Seasoning is a polymer which gives it very strong resistance, which is not going to breakdown just with one dishwasher wash.
The seasoned surface is hydrophobic and highly attractive to oils and fats used for cooking (oleophilic).
The protective layer itself is not very susceptible to soaps, and many users do briefly use detergents and soaps.[28]
Unless you are dish washing it everyday and refuse to dry/reseason it, you will be fine.
However, cast iron is very prone to rust, and the protective layer may have pinholes, so soaking for long periods is contraindicated as the layer may start to flake off.
This aligns with how I care for mine. Scrub it with a chainmail scrubber, Wash it with soap / watwr, then rinse dry over flame and then drizzle a but of oil and rub with a paper towel.
I have no reverence for my cast iron besides avoiding letting it sit wet for a long time.
Also throw in the metal fork you used to scrape your expensive non-stick pan.
You can wash Cast Iron all you like, I wouldn’t suggest the dishwasher, just don’t use soap, scrape with a plastic paint scrapper under hot water, heat until smoking, rub some oil on it, let cool. Easy peasy. After knowing we’re all poisoning ourselves with the nonstick coating and have been for decades, the Cast Iron is a great nonstick alternative.
Use “soap” if you want. Modern dishwashing liquid doesn’t have lye in it. It’s the lye from old school rendered soap that damages the seasoning.
Don’t use anything with an abrasive more than the rough side of a sponge, and even with that, don’t rub super hard or in the same place for too long.
This thread is full of people claiming that dish soap doesn’t contain lye, but the most popular dish soap I’m aware of, Dawn, contains lye and that’s easily found in a two second Google search.
Interesting. Sodium hydroxide.
Well, while I don’t use Dawn, I do use dishwashing liquid, whatever happens to be in the house, and I’ve never had a bit of trouble with it.
My main issue is with calling cast iron “non stick” when things most definitely stick.
The trick of pre-heating it to unreasonable temperatures before adding the ingredients isn’t a property of cast iron, it works on all materials, but it can quickly go wrong and make everything stick.
It is non-stick if the seasoning is right, but often it’s not smooth enough off the shelf.
Eh, not really. You can “season” it and if you add eggs with no oil they’ll stick.
They key with cast iron is using enough fat, which is generally more than you’d use with other cookware. High heat just burns the fat and/or the food, ruining your meal and making cleanup more difficult.
What cast iron is really good at in terms of heat is retaining it. There’s enough mass that you have to preheat the pan for longer, but once it’s hot, it stays at a pretty stable temperature when you add your ingredients. It doesn’t get hot spots as severly, either, especially if preheated for a good long time at a relatively low heat.
Yeah cast iron, even with a good seasoning, will never match a Teflon coating. It’s pretty good, but you will need to cook some bacon in the pan before the eggs to make them not stick.
Eggs with no oil will stick in a “non-stick” pan, too.
Not the ones I own. I should know, back when I was counting calories not using oil was an easy trick to control the fat intake.
When you’re cutting out vegetable oils to lose weight, you’re doing it wrong.
Your body needs them.What it doesn’t need is animal fat, and what you can safely reduce to lose weight are simple carbohydrates.
You don’t need vegetable oils, that’s a very weird claim. You need lipids in general, sure.
But I never said I never ingested oils - I said I was precisely monitoring calories, which in turn could mean smartly deciding not to use oil when eating eggs just because my flawed cast iron pan sticks. I could choose to ingest fats in more tasty or practical ways.
Weight gain or loss is a matter of building a caloric deficit or surplus. If you’re going to do that by reducing carbohydrates that’s your choice, go for for it.
I don’t need help with dieting my man, I’m a biologist and I’m quite happy with my weight results. I’m just explaining that a pan that forces you to use oil to not stick can’t be honestly called “non-stick” because actual non-stick materials won’t require the oil. Otherwise, every pan is non-stick so long as you use enough oil.
A bit of olive oil in a mister doesn’t add enough calories to matter.
