``
[music]
Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar. I'm in for Alison Stewart. She'll be back on Monday. Cast iron pans are the workhorses of any kitchen. They go from stovetop to oven, they retain heat beautifully, and they may last longer than any other item in your apartment, that's including you. Taking care of cast iron can be confusing and contentious. I have googled videos debating the merits of grapeseed versus flaxseed oil. True story, I've really smoked up my kitchen trying to restore a seasoned surface to an old skillet. I've since moved out of that apartment, just FYI. Many a relationship has been tested by arguments over whether or not to immerse your pan in soapy water, but according to Daniel Gritzer, the editorial director at Serious Eats, much of the hand-wringing is overblown. He says cast iron is almost indestructible, and he is here now to demystify its care. We're going to take your calls and questions. Daniel, welcome back to All Of It.
Daniel Gritzer: Thank you, Kousha. I'm so glad to be here and I'm really scared now.
[laughter]
Daniel Gritzer: I can already sense the anger rippling across New York City as people are like, "He's wrong."
Kousha Navidar: Just wait. It's funny the last time you were on this show was for Serious Eats's annual Starch Madness competition. Believe it or not, it's nice to have you back for something that's somehow less controversial.
Daniel Gritzer: Than what's the best sandwich in the world?
Kousha Navidar: [laughs] Yes.
Daniel Gritzer: Oh, boy.
Kousha Navidar: Listeners, if you have questions for Daniel about how to clean cast iron cookware or hot takes, that's a pun, give us a call or send us a text. We're at 212-433-9692, that's 212-433-WNYC, or you can hit us up on social. We're on Instagram and X. Our handle is @AllOfItWNYC. Do you have a way that you like to take care of your cast iron skillet or your Dutch oven? Give us a call. 212-433-9692. Let's start off right at the top, Daniel. Why cast iron?
Daniel Gritzer: Cast iron is a wonderful type of cookware in the kitchen. It has a lot of benefits. It's not perfect for everything. Different kinds of cookware have different places. You said it in your intro, one of the great things about cast iron is its heat retention. This can cause a lot of confusion because there's heat retention and there's heat conduction. They're not the same thing. I am not a material scientist, so there's a limit to how deep I can go into all of this and why.
Kousha Navidar: Unacceptable.
[laughter]
Daniel Gritzer: Let's just say for simplicity's sake that cast iron is not a great heat conductor. Now, this is relatively speaking. Among kitchen metals, it's a very good heat conductor compared to rubber, but it's not a great heat conductor compared to aluminum or copper. It has wonderful heat retention, and that really is one of its superpowers. Has a couple of other superpowers, but heat retention is one of them. That translates to excellent browning.
If you're cooking a piece of meat or vegetable, you want to sear a nice broccoli steak or something like that, or broccoli florets or a steak, beef steak, you get that cast iron pan ripping hot. When you put your food in the pan, even if it's room temperature or cold, the pan's temperature is not going to drop that much because it has so much retained heat, and that is just great in order to get that wonderful sear on things. That's just one really, really, really important benefit of cast iron.
Kousha Navidar: The downside, it's heavy. What else?
Daniel Gritzer: Yes. Cast iron is heavy. That's a big downside. It's a little bit more finicky in terms of its care. Stainless steel pots and pans, some of them you can throw in the dishwasher. Please never put cast iron in the dishwasher.
Kousha Navidar: We're going to get to that.
Daniel Gritzer: We'll get there.
Kousha Navidar: Listeners, if you disagree with that, give us a call. You're saying do not. [chuckles]
Daniel Gritzer: I would love to hear someone defend cast iron in the dishwasher. I'm okay with soap, but the dishwasher is definitely a step too far. If anybody wants to argue about that, [chuckles] I'd love to hear too. Yeah. Let's see, what else is hard about cast iron. It tends to have more vertical sides to, if we're talking about skillets, a classic cast iron skillet. If you wanted to do more sauteing where you're tossing the food and jumping it around, that more vertical side is a little bit more difficult. If you imagine a skier doing a ski jump, you need a slope in order to jump.
