Dry. Dry as possible.
No more water than necessary.
I’ve done the salt, from what I see its not necessary.
If your seasoning is good this won’t be a problem.
Unsure of the seasoning? Clean, mild and dry. Don’t gouge. Re-season.
Seasoning cast iron is another thread.
Most certainly true. My cast iron is Finex brand and it has the coil handles and caps, etc. where water can hide. So I bake it instead of using the burner.
Good idea, then.
A lot of old wives tales persist from our great great grandparents time. Especially the never touch it with soap one. That mostly comes from a time when they used lye. A little mild soap like Dawn won’t hurt it. When it’s really icky I use a little Dawn and scrub. Just make sure it’s dry. So far I’ve never needed to recondition.
Please elaborate a bit more on the pan and the schmung that you want cleaned.
Since you have not checked in again- no doubt not needing a fast reply I’d say tonclean a previously seasoned pan, just use hot hot water and a green scrubby to clean the pan.
Easy peasy
There is no reason to not use soap. It won’t harm your pan. It’s an “everyone knows” thing that isn’t true. Don’t use lye and it will be fine and so will the seasoning if you did it right in the first place. You would look at someone funny if they told you to just use water on anything else.
Nah, if I’m going to be heating it to hundreds of degrees in its next use, I normally don’t use detergent of any sort on a dish. In fact, when I was a professional dishwasher I used basically no soap. Since nothing had sat around for long, most things scrubbed clean easily. The ol’ Hobart was going to get the dishes so hot that I’d barely be able to touch them when I got them out, so they were sanitary.
Heck, my current dishwasher can do a pretty good imitation of the Hobart. It doesn’t really need the soap when the temp is set that high and you scrub things properly. But that’s murder on plastic items, and I’m kinda lazy when you’re not paying me to wash dishes.
I don’t use soap on my carbon steel wok.
Or on the pizza stone.
Or the iron Dutch oven.
Instructions specifically state no soap.
I also never use sprays to clean the granite counters. Just hot hot water.
I’ve come to the same conclusion. My pan is something like twenty years old by now (I have much older ones that I inherited, too, that are closer to a hundred) and for the first five years I used to follow all the ritualistic bullshit associated with cast iron pans and then figured out, through both experimentation and research, that most stuff is fine, at least once you have a good seasoning down. I use soap and a scouring pad most of the time I clean it, and it works much quicker and better than salt for me. I cook tomato-ey stuff in it without a second thought (though maybe only 20-25% of the time I cook with it), and I have no problem. There’s no rust; I can cook a fried egg on this thing without it sticking. And it’s not even one of those finely milled ones – it’s just a (at the time) $15 store/generic brand cast iron from Target. Once you get a good seasoning, it gets slick.
The value of dish soap isn’t (just) that it kills germs. It contains surfactants that make cleaning much easier than water alone. To get something clean, especially if you’ve been cooking with oil, you need either a surfactant or an abrasive.
Salt works, but not because it’s gentler on the pan or because it represents some kind of cautious quality-minded care. It works because it’s incredibly abrasive and the pan is basically indestructible.
This is why the “never soap, only salt!” crowd is kinda funny to me. Y’all are using a much much much more destructive cleaning method that’s only feasible because your pan can shrug off the abuse. But it does work just fine and you should keep doing it if it makes you happy.
I’ve also never found it necessary to coat the pan with oil after cleaning it. I’m not storing it in an 18th century ship’s galley. If I were going to put it away for a long time, like years, then sure, I might oil and wrap it. But if you cook with it regularly and make sure to fully dry it each time, it will never rust (provides it’s been seasoned properly).
Just thinking about it, the cast iron pan cleaning thing is an example of nuance failure from before the internet. The internet has made it worse and stripped away even more of the nuance (as well as giving people more opportunity to be insane about it).
I have a cast iron pan that I bought when we were newlyweds, 30 plus years ago and I’ve just washed it with hot water and dish soap along with the other things. On occasion I have scrubbed away stubborn bits of burnt on food with a scouring pad; I used to rinse, dry, apply a light coat of oil then bake in the oven after each use, but these days, the seasoning is really on there hard and I cook tomato sauces in it, or anything else I like, without any problems. I continue to use soap, then rinse, then just leave to dry naturally - there’s no exposed iron to rust.
Grill grates, griddle behind the counter at a taco shop or short order diner, kettles, ovenware, probably some coffee production items. A lot of things that get super hot just don’t need much between uses.
Agreed. Using an abrasive would be much more likely to hurt the surface than a little bit of mild soap. I’ve also never seen the need to oil between uses. If dried properly it’s never rusted on me. Leaving a coat of oil means it’s more likely that dust and things floating in the air will stick to it meaning I would have to do a quick cleaning before use anyway.
And I don’t feel the need to use soap every time. But when it’s something very saucy or hard to clean I don’t hesitate to use soap to make things easier to clean. I spent a lot of time seasoning it when I first got it.