I’ve done that plenty of times. I’m not boiling a panful of vinegar or lemon juice, but I’ve put them in plenty of sauces that take time to reduce. So far no problems. When a pan is well seasoned it should have a thick coating of impermeable carbon. A little acid shouldn’t matter.
I still have difficulty keeping my cast iron seasoned and in my experience the pebbled texture is actually easier to keep seasoned than the smooth; although this may be because my pebbled pans don’t get used as much.
I find scrambled eggs remarkably easy to clean from cast iron, the trick being to thoroughly warm up the pan first and be sure to grease or oil the bottom and sides. If the pan is well-seasoned enough the eggs will come loose like it was Teflon. If it does stick a little, I let the pan sit until the egg has dried completely and then an oiled paper towel usually gets it off. If not I use a nylon scrubber sponge and when all else fails copper wool.
What gives me the greatest difficulty is the juice that bleeds from meat and hamburger when you fry it. The water content boils away leaving a sort of sticky gunk. If I can scrape the pan with a plastic spatula before all the liquid’s gone it will come off, otherwise I have to resort to using water, which indeed is bad for the seasoning. Suggestions anyone?
All I know is I was sauteing fish in my skillet, and I added some lemon juice at the end and it left big holes in my well seasoned skillet that exposed bare metal.
That’s odd in my experience.
Yep. I find this true with cast iron or my stainless steel sauté pan. The oil has to be hot (like rippling) to release the food properly. I had issues with my stainless steel sauté pan until I started doing the “hot pan, cold oil, food won’t stick” thing. If the oil is not at the proper temperature, food sticks like a sonofabitch to that pan. It helps with cast iron, too, but the effect doesn’t seem to be quite as dramatic.
I use a steel spatula with a really flat front edge. I have this one by OXO. Some have a slightly to very slightly rounded edge, but this one is really straight aside from rounded corners. It’s ideal for scraping, plastic just won’t do it. If there’s anything left after that, I just use hot water and this OXO cast iron brush. I got it as a gift, I didn’t even know these existed, and I love it.
My Lodge is a Target one, and it took me a year (with only sporadic effort) to get it to the proper finish, mostly with cooking pork, chicken and duck in it, and occasionally doing a pork or duck fat cure for an hour at 400F. It’s finally jet black and slick, so I need to use the spatula as a scraper less and less, and only do the hot water and brush briefly if needed after cooking, then back on the stove to add a teensy bit of oil and heat it dry.
That reminds me: one of the best things you can cook in a cast-iron pan to season it is toasted cheese sandwiches. If I never used my pans for anything else they would be the best-seasoned pans possible.
Ah, Jeff Smith; The Frugal Gourmet. 
You got it!
Do you cook with a stainless steel spatula? because this one change made a ton of difference in my cast iron experiences. Stainless steel lets you get a good scrape that plastic wont.
and I second the thrift store idea, I have 2 I picked up at thrift stores, one from korea of all places. both smooth bottom, both treat me way better than my lodge ever did.
I got my first pan at a thrift store for free. It was dirty and gross and had old black gunk coated on it but it didn’t have any thick rust or warping so I knew it could be restored. I also got free pans from friends who just didn’t want to deal with cast iron. Just put it out there that you are looking for cast iron and you may be gifted with gold that others just don’t want to deal with.
I buy up every cast iron poy and pan I can find at garage sales. I recondition them by cooking them in a camp fire for about 30 minutes and then start the seasoning process over again. I don’t make too big a deal out of seasoning. I coat with oil and heat till it smokes off, maybe I do this about 3 times.
Lately I have been thinking about experimenting with different high temp oils for seasoning. For some reason my meat tends to stick a little while my eggs, hash browns, pancakes etc slide right out. If my meat sticks and leaves a residue I like to burn that out rather than scrup it out.
Use a spatula with a flat edge like this, instead of one with a rounded edge like this. Using a flat-edge spatula will smooth out the bits and fill in the pores in the seasoning, making for a smoother non-stick surface. (I think I read that here.)
I used flax seed oil (on the advice of someone on my previous thread) repeatedly as well as using the skillet mostly for meat, bacon and so on.
I don’t know if I had a defective skillet, or I was doing something wrong…but I’ve had previous cast iron skillets that were smooth as glass and I managed to keep them that way, so I don’t know. My Lodge is going to a friend who is a cooking fool and plans to season it up right. If she does what I couldn’t, I’ll be able to figure out where I went wrong.
That may or may not have been me, but that’s what I used for my initial season. I took my pan down to bare metal by putting it in an oven cleaning cycle, and then worked the seasoning up using flax seed oil as advised by Cook’s Illustrated (and various online sources). I don’t use flax seed to keep it up anymore, just regular oil or animal fat.
You did recommend that in my earlier thread (as did several others) and thank you all.
burgers last night. I rolled ¼-pound ground beef into a ball, put it between plastic wrap, and smashed it with a heavy-bottom saucepan. No way two of those would fit into my cast iron frying pan, so I got out the other 10" one. The one I use all the time says ‘8’, ‘SK’, ‘MADE IN USA’, and ‘D1’ on the bottom. I’m sure this is a Lodge, but it doesn’t say it anywhere. It’s an ‘older’ one; by which I mean I got it in the early-'90s. The other pan, which I’ve had a longer time, was made in Taiwan. No idea what the brand is.
The Lodge has your typical rough cast-iron finish; a little ‘pebbly’. The Taiwanese pan’s cooking surface has been milled smooth, and the pan does indeed ‘feel’ thinner than the Lodge. The Taiwanese pan is barely seasoned. I don’t remember why. I think at one point I decided to re-season it and got part way; then I decided that the pebbly-bottomed Lodged needed a good coat of gunk to fill in the pores and make it non-stick, and have been cooking with it ever since.
The only purpose to use a cast iron skillet is that the cost of an equally heat-transferring steel skillet is prohibitively expensive. Iron is about twice as conductive as the best stainless, so a thick iron pan is pretty good at distributing the heat evenly through the pan to the food.
Enough of the trivia.
I’d say consider an enamel-coated iron skillet if you don’t want to worry about your food tasting like metal or seasoning the pan.
This is the most recent of several cast-iron threads, so I’m picking this one to bump. I recently discovered a solution to the above problem that I wanted to share with everyone. For stuff like hamburger or bratwurst that bleeds a lot, just put a bit of cracker or bread crust in the pan. It’ll absorb the non-grease part of the drippings so it doesn’t bake onto the pan. This has been working great for me; I may never need to wash my pans ever again.
I gave up.
I just cook whatever I want in it and when I’m done, if there’s stuff stuck to the pan, I boil water and scrape with a spatula, then I clean it gently with a scrubber and dish soap. The seasoning looks better than it ever did when I messed around with oils and kosher salt and never using soap and wishing it clean.