You would never have a skier go down a ski slope and hit a wall. The food in a cast iron pan going against that more vertical side of the pan for sauteing would be challenging because it would hit that wall. It's possible, but between the weight and the shape of the pan, it's not great for things like sauteing.
Kousha Navidar: We just got a text that says one word, Crisco. I think this might get into an element of cast iron care that is important. That's seasoning. Can you explain what seasoning is and what the point of it is and when and how you do it?
Daniel Gritzer: Yes. This is critically important to the conversation on cast iron. It also applies to a related metal pan in the kitchen that's a little less common, which is carbon steel. Let's stick with cast iron. You have to season it. Why is that? Cast iron, it's a big hunk of iron, really, and iron is highly reactive. If you think of pieces of metal just left out in the rain for a couple of weeks, things rust.
I've actually seen unseasoned bare cast iron rust before my eyes. If you're in a humid enough environment, just the humidity of the air can cause surface rusting in a matter of minutes. Rust is one of your big, big concerns with cast iron. The seasoning is one of the things or it is the thing that protects your pan from rusting. What is seasoning? It is not flavor. It's not seasoning in the sense of I'm seasoning my food with salt or spices.
It is an application in many, many, many very thin layers of oil that-- This is super important. When heated sufficiently, the oil goes through a transformative process that scientists call polymerization where the oil bonds with the metal of the pan, and it also forms a plastic molecular structure with itself. It ceases to be a liquid oil and it is really technically a plastic. It creates this cladding, this coating on the pan that protects the pan from rusting, but also, really nice side effect, it gives it nonstick properties. Not nonstick to the level of Teflon, but a really nicely seasoned cast iron pan is quite nonstick.
Kousha Navidar: Wow. You said oil. What do you use to season it?
Daniel Gritzer: Right. Oil or fats. I'm actually a bit of an agnostic. I don't go too deep into the arguments around which fat to use. I think there are a lot of different fats you can use. I think what's most important is just that you season the pan, period, through both-- Possibly if the pan is new or it needs a little TLC, doing deliberate seasoning process or just cooking in the pan. Whether you're frying bacon or you're cooking cornbread or you're searing a steak, any of those things, and that's going to have-- We're talking about a lot of different fats here. There's beef tallow. There's different kinds of oils. There's possibly Crisco, pork fat.
All of those things, they're going to help lay down seasoning. At the end of the day, that's all going to be more good than anything else. There are arguments among cast iron nerds about what's the best fat. Flaxseed is a very popular one because it makes a really beautiful-looking seasoning. Just anecdotally, and I can only speak anecdotally about this, there are reports that flaxseed seasoning tends to fail more often, chip off, flake off. At home, though, whatever I'm using, canola oil, grapeseed oil, if you have reserved bacon fat, it's fine, it's going to work.
Kousha Navidar: You do it every single time right after you finish cooking or what?
Daniel Gritzer: This is another thing with cast iron. It depends. I own a lot of cast iron cookware. I own enough cast iron cookware that I'm not using all of it all the time. When I work with my own cast iron, after I'm done cooking with it and cleaning it, I'll do a little maintenance seasoning on it just before I put it back in my pots and pan storage because I don't know when the next time is I'm going to get to it. If you have a cast iron pan that you're just using all the time, I think you don't need to do this maintenance seasoning because I really think you're going back into that pan so often.
My biggest concern, or one of my big concerns anyway, with letting a cast iron pan sit without that maintenance seasoning is if there's residual oil on the pan, and I'm using oil, but really, it could be Crisco, it could be bacon fat, whatever, if you let it sit and you don't use the pan for a while, that fat will become sticky and tacky and get this stickiness on the pan. You don't want that to happen. If you're using the pan all the time--
I have friends who have one cast iron pan. It's always on the stovetop. They're done with cooking with it, they give it a rub with oil, they let it sit, and the next day they're using it again. That's fine. If you think it's going to be not touched for a week or two, I would do more of a seasoning treatment where you're deliberately heating that oil and burning it onto the pan in the polymerization process.