That’s just an abuse of olive oil. Olive oil is a finishing oil when you want the flavor. Use a neutral oil like avocado.
Teflon itself isn’t poison. The entire point of teflon is that it’s so chemically unreactive that nothing can even bind to it on a molecular level.
The problem with Teflon is that manufacturing it uses a lot of actually toxic chemicals incidental to making the Teflon bind to the metal of a pan and because it’s so non-reactive and very brittle, general use and any disposal of it will result in Teflon molecules just floating around in the environment unable to be broken down by anything.
You would probably like cast iron more if you stopped committing war crimes against it.
It’s insane to me that people don’t wash them and call it seasoning.
It’s apparently a different story when someone seasons their underwear.
Whatsa matter? You don’t like your pancakes to taste like last nights steak?
lol I got seasoned by 101 men at an airbnb and cried
It still gets them to reply, every time.
Just FYI, you do wash cast iron, you just don’t use detergents on it. One common method is to dump a handful of salt and a tiny splash of water into the pan and start scrubbing. You can use a gentle dish soap, but I’d avoid using the dishwasher, because those detergents will be a lot stronger and will actually ruin the seasoning (as well as linger on the surface and end up in your food, which is also bad).
Ice in the hot pan also works. Paper towel to wipe out, voila!
I use a little dawn on mine now and then and it’s still basically like glass. Just put a little oil on it afterwards. Never the dishwasher though omg
Detergents are basic because that works wonders on greasy stuff. When oil polymerises it won’t be susceptible to basic substances anymore but will react to acids. (Unlike acid and oils which don’t really react with each other – think vinaigrette separating in the fridge.)
Washing a cast iron pan with detergent will clean it from unpolymerised oil.
Cooking e.g. tomato based sauces in your cast iron pan will strip it of the polymerised coating (might impart flavour too).
Cleaning kitchen tiles near your stove is sometimes easier with acidic cleaning solutions as well. Just be careful with the caulking which will brittle over time from using acids.
Modern soaps/detergents don’t contain lye, which is what ruins the seasoning. It’s the humid drying of a dishwasher that causes it to rust. Nothing to with the detergent.
Dawn has lye, that’s why it works so well
As a mild ph adjuster, you would have to soak your cast iron in Dawn (platinum only) for hours, which would ruin your seasoning no matter the detergent used.
Someone doesn’t know Sodium Hydroxide is Lye
I do, the lye is not to aid in cleaning and it doesn’t have enough to ruin a seasoning.
There’s a difference between knowing something is in it, and why it is in it and what it can do.
Soda has caustic and corrosive ingredients, it doesn’t mean it’s going to dissolve your intestines lmfao.
“The caustic ingredient in a soap is not to aid in cleaning” You, that’s you, demonstrating a single digit IQ.
I just wash it as normal, you just need to re-fry/season it once in in 3-5 months or so. People that don’t wash it usually let it become rusted and dirty as well.
Shouldn’t need to reseason it if you are just using dish detergent like Dawn.
I don’t really think about looking for special detergent without lye when buying (dunno why people say that dish detergent in general doesn’t contain it anymore), re-frying it once in a while makes the surface more smooth.
What do you mean by refrying?
I notice it get smother over time the more I use it.
The process where you wash it as clean as possible then apply oil and put into oven.
We do wash them, I clean mine by boiling water in them, scraping any stubborn bits with a wooden spatula, rinsing it out under running water and wiping them down with a clean towel and heating the pan again to evaporate any remaining water. No microbials will survive being boiled and then heated again, anything stuck to the pan dissolves away in boiling water and a clean towel will wipe away anything else. After that I add a few drops of oil and wipe down the still hot surface with the thinnest possible coating of oil.
Seasoning for cast iron doesn’t mean holding onto previous flavors. It definitely shouldn’t taste like last night’s dinner. Seasoning in the context of cast iron is the build up of thin layers of polymerized oils from heating them up in a clean pan that forms a durable protective finish that is incredibly non-stick.
