So how do you get the bacon to keep from sticking? When I cook bacon it leaves a thick sticky sludge where the bacon touched the pan that I have to scrape off with a spatula to the point that I feel like i’m scraping the coating off. My eggs come out fine, but cleaning after cooking bacon is a pain in the ass
I bought a pre-seasoned pan and it was fine for a while but I seemed to have washed the seasoning out. I use hot water and no soap, but I still find I have to reseason quite often.
The bacon stuck when the pan was new. Since it’s been used quite a bit, not so much. I’ve found that no matter what I cook, using a lower heat setting than when I use Teflon pans works better. If I do get food stuck here and there, for example, if I want a really good pan-seared steak and use higher heat, I just put a little water in the pan and let it simmer while I’m eating. Then it’s under the hot water with the nylon brush, back on the heat to dry, and a light coating of Crisco and let it cool.
But for the bacon try a lower heat setting. Clean and oil the pan when you’re done, and I predict that after the third time you’ll find much less or no stickage.
I’ve had tremendous trouble keeping my cast iron frying pans seasoned. Probably it doesn’t help that my wife cooks hash by putting it in the pan cold with no oil, and then scraping the pan with the edge of a metal spatula! But even beside that, I have problems. The biggest is that any sort of fried meat forms a sticky crust of cooked juice in the pan, and there simply is no way to remove it without using water and gentle scrubbing to soften and loosen it, and that seems to gradually wear away the seasoning.
When I try to recoat the frying pans, most of the oil just boils away, leaving bare metal with a few forlorn islands of seasoning. Not hot enough perhaps? (I’m reluctant to smoke up the house.)
Eggs, shmeggs. You want to challenge a “non-stick” finish, try Morningstar Farms Vegetable Sausage®. Those things will try their damnednest to bond themselves to any cooking surface. Or try frying sliced Spam®- I think it’s basically held together with edible glue.
Two of my cast-iron pans have a pebbled texture rather than a smooth, and they seem to keep seasoned much better; but then they’re the two I use the least (one’s huge, the other is tiny) and so it’s hard to say.
I usually season my pans at around 500, but isn’t the self clean cycle too hot? I’ve seen it used as a suggestion for removing seasoning, not making it. My oven doesn’t have a self clean cycle so I’ve never been able to test it myself.
Either way, 350 is too low I think. The first cast iron pan I ever had I tried to season at that temp (following the directions from some web site) and it just left a sticky residue. 500 leaves a significantly smoother surface, along with a significantly smokier house.
If you do have some stickiness though, you can always put it on the stove top and heat it up. Eventually the sticky residue will burn into the hard carbon coating you’re after. Just keep an eye on it and make sure you don’t over do it.
That is seasoning! 
I think the self cleaning function is designed to incinerate gunk off of the non-porous enamel surface inside the oven. The surface of cast iron may react differently, but in doubt, I don’t see why you’d have to go above 500 or so.
Do those of you who coat the pan before putting it away use the pan often? I don’t use my cast iron skillet very often and the thought of putting Crisco or other oil on it before I store it in the cupboard sounds nasty. Doesn’t the coating get rancid after a while?
I coat it, then heat it. (Or coat it very hot and let it cool.) If it’s been sitting a while I’ll wipe it out with a damp paper towel. Never had any rancidity issues. I also store it in the oven. If I’m cooking something in the oven, the pan gets cooked too on the lower rack.
I have two heirloom cast iron skillets and a dutch oven that I usually season over the campfire about once a summer. No problems with anything sticking. The only cast iron that I’ve ever started from scratch with, I did the Crisco thing with a hot oven. It was ok, but it took a couple of years to get the seasoning on par with the heirloom ones.
I wash mine in hot water, no soap and a nylon scrubby, then dry it on the burner of the stove. My grandmother, however, would never put hers in water to wash them. She used about a cup of cornmeal and a piece of grocery bag to remove any food particles and grease remaining in the pan after cooking. She would then smear a thin layer of lard, bacon grease or cooking oil on it with another piece of grocery bag (one of the original recyclers) and put it away in the oven. I still use one of them and I haven’t been poisoned yet! I guess it’s true that fire cleanses. She also kept the cornmeal for the next batch of cornbread :). Good stuff!