Kousha Navidar: Listeners, we're talking about how to care for and to clean cast iron cookware. We're here with Daniel Gritzer, who's the editorial director at Serious Eats. If you have a question for Daniel or you have a hot take about how to care for cast iron cookware, give us a call, send us a text. We're at 212-433-9692. Let's go to John in Staten island. Hey, John, welcome to the show.
John: Thank you. I have a cast iron Dutch oven, which an idiot that I had doing work in the house saw and took and put water into it, and then put it on top of a wood stove to humidify the air. By the time I realized what he'd done, it was too late. The interior of it is now rough, and it's showing signs of rust. Is there anything I can do to reclaim it for cooking purposes?
Kousha Navidar: John, thank you so much. Rust. Go ahead, Daniel.
Daniel Gritzer: This is a great question, and here's the good news. You can absolutely save that pan. Cast iron, it can be damaged, but it is really a pretty indestructible pan, or material that our pots and pans are made out of. Rust is a big problem, and rust can come out pretty easily. The best way that I know of to get rid of rust is distilled vinegar. If you wash or even soak the pan-- Distilled vinegar is really cheap. You could buy a couple of gallons of it and literally submerge the pan in the distilled vinegar and just give it a big, long bath, and then try to scour away that rust. It should come off.
Depending on how bad the rust is, you may have to do several treatments of this, but you should be able to do it. If you really go down the rabbit hole, you can set up electrical currents and water, also, that's dangerous. please be careful, to do things like removing rust and stripping a pan down. For most of us, that's not practical. It's nothing totally safe. The distilled vinegar is a great way. If you just have tiny rust, maybe accidentally somebody put something with a wet bottom in your nesting pans and something was a little wet on the bottom and you get a little ring of rust in the pan, that distilled vinegar can usually just wipe it right out.
There's a related thing, which is what happens if you need to also strip off seasoning if a cast iron pan gets really messed up. There your best bet is a lye bath, lye the alkaline chemical that pretzels are dipped in and that soap is made out of and that you can strip your cast iron pan with. You have to be careful with lye. You don't want to get a lye solution on your skin. There are all sorts of ways to take a messed up cast iron pan, strip it all the way down, and then build it back up from scratch.
Kousha Navidar: It sounds like distilled vinegar is really a good heuristic here, a good key for a lot of this.
Daniel Gritzer: Yes. If you want to remove seasoning, let's say you're doing some flea market shopping in Upstate New York and you see an old vintage Wagner cast iron pan or something, and it's just a beautiful thing, it's a century old. Who knows? It's really seen better days and you have to strip it down, that's a great project. You buy the pan, you take it home. You probably need to do several treatments of a lye back.
Also, Easy-Off, the oven cleaner, is basically a sort of aerosolized lye foam. You can use that. Once again, please be careful. Well-ventilated space. Don't get it on your skin. Possibly need to do several applications of it to get the seasoning off, but it will eat through the seasoning and remove it. Then the vinegar, like we said, that's really great for getting the rust off. Then from there, as soon as you do strip down a pan, you do want to season it right away because, as I said, raw iron will just start rusting. It won't wait for you.
Kousha Navidar: Listeners, if you have some tips or questions about how to care for cast iron, give us a call. We're at 212-433-9692. I'm going to quickly read some texts that we have coming in here. A lot of the texts are about rust and how to handle rust. I feel like we addressed a lot of that.
Daniel Gritzer: Distilled vinegar.
Kousha Navidar: We've also got, "I had a cast iron pan. Dropped it on the floor and it split in half. How is this possible? I was amazed."
Daniel Gritzer: [chuckles]
Kousha Navidar: We've got another one that says, "Crisco, no way. Canola oil all the way." You had mentioned soap very briefly in your last response. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to go to a caller who has a comment to make about that soap. We'll be right back. Stay with us. This is All Of It.
[music]
Daniel Gritzer: This is All Of It on WNYC. We're talking about how to care for cast iron cookware here with Daniel Gritzer, who's the editorial director at Serious Eats. Listeners, we're taking your calls and your texts. If you have questions or some hot takes about cast iron cookware, give us a call. We're at 212-433-9692. Let's go to Reed over in Staten island. Hey, Reed. Welcome to the show.
