I bought a couple of Cast Iron Skillets. They have a very small amount of rust here and there on the outside of the Skillet but nothing too bad and almost not worth bothering with but rust is rust and I feel compelled to get rid of it. Looking for recommendations on how to clean the rust off without damaging the Skillets and whether I need to treat the Skillet where I removed the small amounts of rust. There is no rust within the Skillets. From what I can determine, 0000 Steel Wool is not recommended. Sea Salt is recommended and rubbing it on the rust to remove it.

Also, any recommendations on proper seasoning of the Skillets would be appreciated. Thanks!

Here you go...

Just FYI to the OP that there are a number of cast-iron threads on the board. This is the most recent:

Who else is loving their cast iron cookware?

My cast iron are pass downs from friends and relatives Some pieces are over 60 years old.
Many have first been burned in wood fires, cooled, wiped down with vegetable oil, placed in a 300 degree oven, for a couple hours, cool and repeat 3 or 4 times to properly coat.
Then, cook bacon, sausage, ham slowly to render natural fat, and enjoy.
Carefully scrape the food particles off the side and bottom; wipe out. Small splash of warm water, and wipe clean. Any tiny bits are removed with kosher salt rubbed with a paper towel. Coat a cleaned pan with a thin coat of vegetable oil, and finish in a warmed oven for a couple hours.
I never use soap; my cast iron is a clean satin black, makes wonderful meals, great steaks( lots of butter), fried fish, burgers, and fantastic corn bread.
Good luck
Blackhorse4

Moderators - I posted, forgetting to check for a previous thread or threads on this same great topic. Move if you choose.
Regards to all.
Blackhorse4

Thanks NHracecraft and Blackhorse.

Since it's a small amount of rust you can soak in vinegar and scrub with steel wool. It will take a little elbow grease, bit it will come off.

To season, pick a cooking oil and rub it in. You don't need anything fancy. Crisco, vegetable oil, or olive oil all work great. Coat the pan- then WIPE OFF AS MUCH AS YOU CAN. Find out what your oil's smoke point is and set your oven above that. Put the pan in the oven upside down and leave it for an hour or so. Repeat if necessary.

Lots of people say to cook bacon to season a pan, bit the bacon you get at the store has so much sugar in it you'll probably just end up with a mess. I personally think something like cornbread works s whole lot better.

All that aside, cook with it and the seasoning will get better and better over time. Nonstick properties come from temperature control, not seasoning. Good seasoning does help prevent rust however.

Wipe the pan out when you're done cooking with it and clean with soap and water. It won't hurt the seasoning, that's an old wives tale. Some people tell you to put a coat of oil on it after you clean it, but I don't find that to be necessary. Dry well and put it away.

That video makes its rounds ever year or so on SF. Simply put, if you follow what the guy says, you will find it works perfectly.

Lots of variations on care. You’ll figure out what works for you. For instance, in lieu of vegetable oil, I prefer an oil with a high smoke point like grape seed oil.

This where I learned.
We all learn something here, great forum, keep posting.

https://fieldcompany.com/pages...skillet-instructions

Here's how I do it for cast iron and carbon steel. I use The Field seasoning also. Great stuff.

Get chain mail for cleaning. Best thing ever. And don’t worry about your care and maintenance as cast iron is very forgiving.

Wut, nobody cleans them in the dishwasher?

I've seent it done, once. Took a year to get eggs to stop sticking.

Closest thing Mom did was wipe it out with a paper towel and that was more than Granma. For the most part they got seasoned with bacon grease and hamburger grease, alternately, then throwed down in the oven to hide them.

The burger grease got poured off. The bacon grease did, too, into a little brown pot which was the source of cooking grease for Brussels sprouts when they were the veggie of the meal. They soak up a lot, serve hot, sprinkle with parmesan. The pizza stuff with seasonings is good.

Breakfast, you pulled out the skillet, threw in some bacon, when those were done, eggs. Pour off the grease, pancakes. And nobody worried about cholesterol, which is becoming associated with too much carbs. Not fats - but them transfats will kill you. Stop with the fake butter and see if those numbers don't improve.