Not to be a naysayer, but I tend to think that cast iron is sorta moot if you’re a vegetarian. All the food stuffs that benefit from cast iron, and the food stuffs that contribute to the cast iron mojo over the years, are meat based. Eggs don’t benefit from cast iron, I have a cast iron skillet and a cast iron grill pan but I still use teflon for those since using the cast iron is just a extra hassle. Cast iron can get really non-stick, but it’s never as good as teflon and eggs stick to even that. Fish is best seared on a stainless steel pan and doesn’t really do anything for a cast iron pan and vice versa.
The cast iron could be handy if you want to pan fry or deep fry, but that’s about it. Stir fry and the like are better done in a carbon steel wok.
If you really want to get it seasoned, buy 2 or 3 pounds of bacon and cook it up (or have someone else do it) in doses until it’s gone. Then feed it to the dog or a neighboring college student. Or fill it with some Crisco and and deep fry some french fries or cheese.
For all the advice you get about seasoning it in the oven and whatnot, the only way to truly season it is to cook fatty meat products on it regularly for a long time.
Absolutely. I’ve never been able to start a good seasoning on a cast iron pan with any vegetable oil. It always starts and stays sticky. But the ones I’ve done with lard, bacon and salt pork have seasoned well and are very slick. Sorry, but it really is a pretty animal-product intensive type of utensil.
Yep. Though I use Crisco to ‘keep up’ the seasoning, most of the seasoning was put down by good old-fashioned bacon. And I keep the drippings for non-Crisco seasoning.
So, I happen to have both a cast iron skillet that needs seasoning and a package of bacon that needs to be used this week. Should I just cook all the bacon in the skillet (in batches, of course), draining off the fat as I go? What’s the best way to do it?
I cooked four or five rashers and poured the grease into my grease keeper. I’d wipe out all the bits and then pour some of the strained grease back in the pan and let it cook for a bit. Then I’d do the same every time I cooked bacon. Often I’d do a fry-up where I cooked chopped onions and diced potatoes in the grease, adding the crumbled bacon at the end and cracking eggs on top. Cover and cook until the whites are set. Clean-up would be the same as if I’d only cooked bacon: wipe out the bits, add bacon grease from the grease keeper, cook and cool.
I thought stickiness was sign of too much oil be used to start off the seasoning process. You really just pour a bit of oil in and use a paper towel to wipe it all over (everywhere–inside and outside) and to remove all excess. You really just want a micro-thin film of oil. The pan should be placed upside down (with a sheet pan on a lower rack under it) in the oven when it’s being seasoned. This stops the oil from pooling on the bottom.
I took a peek and some say that it’s the vegetable oil itself that causes the sticky film.
The “Cast Iron Feeding Instructions” on page 26 of my copy of Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here For the Food, states that solid vegetable shortening should be used because it is “more refined than other oils and won’t leave a nasty film.” To summarize: use Crisco, bake at 350F one hour upside down, remove, wipe but do not wash the first time!
If you’re a diehard vegetarian, you might try seasoning with a very high melting point vegetable oil like coconut oil, palm oil or (hard to find) food grade cocoa butter. I think it’s the boiling point/ polysaturation that makes the difference, not whether it came from a plant or animal. Very pricey though.
I never wash my cast iron. Following Alton’s instructions, I pour some kosher salt in the pan while it’s still warm and scour it with a paper towel.
My paper towels always fall apart when I do that. Next time I’ll try the paper bag.
Yeah, the salt & paper towel thing never worked for me either. I get dingleberries. I’ll probably stick with brushing with hot water and drying on the stovetop.
I always use peanut (arachis) oil, for my wok and my cast iron pan and it seems to work well. Just heat up the pan after cleaning (NO SOAP! - I just use running hot water) to dry it out, then put in a little bit of the oil and wipe with a bit of kitchen paper and let it cool down.
If you set the pan out for a longish time, excess oil may go rancid (never happened to me, though), but you need the oil to protect the pan from rust, so wipe it with a thin layer of oil and leave a bit of kitchen paper in it to soak up the little oil that might gather. For the same reason, don’t leave a pan completely covered since that captures moisture.
I use CostCo’s “Kirkland” brand paper towels and they are rugged as all get-out. I put a tablespoon or so in the pan, and the salt is doing the scrubbing, not the paper towel.