Reed: Hi. Long time, long time. Daniel, huge fan of Serious Eats. It is my go-to to get a recipe. I want to say anything that dish soap can get off your pan, that's not seasoning. Like you were saying, that's not polymers, that's crud, that's carbon. Use dish soap. You will get better seasoning in the long term. About oils, definitely agree with you. Flaxseed's a little brittle, in my opinion. I like grapeseed a lot better.
As far as picking pans goes, if there's a lot of crud, if it's really funky, always get a lead test to see if someone ever used that to put lead in it because if that lead gets in a cast iron pan once, then they're forever and it can cause lead poisoning. When I'm looking for old pans upstate or flea markets, I always check for lead tests.
Kousha Navidar: Reed, thanks so much for calling and for all those hot takes. Daniel, what do you think about all that?
Daniel Gritzer: Wow. The lead thing is really interesting. Actually, that's the first time I've heard that. I'm not familiar with using lead in cast iron pans, but I believe that that could be true. Certainly, there's no harm in making sure there isn't lead in your pan. For the soap, I also agree. The thing with soap, and this is one of these really hot button cast iron issues that gets people worked up, my understanding-- Serious Eats, We've been pro gentle washing with dish soap in your cast iron pan for many years. Many of us have been doing it for many years. We've got great cast iron pAns in great condition. It's not a problem. We can say so from experience.
My understanding is that that really originates from an earlier time when soaps were more aggressive and actually could eat away much more quickly at the seasoning on a cast iron pan. Modern dish soaps and those sponges that have the blue scrubber side, that gentle scrubber, the combination of a modern dish soap and that kind of gentle scrubber, in my, I think, pretty extensive experience, it really doesn't damage the seasoning.
You would have to stand there and scour for a long time to start to-- I'm sure it's possible you could eventually do damage, but that's exactly the thing, is there's burnt in crud, carbonized food that's burnt onto the pan, that's not seasoning. You don't want that. You want that out of your pan. You want your pan nice and smooth and with the layers of seasoning built up in very, very thin layers, and gentle dish soap works just fine for doing those cleanings.
Kousha Navidar: We just got a text that said, what's the best way to scrub off cooked on foods that are stuck to the bottom of the pan? [chuckles] Which sounds pretty similar to what you're describing. Soap seems to be an answer?
Daniel Gritzer: Soap. The sponges that have that-- What is it? Scotch Brite? Is that the brand? They have those blue scrubbers. I think they even brand it. Maybe it's like a gentle scrubber or something, although maybe I don't have that quite right. Those work really well. Also, the traditional way was salt, and this was also with carbon steel. I used to do this in restaurants. When I was cooking in restaurants, every night before we start service, we would load all the pans, cast iron, carbon steel with salt, get them super hot, just like smoking, burning.
Obviously, we had restaurant ventilation, [chuckles] so it wasn't too much of a concern in terms of air quality. Then just scrubbing, scouring, and using that abrasive power of salt to just grind all the crud out. That's another very old, very classic way of cleaning these kinds of pans. Also, they sell these chainmail scrubbers, which I've used. They seem fine. I've used them a little bit, but at the end of the day, I find that old sponge that I always have there, or not too old-- I replaced my sponges.
[laughter]
Daniel Gritzer: Or salt works really well. The chainmail is one extra thing I don't necessarily need on my sink.
Kousha Navidar: I feel like you are in lockstep with our listeners right now because we literally just got as you were saying that a text that said, "Use a lot of kosher salt and a soft sponge."
Daniel Gritzer: There you go.
Kousha Navidar: You're simpatico right now.
Daniel Gritzer: [chuckles]
Kousha Navidar: Let's go to Ellen in Huntington. Hey, Ellen. Welcome to the show.
Ellen: Hi. Thank you so much. I love the subject. I love the station. I listen to it every day. Not to waste time here, I have a lot of cast iron and I'm always concerned about cleaning it. I heard you mention salt, which I've used before. My concern is that, yes, when I'm trying to scrub the food off and I use hot water, and then after you do that with the salt, am I coating it with oil and putting it back on a burner to dry it out? I noticed that with some cast iron pans, they're actually dry. You don't feel any coating on it. With mine, I always feel like I need to coat it with a little bit of oil with a paper towel just to maintain it. Am I doing the right thing or is there a better way to do it?
