If you\u2019re moving into your first home, or you just got married, or for some other reason you have decided it is time for you to start Acting Like an Adult, then chances are good you have recently acquired a cast iron pan.<\/p>\n
The cast-iron pan, along with the Kitchen Aid stand mixer and a set of matching dishes, is a hallmark of home-ownership and adulthood. It is both a practical, durable kitchen utensil and a totem of the past, sometimes handed down through generations. Because of this, there is a lot of mythology about cast-iron skillets, which Serious Eats\u00a0tackles well here<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the biggest cast-iron myth, the one most people just can\u2019t let go, is the myth that you can\u2019t use soap and water to clean a cast-iron pan.<\/p>\n We know. We know. Grandma never touched hers with soap and it lasted 800 years and practically jumped into your refrigerator and cooked the steaks on its own and by golly you\u2019re not changing for nobody. Get it all out. If you don\u2019t want to clean your cast iron with soap and water, you don\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n But if you want to clean your cast iron with soap and water, you won\u2019t hurt it.<\/p>\n The reason you\u2019ve been told not to use soap on your cast iron is that the soap will eat into the layer of fine oil \u201cseasoning\u201d on the metal, damaging the pan\u2019s non-stick characteristic. This conventional wisdom is based on a misconception about what the seasoning actually is.<\/p>\n See, as Good Eats points out, \u201cSeasoning is actually not a thin layer of oil, it\u2019s a thin layer of polymerized oil, a key distinction.\u201d The long and short of it is that the process of seasoning your pan left it with a plastic-like surface that is bonded to the metal itself. This layer is not invincible, but it won\u2019t be damaged with dish soap.<\/p>\n No. Don\u2019t let the pan soak in water. Use the water to help get the gunk out, then get the water out. This is because, even with a good seasoning on your cast iron, there is a good chance your pan has some exposed metal somewhere in there, and that metal should spend as little time hanging out with water as possible.<\/p>\n For the purposes of this blog post, we\u2019ll assume your cast-iron pan could use a fresh dose of seasoning. It\u2019s a good thing to do from time to time anyway, especially if the pan has recently come into contact with a lot of water or acidic food, such as tomato sauce.<\/p>\n There is\u00a0more than one way<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0to improve the seasoning on your cast-iron pan. They all come down to coating it in a thin layer of oil and getting it hot. You can do this with the stove-top burner or you can do itinside a hot oven<\/a>, but any combination of heat and oil is having a seasoning effect on your pan.<\/p>\n And then, of course, use it! Fry some chicken, saut\u00e9 some shrimp, sear up a burger. Those oils will help too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re moving into your first home, or you just got married, or for some other reason you have decided it is time for you to start Acting Like an Adult, then chances are good you have recently acquired a cast iron pan. The cast-iron pan, along with the Kitchen Aid stand mixer and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesmar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}But what about the seasoning?<\/h2>\n
So I can just soak the thing?<\/h2>\n
It\u2019s clean. Now what?<\/h2>\n