Of the three - aluminum, teflon, and iron - only iron is needed in our diet. Yet the females are taking supplements while staying away from iron skillets - yet their moms and grammas didn't seem to suffer for it.

I like to call it retro technology when we go back to what did work in the day. Except hand cranking cars. Not gonna happen.

I bought a Stargazer skillet. I've read to use flaxseed oil
to season it. I still need to season it a few more times.

Tirod’s post brought memories of fresh sausage gravy and homemade biscuits at Grandma’s wood stove!!
Love this post. Lots of tips and techniques.
Regards,
Blackhorse4

quote:

Originally posted by Schmelby:
I bought a Stargazer skillet. I've read to use flaxseed oil
to season it. I still need to season it a few more times.

Stargazers are notorious for being hard to season, I know mine was.
Finally fried in it with peanut oil a few times and that did it.
I used flax oil at 1st but after it flaked off, I switched to grapeseed oil. Then... I switched again to the Field brand seasoning oil and for me, it works the best.

I just received a new Smithey Iron pan today and I'm looking forward to using it.

Back in the day, soaps had lye, and this is what is purported to remove the seasoning, today's modern dish washing soaps don't have lye, so you can clean the pans all you like, won't remove the seasoning.

The video posted is good, used that technique to season or re-season pans, and Crisco is the best for seasoning... YMMV

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
Back in the day, soaps had lye, and this is what is purported to remove the seasoning, today's modern dish washing soaps don't have lye, so you can clean the pans all you like, won't remove the seasoning.

The video posted is good, used that technique to season or re-season pans, and Crisco is the best for seasoning... YMMV

Actual soap is always made from a chemical reaction between fat (usually one or more types of vegetable oil, but sometimes animal fat) and lye.

In properly made soap, all the lye reacts with fat and no lye remains in the soap.

Really old school homemade or pre-modern-manufacturing soap often had some lye left in it because the ratio of fat to lye has to be very exact. If you had too much lye, the soap would still get stuff clean, it would just chap your hands and eat the seasoning off your pans. If you had too much fat, the soap would just get stuff greasy.

Virtually everything now sold in stores for washing dishes is not actually soap and won’t say soap anywhere on the packaging. Chemically, “dishwashing liquid” is a mixture of detergents and surfactants and some other stuff, but no actual soap.

Soap (and detergents and surfactants) doesn’t cause a chemical reaction when you wash with it, it sort of just helps get stuff wet so it can be rinsed away. Lye actually reacts chemically with fat (and a lot of other stuff, including polymerized fat aka pan seasoning) and turns it into something else.

quote:

Originally posted by joatmonv:

quote:

Originally posted by Schmelby:
I bought a Stargazer skillet. I've read to use flaxseed oil
to season it. I still need to season it a few more times.

Stargazers are notorious for being hard to season, I know mine was.
Finally fried in it with peanut oil a few times and that did it.
I used flax oil at 1st but after it flaked off, I switched to grapeseed oil. Then... I switched again to the Field brand seasoning oil and for me, it works the best.

I just received a new Smithey Iron pan today and I'm looking forward to using it.

Thank you. I'll try that.

2PAK, I'd just start over.

If your oven has a self cleaning setting, put the skillets in there upside down and turn it on. When it is complete let it cool completely and then clean the skillets off well.

Heat your oven up to 325 or so and put the skillets back in there [for about 20 minutes, enough to heat throughout], pull them out and coat them with whatever you choose to use to coat them with (whole 'nother conversation there-Crisco/olive oil/whateveryawant) and put them back in for 15 min or so to be sure they've soaked in to every pore well. Pull it out, let it cool, wipe it down. Repeat the process a couple times to be sure it's just right.

I usually cook eggs in it for the first couple dishes, since that seems to do the best for me to set the finish, and I use a generous amount of oil when I do so. After each use I clean by wiping out general debris, using ice cream salt to scrub the stuck on crud, then heating the pan up on the stove over medium high heat until it just starts to have light smoke, apply a light coat of oil (I use olive oil) wipe off and let cool. I am Captain Anal about cleaning my cast iron after use, never soaking in water or boiling water in it and always using light reseasoning as stated above after each use. My Griswold is beautifully seasoned and slick as can be, as long as I keep it far away from my wife.

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