Daniel Gritzer: It's such a good question. I think you basically are doing the right thing. The thing I had said before about how much time elapses between your use of any specific piece of cast iron would influence a little bit my recommendation. I think if you're using one regularly, daily or every other day, or that kind of thing, washing it, drying it, giving it a little very light rub with oil, and then just leaving it there for the next time you're going to use it, again, within a day or two is totally fine. If you think that you are not going to touch that pan for a week, two weeks, three weeks, or longer, that's where I start to get worried that you're going to get that sticky tacky thing with the oil.
I think it's the oil kind of going rancid on the surface of the cast iron. It might actually be polymerizing a tiny bit. I'm not, again, a scientist, but I think that might be what's happening. You don't want that because that really does mess up the performance of the pan, and it's harder to clean off. If you think there's going to be time in between, you wash it, dry it. I usually do put my pan on a burner to truly drive off all the moisture because I want it bone dry. Water with cast iron is the enemy in terms of rust, and so I want to make sure it's totally dry.
Then I will take a little towel or something and a very small amount of oil and rub it all over the pan. I cannot overstress this, a micro thin layer of oil, even buffing it to the point where you almost can't see that you've just put oil on the pan. There will still be oil molecules spread all over the pan, but you do not want it to look greasy in the least. You want it to look buffed almost to the point of dry. Then I will put that on the heat and let that burn onto the pan so that it does appear extremely dry. All that seasoning is on it. The pan is sort of ready to just wait until its next used.
Kousha Navidar: Ellen, thank you so much for that call. We just got a text in here, and I'd love to know what you think about this, Daniel. It says, "Hi. I have a handful of antique cast iron pans, some from the 1900s that I've stripped and restored. My tip for using Easy-Off in small New York City apartments is to spray the pan in a large, sturdy plastic bag, then close and leave in a cabinet for a couple of days. This allows the lye to sit and really eat away at the old seasoning without having to worry too much about ventilation. Also, I use organic food, grade flaxseed, which is essentially linseed oil."
He's a painter, and it's very similar to oil painting. That's from Philip. Thank you so much. Daniel, what do you think about that, putting in a plastic bag, leaving it in the cabinet?
Daniel Gritzer: Oh, it's fantastic. That is precisely what I would say to do. Philip hit the nail on the head. I have an article I wrote years ago. It's still on Serious Eats. It's about how to restore vintage cast iron. I actually went and learned a lot about it from-- Oh, gosh, I can't remember. It was these folks in the city who were selling a lot of vintage cast iron. They were basically every weekend or whatever, they were going and traveling the flea markets and antique stores and buying these pieces for cheap, stripping them down and making them absolutely beautiful, and selling them for a lot more than they were buying them for.
They knew an awful lot about how to do this, and they walked me through the many ways of doing it. If you look at Serious Eats and look for this, how to restore vintage cast iron, you'll get a blow-by-blow walkthrough of the several different ways of doing it. That tip about spraying the pan with Easy-Off, putting it in-- I think really when we say a heavy-duty plastic bag, a heavy-duty garbage bag is really a good option there. Just coating it in the Easy-Off, seal the bag, and leave it for a day or two. Then you take the pan out carefully. Again, don't get the easy off on your skin, although at that point a lot of it will have reacted with the pan, but still, be careful.
Wash the pan, see what it looks like, how much seasoning has come off. If more needs to come off, you just do it again and again and again. It can be a little bit more tedious. If you are really serious about doing a lot of cast iron restoration, you probably want a big old bucket of lye solution [chuckles] and just drop the pans in there and let them hang out until all the seasoning has come off, or I guess you could learn how to safely do the electrical removal of the seasoning.
Kousha Navidar: A heavy-duty garbage bag can do the thing.
Daniel Gritzer: Yes.
