I agree with China Guy and others that the key is getting the right seasoning on the pan in the first place. Take it all off and start over. Once the seasoning is done right, you can do almost anything to the pans.
Oh…my heart goes out to you. That must have been a little emotionally painful.
That said, your wonderful pan shattered not because the cast iron was old but because the cast iron was cast iron. In other words, cast iron pans are inherently brittle, and it’s not surprising that a dropped pan might shatter.
To the best of my knowledge, nearly all cast-iron pans are made from grey cast iron. Its elongation prior to failure is about 0.5%, which is very low and well within what most people would call “brittle.”
There is such a thing as malleable cast iron (12% elongation), but it’s not often used for cookware. And another class of materials, called “ductile cast iron” (about 18% elongation) came along around 1949, likely after your grandmother’s pan was made. Besides, malleable cast iron is rare in cookware. It’s mostly used for iron pipe and truck components.
Fun fact 1: people think of steel as “iron plus carbon,” but “cast iron” contains a lot more carbon than nearly all steels.
Fun fact 2: counterintuitively, rubber bands are brittle—even new, stretchy ones. Ductile materials undergo permanent (plastic) deformation prior to failure, while brittle ones take little or no permanent set prior to failure. So yeah, glass and cast iron are brittle, but so are many kinds of rubber.
Related question: How do you re-season a pan without an oven? I’ve never seen a guide to re-seasoning that didn’t require access to either an oven or (in one case) a gas barbecue grill. Can you do it on a stove top, or does the relative lack of temperature control make it hard-to-impossible? I live in an apartment without a real oven; our microwave/convection oven is too small to fit a skillet.
I agree with the posters that say don’t oil them when you put them away. I hang my pans on four spaced screws. The little pan gets used close to never, and the big pan gets used about weekly. The middle two about daily. Season on a lower temp, 350 or so, I like peanut oil, but any hard to burn oil will work.
The day after it’s seasoned, start to cook on it. Use it daily if you can. In a week or two you will have a good season built up, and you can then safely store it without too much worry about oxidation. A hard plastic or steel pot scraper can help if you burn something to the point that it gets stuck to the pan. If that happens, make a mental note not to cook like that again. I wash with soap, and I’ll even soak a pan from time to time, I can still make crepes in any of them.
I find that making popcorn in the pan is really good for the seasoning.
Stove top works, high heat, but you will get smoke, so open windows, etc.
** I regularly use the pan to make popcorn, which I think is really good for the surface. Recipe: put a dollop of goose fat,**
where in the world can you buy goose fat? or do you keep your own geese? just wondering…
Amazon sells it. But if you make a Christmas Goose, you will have plenty of leftover fat for the rest of the year, trust me.
I can’t believe I am the first to say this:
This may seem like a stupid question, and yes, I read the thread.
Why “season” a cast iron utensil? I own two grill pans, a “dutch oven” and a flat “pancake” pan
None of them are particularly “sticky” and I wash them with abrasive scrubbers in soap each time I use them. (Actually, not true, half the time I dont wash the pancake pan)
We are talking about cast iron. A thin oil film can be achieved by lightly oiling the pot. “Seasoning” is also a light oil film, which might be “baked in”, left alone… or other methods. My cast iron cookware has so far survived everything from heating in a fire to WELL beyond olive oil smoke point to rough scrubbing with sand on camping trips.
“Seasoning” implies there is some change to the metal/surface. I doubt this. What is the real dope?
Yup. Once or twice a year I buy a goose. My local butcher orders it for me. I usually serve goose New Year’s Eve, and sometimes do one for my birthday. That keeps me in goose fat for quite a while. It’s excellent for vegetables as well as for popcorn.
But you can also order goose fat on-line, I’m told by several reliable sources.
Re cooking with goose fat – I made some roast root vegetables for company. The recipe was pretty much “par boil veggies, cut into cubes, saute in goose fat with a little salt and pepper until done”. I got rave reviews and everyone asked for my recipe. It has a very mild flavor, but it adds richness.
Duck fat has a stronger flavor, and I don’t like it as much for things that should taste like themselves. (Yes, I cook a duck every so often and keep the fat.) But if you are cooking say, bean soup for people who won’t eat pork, duck fat adds a similar unctuousness to the beans that a ham hock would.
The local international market has such stuff in the refrigerated meats section. Plastic ~quart size tubs.
You can also get whole ducks, rabbits, all sorts of pig and cow internals, etc.
Oil residue is a good thing. You can scrub with soap and soak (for a few minutes, not a long time) if you want. But you’ll want to reapply a layer of oil when you’re done though. If you’re leaving enough oil on there to feel sticky or to go rancid, it’s far too much. Really, just rub oil on and then go ahead and wipe it all off. Until a paper towel comes away dry. There’s still oil the pan at that point, you just can’t get it off without soap.
This depends on what you mean by “re-season”. You can apply a new layer of seasoning on the stove top, sure. But you’re going to have a hard time stripping the old seasoning off that way. If you have no self-cleaning oven cycle to work with, I suggest the oven cleaner trick someone mentioned upthread, or just throwing your pan in a bonfire. You could also grind it with a wire wheel or something, but that takes metal off the pan, too, in addition to the built up carbon. (People complaining about pebbly surfaces can grind down the cooking surface flat, too, if they want. There are many youtube videos illustrating how.)
I’ll be contrary and say buying a special, fancy type of oil for seasoning iron is a waste of money. It all turns to carbon at the end, so go ahead and use the cheap stuff. Or whatever you happen to have around. I bought a bottle of flax oil once to reseason one of my pans. It was over ten bucks for a quart. You might as well use truffle oil. And the seasoning was not noticeably better than just using lard.
This is the real issue. Cast iron gets better and better with frequent use. Cooking with it is part of keeping it well-seasoned. Once or twice a month won’t really cut it! Cast-iron might not be best for you.
Certainly, a fancy oil is not necessary–people have been doing it for centuries with lard and whatnot. But $10/quart is a bargain for flaxseed oil. That’s only about double the price of a quart of peanut oil (I see 24 oz at $4.80 on Amazon, so not even a quart), and less than decent olive oils (my usual olive oil, Franoia, is usually around $14-$16/quart). (And no real truffle oil is anywhere close to $10/quart.) I paid that much for a pint. Thing is, you don’t need a lot of it, so it’ll last for years in the fridge–I still have the bottle I bought around ten years ago. Technically, it was supposed to be used by 2012, but it still seems fine and works fine.
Actually, thinking about it again, I don’t think the jar I got for $10 was even a pint. Also, I didn’t know to refrigerate it, and it went rancid pretty quick. It worked fine, I just didn’t see the appeal over a cheaper fat.
Yeah, don’t do this. I tried it with my 40-year-old cast iron skillet after reading this thread and it cracked. Don’t do this.
Uh, I think you might want to throw out that oil. Most oils are meant to be consumed in a year. Yours has degraded and has most definitely oxidized, if not rancid, especially if it’s contained in a plastic container.