So more accurately parallel your underwear example how cast iron is cleaned, if you took your underwear, boiled the hell out of them, used something to give them a scrub, rinsed them out well and then heat dried them.
Your method sounds great and I’m sure it works well, but I just want to make sure you know that modern dish soap won’t damage your seasoning at all.
I hate cast iron, but ‘seasoning’ is just a misnomer that was adopted to refer to the oils polymerizing on the pan. The oil (usually something like canola) is literally bonded to the metal.
Not cleaning a cast iron pan is gross, fats left in the pan will go rancid.
The only soap you can’t use is lye based as that will strip the seasoning off.
its just a fry pan
I wash my cast iron with normal dish soap and steel wool, and if I’m too lazy, I put it in the dishwasher. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I don’t “season” it. It’s a pan, no more, no less. Needs a tiny little bit more fat than a non-stick if you want to make an omelette.
I know you’re a troll but the idea of cooking on a dish soap infused cast iron is filthy lol
I’m not a troll. But the amount of magical thinking around cast iron amuses me to no end.
“dish soap infused” lol. Tell me, are your kitchen knives “infused” with soap, too?
Lol I’m not religious about it or anything, but it’s porous unlike other cooking materials, so yeah, I don’t put soap on it
What are your cutting boards made of?
I also try not to use much if any soap there too, because, porous wood
To each their own my friend, you do you. Not trying to get into a fued over soap preferences lol
Yeah he’s a panoisseur. I wash mine with soap too lol. But I use the lemon scented shit so my soap infused food is always citrusy fresh.
Yeah, soap doesn’t hurt a fucking thing, If I just cooked with a seed oil or bacon or something I’d be inclined just to let it burn off, But if I cooked noodles or pasta or garlic or anything fragrant on there, I’d soap and scrub the piss out of it. I just make sure to throw it back on the fire and get it past 212 if it’s been wet.
Same here, though i don’t use steel wool and i do season it every now and then
The pan handles it like a champ
I used to love cast iron but carbon steel has stolen my heart
I bought my first carbon steel pan (a wok specifically) last week and I did a bad job at seasoning it for the first time. I had to scrub the shit out of it with steel wool and vinegar to reset. My second season was a little better but it’s still not fully non stick. I hope it will just naturally get better as I keep using it.
Oh it’s the absolute best. Frank Prizinsano the chef taught me that.
That just gets me excited to start a fresh new seasoning. Starting from bare metal is a good feeling
Well that’s blatantly what they’re doing, isn’t it. Must have found a shitty pan or something.
Nazgûl screeches intensify
I love cast iron for cooking. It’s also very forgiving. Depending what I am cooking it gets treated carefully for the seasoning, or scrubbed with dish soap. The beautiful thing is I can take it camping, come home and scrub all the ‘seasoning’ off, then re-season with 30 min in the oven an a bit of olive oil.
When my SO and I first got together I did his dishes one day, and as I had never seen a cast iron pan I just washed it, fussing the whole time about how filthy it was. My Australian bush lunatic, one pair of underpants owning mother in law had an apoplectic fit. But seriously, these people cook salmon in them one night and pancakes the next with barely a wipe and it’s disgusting. Give me stainless steel.
Well that’s just crazy. I wash mine with soap and water after cooking… but then I give it a quick flame dry and re-season on the stove top, which I can definitely admit is more maintenance than most people want to deal with.
Wash it all you want, should be fine as long as you hand dry it after.
I put mine in the clothes dryer with a load of socks. Is that wrong?
For your clothes dryer most definitely. Probably not great for the sheets either.
I’m imagining the sound
Depends on how much you like buying dryers.
it’s just a pan
You can take care of your pans anyway you want. But it’s telling when people treat neglect like it’s an ethic.
I use the washer and then let it sit wet over night to bring out its natural paprika seasoning.
Carbon steel > cast iron. Lighter, basically the same heat properties, and you don’t get peer pressured into unnecessarily babying a lump of solid metal.
