special I still would have had a perfectly usable good pan see here check the notes think a little bit see if there's anything else that I really wanted to talk about well I think I've all covered it this is done this pan here is well seasoned now not really well seasoned that'll take a bit of time the process I use doesn't give you a really black dark finish at least not at first you'll get a dark gray to start with over time they'll turn to kind of a golden blackish-brown it's kind of a pretty color for a while and this is smoking a little bit but you can see that the bottom of the pan is already starting to black in a bit that's because it cooked some of that starch into there and it's starting to carbonized and that's exactly what you want to have happen there's no need to overcomplicate things and go through 25 baking's and applications of oil in order to season the cast iron pan the first couple of times I use this upright fry potatoes in but after that it can be used just like an any other pan so there you have it and hopefully this has been informative and hopefully you'll go out and you'll find yourself nice little treasure like this and I thank you much for watching and good night

Channel: TheMudbrooker

Views: 522,797

Keywords: Cast iron seasoning, vintage cast iron, cast iron restoration, cast iron identification, finding vintage cast iron

Id: qJSBbRv9pR4

Length: 40min 8sec (2408 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2019