You... hate cast iron? Of all things people could hate, cast iron is the choice here. Mmaight.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
638 points (97.1% liked)
memes
10671 readers
2840 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's going to be a good day.
It's your expensive quality cookware, if you want to ruin it I can't do anything about it.
Whispers gently to well seasoned dutch oven
Shh, it's okay, the bad man can't hurt you.
It's pretty hard to ruin good cast iron. A good cast iron pan could spend a year at the bottom of a lake and all it would need is a good scrub and reseason to be good to go again.
About the only thing I've seen that makes them completely irrecoverable is when people use them to melt lead. Also you can crack the cheap ones in half with thermal shock.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I see someone has chosen violence today
Setting off the pan nerds should be listed as a war crime by the Geneva Convention.
Fuck you. >:(🖕
/s I am indeed unreasonably mad.
Not that you put the cast iron in the dishwasher (enjoy your rust), but the fact that you can actually fit the pan in your dishwasher. I recently spent $350 on a portable dishwasher and your iron skillet is bigger than that. I bought that thing to NOT have to scrub dishes. Thanks for reminding me that I STILL have to scrub pots and pans!
¯\(ツ)/¯ wouldn't kill it. Just scrub any flakes off and re-season. The abuse they can take is almost unreasonable.
You could leave it outside in the dirt for 5 years and still just give it a lye bath then reseason it to work like new
Preach!
I'm loving all the superstition in this thread.
even putting it on the top rack, instead of the bottom where the pots go. Masterfull attention to detail in trolling.
load more comments
(1 replies)
You have to be like at least 50 to get mad over some pan
I just turned 50 last month in fact?
Unseasonably mad
I am in flavor of this.
That just gets me excited to start a fresh new seasoning. Starting from bare metal is a good feeling
Nazgûl screeches intensify
What weirdo takes a picture of their dirty dishes and posts it to the Internet? I'm unreasonably angry, mission accomplished.
load more comments
(1 replies)
It’s insane to me that people don’t wash them and call it seasoning.
It’s apparently a different story when someone seasons their underwear.
It still gets them to reply, every time.
I hate cast iron, but 'seasoning' is just a misnomer that was adopted to refer to the oils polymerizing on the pan. The oil (usually something like canola) is literally bonded to the metal.
Not cleaning a cast iron pan is gross, fats left in the pan will go rancid.
The only soap you can't use is lye based as that will strip the seasoning off.
We do wash them, I clean mine by boiling water in them, scraping any stubborn bits with a wooden spatula, rinsing it out under running water and wiping them down with a clean towel and heating the pan again to evaporate any remaining water. No microbials will survive being boiled and then heated again, anything stuck to the pan dissolves away in boiling water and a clean towel will wipe away anything else. After that I add a few drops of oil and wipe down the still hot surface with the thinnest possible coating of oil.
Seasoning for cast iron doesn't mean holding onto previous flavors. It definitely shouldn't taste like last night's dinner. Seasoning in the context of cast iron is the build up of thin layers of polymerized oils from heating them up in a clean pan that forms a durable protective finish that is incredibly non-stick.
So more accurately parallel your underwear example how cast iron is cleaned, if you took your underwear, boiled the hell out of them, used something to give them a scrub, rinsed them out well and then heat dried them.
load more comments
(12 replies)
Cooking has been a hobby of mine for decades now. I have gone through a lot of phases in cooking, especially early on.
I have used cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, and a dubious flirtation with all aluminum.
16 years on now and this is what I reach for 100% of the time:
Skillet/sautee: cladded stainless. Both standard side and high sided.
Dutch Oven: Enameled cast iron.
Pots Pans: Cladded stainless steel. For smaller 1qt to 2qt I like All Clads D5 for its heat retention. Larger than that I like the D3 for its lighter weight
Grill Pan: cast iron. Hate the excessive weight though
Non-stick: Ceramic coated aluminum. What ever Americas Test Kitchen recommends that year. I consider these disposable items. I stopped using TEFLON a long time ago.
