Question
Toni Crawford
Can I take a very old cast iron pan that been passed down somewhere to save it? It has burnt spots underneath and is starting to rust but I don't want to get rid of it.
Answer
Absolutely, yeah. This is one of the beauties of, of, of cast iron cook surface ca uh, cast iron cookware is that, you know, you can, um, you can, you can sand it down and bring it down to its clean metal and then re season it and just start all over, essentially with a, a new cooking surface at that point. And so you'll wanna coat it in oil, the inside and outside and then put it into the oven at a high temperature. And I, you know, I would recommend the highest temperature, and it's probably gonna be around 550 degrees or so, turn on your fans, open up all the doors in the windows because it'll produce some smoke, because what you're doing is you're bringing the oils up to a temperature where they start to polymerize and the molecular structure of the oil changes, um, in a way that will create this plastic, like very hard, um, uh, structure and surface on the pan. Um, but it does require, uh, a pretty high temperature, and you can do this multiple times. So you, you know, um, oil it, bake it, let it cool down oil it, bake it, and do this, you know, three or four or five times and to build up this layer of polymerized oil. And this is the seasoning process. Um, and then, you know, in terms of caring for it, just avoid scrubbing it after cooking. You know, it should be, uh, soaked to loosen up anything that sticks to it, and then, uh, just gently clean it out. Because really what you want to do is to continue, right? The buildup of the, the oils on the pan, whether it's the inside or even the outside, is, is fine. And, uh, you should be quite fine, you know, using this moving forward. And if you ever find in the future that for whatever reason, right, uh, you've developed some little spots, maybe someone did scrub the pan and, and scrubbed through the layer of seasoning that you've built up, you can always redo this process. So I hope you'll enjoy the process of seasoning your pan.