Kousha Navidar: Phil, thank you so much for that shout-out. We've been talking a lot about cast iron generally. What about enameled cast iron? What's the difference? Does it need to be seasoned, cleaned differently?
Daniel Gritzer: The difference is the enamel. Here we're talking, if anyone's unclear, about pots and pans from brands like Le Creuset, would be one of the most famous ones, Staub, Lodge, which makes regular unenameled cast iron, also makes enameled cast iron. This is cast iron that is coated in a glaze of enamel that changes a lot of things about the pan. You do not need to season enameled cast iron pans. The enamel completely protects the cast iron within. That alone changes a lot of considerations.
Cast iron also, it's reactive with acids. It's fine to have something acidic like lemon juice or wine in a cast iron pan very briefly, but you wouldn't want to do a long, slow braise with tomato sauce or anything that's acidic in a bare, meaning seasoned cast iron pan. You would want to do that in enameled cast iron pan because the enamel is completely non-reactive and protects the cast iron from reacting with the acid.
Slightly different use cases, but lots of overlap because you get a lot of those same benefits. An enameled Dutch oven like a Le Creuset Dutch oven, it has all that wonderful heat retention. That's why it's so good for long, slow brazes, and it's just bubbling away and it's holding all that heat. A cast iron cousin, I guess, in the cast iron family. [chuckles]
Kousha Navidar: You know what's the other part of that, though? You're talking about Le Creuset, that's, I don't know, $200, $300. A large skillet you can get for, I don't know, maybe $20. What's that price difference there?
Daniel Gritzer: Yes. I don't work for these companies, so I can speak to this as best I can indirectly. The enameling process adds production costs, so that right there adds cost to the pan. There is a pretty big range, even in prices, in the realm of enameled pots and pans. The Le Creusetes, the Staubs, which are these heritage classic enameled cast iron brands, they're the most expensive, and they're quite expensive. Their sales pitch would be we have an incredibly tight quality controlled process that we've honed over a very long time of applying enamel to these pots and pans and blah, blah, blah. Therefore, we're the best. I love Le Creuset. I love Staub. I think they're beautiful.
I think a company like Lodge that also does enameled cast iron probably does a pretty good job of enameling those two. I think on some level, there's just the price of the brand built into it. All of these things, from the basic cast iron all the way up to the expensive enameled cast iron, they really are lifetime and arguably multiple-lifetime investments. You can divide that cost over many, many, many years of use, and it, I think, works out in your favor. Can you spend less on enameled cast iron and still get a good pot? Yes, I think so.
Kousha Navidar: I'm looking at the clock. We got time for just one more caller. Let's go to Christina on Croton-on-Hudson. Hey, Christina. Welcome to the show.
Christina: Hi, I'm so grateful for this conversation, and I'm excited to be able to ask this question. My family's from Mexico, so this is the only way you heat tortillas is with a cast iron pan. When I season my pan, I use something with a high. I use an oil like grapeseed oil so it has a high smoking point. Still, sometimes the pan smokes because it's just so hot. I've also heard that the fat is smoking, that's unhealthy for us. I'm wondering if the speaker could address that. Do I have the pan too hot? If it starts to smoke, is that bad news or is that okay?
Kousha Navidar: Thank you, Christina. You got about a minute left. Go ahead.
Daniel Gritzer: Oh, boy. A big topic that opens up a can of health concern worms. I'm not a medical professional, but I think I can safely say that smoke is probably not healthy. At the same time, there are certain cooking applications or techniques where it's very hard to do it in the most optimized or ideal way where there is no smoke. I think there's a personal decision of how much do you want to avoid that smoke for health considerations, which would just be heat management, lowering the heat. I think good ventilation is very important around that kind of thing. I will admit that when I cook, whether I'm searing a steak or heating a thin layer of oil in a pan to do something like throwing tortillas in, I'm probably going to see some smoke too. Is it good for me? Probably not, but it does happen.
Kousha Navidar: Christina, thank you so much for that call. We have so many wonderful questions and calls. Unfortunately, we have to put a pin in it for now. My guest has been Daniel Gritzer, the editorial director at Serious Eats. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.
Daniel Gritzer: Thank you. This was fun.
Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.