dresese

Seasoning cast iron

There are approximately 10 trillion webpages that talk about how to season cast iron pots. However, like a lot of cooking resources, they don't really talk about what to do when something goes wrong. As mentioned in my last posting, I recently bought a large cast iron pot. It was technically a Lodge Chicken Fryer, but I don't intend to fry any chicken in it. I'm just using it to braise meats, making stews, curries and the like. I like cast iron a lot - it's cheap, nearly indestructible, cooks well, and when properly seasoned, has a nice nonstick coating. The only bad part is you have to create and maintain this nonstick coating.

There are a lot of different methods of seasoning nonstick cookware, from coating it with Crisco and putting it in the oven, to heating it with oil on the stove. I did both methods to season this pot. I first heated it with oil on the stove, but that method isn't very good. The problem is that cast iron does not have good heat conductivity, so the sides never really get hot enough to properly burn the oil in. Plus, anytime you season cast iron, you are going to generate a lot of pretty noxious smoke. Having two kids, I'm a bit reluctant to subject them to this smoke, but doing this outside on a burner means that other people in my apartment complex are probably smelling this smoke. So it's not a great solution. But, seeing as how the stove method was not working that well, plus having an lid to season as well, I had to resort to using my oven. The result of all of this was that I had a pot that was somewhat well season, but for some reason had some streaks and spots that apparently had no seasoning at all.

At this point, I didn't know what to do. All I knew is how to season something. I don't know how to fix the seasoning on an improperly seasoned item, which this appeared to be. If I simply put more oil on it and put it back in the oven another day, would it damage the seasoning that's already there? I didn't know, so I called up Lodge's customer service number, and asked them. They told me that streaks are normal, and it should even out over time. What they recommended, is to coat the pot in oil, inside and out, and put the whole thing on a grill for a few hours. They told me it would be nice and black after that, and doing this would not damage the existing seasoning. It just makes everything better!

I couldn't follow this advice, however, since my grill at home is not big enough for my pot. I have a very tiny grill. But I decided to season it outside over a burner again. This time I was for some reason less concerned with the smoke, so I coated it with oil, put it on medium-high heat, and just let it smoke and smoke for more than half an hour. At this point the bottom surface was almost all black, which was great, with no streaks. However, the next time I cooked with it, the streaks came back. They still exist to this day. Cooking with this pot has not made them disappear, but perhaps its because I never fry things without finishing it out as a stew.

Two weekends ago, I was grilling, and after I finished, I decided to try to season my lid again. So I coated it with oil and left it on the grill, while the charcoal burnt itself out. The great thing about is that even though it generated noxious smoke, it didn't appear to be anything out of the ordinary since it was coming from my grill. Everyone expends a grill to make lots of smoke. When I retrieved the lid later the same day, it was nice and brown. The grill did a much better job than the oven did. There is a large communal grill downstairs from me, which anyone in the apartment building can use. I may try to season my pot one more time on this grill. Hopefully, I'll have a good seasoning one day.

Posted by ahyatt at June 17, 2003 09:19 AM