memes

It's pretty hard to ruin good cast iron. A good cast iron pan could spend a year at the bottom of a lake and all it would need is a good scrub and reseason to be good to go again.

About the only thing I've seen that makes them completely irrecoverable is when people use them to melt lead. Also you can crack the cheap ones in half with thermal shock.

A well-seasoned Dutch oven sounds like a fate worse than death.

You could leave it outside in the dirt for 5 years and still just give it a lye bath then reseason it to work like new

I am in flavor of this.

No wok? Also safety razors are great and I'm guessing the only reason cartridges won out is because of marketing, then the following generation forgot there was another option.

Ugh. You wanna know the secret to cooking on cast iron/carbon steel? Just cook with it. Put fat in, get it hot, put your food in. It's really that easy. Wipe it out when you're done, rub some oil on it. That's it. You can even cook tomato sauce in it, it'll be ok. People have been using cast iron to cook all kinds of things, acidic and not, for literal centuries. This myth that cast iron/carbon steel pans are these delicate special snowflakes that need constant attention and maintenance needs to die.

I used flax oil to season my dutch oven, and finds it stands up to frequent tomato based pasta sauces for a bout a year, but it does eventually fail, an you know immediately when that happens, iron flavoured bolognese. Did that for a few years and finally got an enamelled set for that. As for the frying pans, mine are really old (1920s) and quite lightweight, nowhere near as heavy as newer Wagner 1898s and Lodges. I find the heat retention just perfect when making a carbonara, i turn the burner off when the pasta is three minutes from done and the heat is just perfect to make the carbonara sauce cook without turning into scrambled eggs. The other use, pan frying steaks, nothing does that better. They're not for everything, I have one 7 inch teflon pan that i use for one purpose only, and that's french omelets. I have zero interest in trying that in a cast pan.

That just gets me excited to start a fresh new seasoning. Starting from bare metal is a good feeling

Nazgûl screeches intensify

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

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.

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.