I used cast iron skillets for several years. I found them to be finicky. Heat retention was stupidly high and that's not always a good thing. Excessively heavy and god forbid you attempt any sort of tomato based sauce or anything acidic for that matter. Circumstances forced me to use stainless steel and I just found it matches my needs in a kitchen much better than cast iron. It gets used, it gets cleaned and I put it away. No having to have the vaginal juices of a thousand virgins on hand to make sure it doesn't destroy the next egg I try to cook.
I consider cast iron skillets like safety razors. They had their day, but continue on because of a dedicated set of die hard users. Nothing wrong with that, just not my thing.
The above goes for carbon steel as well, although it usually isn't nearly as heavy.
No wok? Also safety razors are great and I'm guessing the only reason cartridges won out is because of marketing, then the following generation forgot there was another option.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Ugh. You wanna know the secret to cooking on cast iron/carbon steel? Just cook with it. Put fat in, get it hot, put your food in. It's really that easy. Wipe it out when you're done, rub some oil on it. That's it. You can even cook tomato sauce in it, it'll be ok. People have been using cast iron to cook all kinds of things, acidic and not, for literal centuries. This myth that cast iron/carbon steel pans are these delicate special snowflakes that need constant attention and maintenance needs to die.
I have a side business restoring antique cast iron pans and I use them for most of my cooking. I cook whatever the fuck I want in them, I leave the pan dirty on the stove a couple days sometimes when I'm busy, I use a scotch brite and scrub them clean with dish detergent, it really doesn't matter.
Go get a shitty Walmart pan and complain that CI is too hard to work with, it's ridiculous. My CHF #8 is an amazing piece of hardware
But they do need special maintenance, compared to Teflon pans or ceramic pans, they are the most finicky and hard to work with.
There are a lot of things people have done for centuries. Being old doesn't make something superior.
The problem with the people who prostletyze cast iron, is they usually assume that everyone cooks like them, but the reality is that cast iron is generally a pain in the ass. I mean just the fact that you need to cover the entire pan in oil Every time you put it away should be enough of an indicator.
You definitely don't need to oil it after every use. The main reason for applying oil is to keep it from rusting while it sits. If you just use it at least once a week then that rust isn't a concern. Even if it did rust you can just scrub the rust off before you use it.
There is all sorts of special care you can do to cast iron if you really get into it. But if you really don't care then you can just use it and wash it exactly like any other pan without issue. The whole soap thing is a myth now a days because modern soaps don't contain lye anymore. Soap is entirely unnecessary in cast iron but it won't hurt it. Seasoning is adequately acheived just by actually cooking with it. You really don't need any special process to season it unless you deliberately stripped off all the old seasoning. You can cook acidic foods in it without issue. I do tomato sauce in mine all the time.
Coated pans require way more care. At least I can use proper metal utensils in my cast iron.
I've been cooking with cast iron for years, all I do is scrub it with hot water only and let it dry. No re seasoning, no coating in oil, nothing.
I'm genuinely impressed you've managed to fuck up using cast iron.
You don't and it isn't. I cook exclusively on cast iron, and I oil it only before I put some food that requires oil. I use hot water and a paper towel to wipe it clean. Been using it for years, way less scrubbing than stainless 90 percent of the time.
But I use it exclusively and daily, so ymmv.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
I use the washer and then let it sit wet over night to bring out its natural paprika seasoning.
Carbon steel > cast iron. Lighter, basically the same heat properties, and you don't get peer pressured into unnecessarily babying a lump of solid metal.
Seriously no reason to dote on either of them so much. Only real care you need to take is that they can rust, so don't leave them wet. And don't needlessly scrub them with chain mail or angle grinders, or you might need to take a few minutes fixing them with cooking oil and the oven.
load more comments
(8 replies)
I wash my cast iron with normal dish soap and steel wool, and if I'm too lazy, I put it in the dishwasher. I've been doing this for 20 years. I don't "season" it. It's a pan, no more, no less. The main advantage is that you don't need to worry about scratching the shit out of it.
Needs a tiny little bit more fat than a non-stick if you want to make an omelette.
load more comments
(7 replies)