Seriously no reason to dote on either of them so much. Only real care you need to take is that they can rust, so don’t leave them wet. And don’t needlessly scrub them with chain mail or angle grinders, or you might need to take a few minutes fixing them with cooking oil and the oven.
Does cast iron really take babying? I have a 12" cast iron skillet that’s pretty much the only pan I use, and I just scrub it with steel wool, get it hot again, then throw in some avocado oil. It takes like 60 seconds of work
No, it doesn’t. I don’t even bother coating mine with oil, just a scrub with hot water and let it dry.
No, it doesn’t. But people think it does and will get really vocal about it if you, god forbid, get it super gross and need to rinse it out with some soap and water.
That’s why I specified that it was peer pressure, not necessity. :)
Also don’t temp shock them, they can warp
Ah, true. That one’s become so ingrained for cooking in general that I don’t really think about it. Putpan on low/medium heat, toss in a bit of oil and let the heat get even then swirl the oil. Adjust heat to desired level and cook.
I also mean when cleaning, don’t go from hot to under the sink stream
I end up reseasoning mine every couple of years, inevitably somebody leaves it in the sink for a bit trying to soak off some burnt on stuff. It’s really no big deal.
Why do you hate cast iron?
It feels super greasy and filthy, and everything you cook sticks to it. Give me stainless steel any day.
Interesting. Mine doesn’t and I only have problems with sticking if I walk away too long. I gave a stainless pan away. To each their own! Thanks for the answer.
You have problems with cast iron sticking but you like stainless steel? Stainless steel is probably the most non stick material you can use. I can’t stand the stuff.
It is a myth that you can’t use dish detergent on cast iron. If it feels greasy and filthy, it is greasy and filfthy.
The truth behind the “no soap” myth is that we used to use lye-based soap for dishwashing. Lye does, indeed, break down seasoning. But we use surfactant-based detergents now, rather than actual soap. Detergents break down oils, but they don’t
Your boomer parents/grandparents couldn’t wash their cast iron with dish “soap”. You can.
That’s just a dirty pan. Actual cast iron seasoning isn’t sticky or dirty because it has no impurities from the food, it’s actually polymerized with the cast iron and it should look make the pan look black and glassy. I wash mine with Dawn soap and hand dry it, and it makes Teflon look like a joke. I can heat it without any butter or oil, drop in a glob of egg yolk, and it’ll slide like it’s skating on Astroglide. You’re having a skill issue and you need to get good.
I wash mine with Dawn soap and hand dry it,
Yeah, I think the big hangup for a lot of people is that detergents used to contain lye which would react with the steel. No longer the case. Folks will seriously refuse to clean their pans which is gross AF.
dawn literally has lye in it
From what I can see, it’s used to balance the pH. So I assume a small amount.
it’s fucking lye, doesn’t take much
What exactly is your argument here? I use Dawn; it doesn’t appear to affect my cast iron pan. Many people online use it to clean their cast iron with no ill effects.
I mean, they use the stuff to clean off ducks after oil spills. I suspect whatever concentration it has is not high enough to have any caustic effects.
So clearly it does take “much.”
Does this also apply to the caustic and corrosive ingredients in a soda?
It’s phosphoric acid, doesn’t make much, yet it’s safe to drink. See how fucking moronic that argument is you muppet?
React with the steel… in the cast iron? I’m confused
cast iron is basically steel, but has it’s own name because it’s brittle. roughly between half a percent to 3 percent carbon (among other things) is the base of many steels. “cast iron” is about 4 percent carbon and pretty much no ductility
Steel is like 98% iron. Sorry for the mistake.
But cast iron doesn’t contain steel, it contains iron and carbon
good lord. steel is iron and carbon, just not so much carbon it becomes brittle and called cast iron
What do you think carbon steel is made from?
Cast iron and steel are largely similar materials, cast iron just has the carbon precipitated out of solution instead of trapped in a crystalline structure
