This time of year, articles about cast iron cookware pop up all over the Internet. It's Holiday Season, time to get your sister-in-law a cast iron skillet that she will attempt to use a handful of times to her great dismay and frustration and then put up into the attic so that her grandkids can reproduce the experiment twenty years later.
"Cast iron seasoning" is a scam. There, I've said it. I've got a full set of cast-iron cookware and have made repeated furtive and unsuccessful attempts to use it it over a period of 30 years. It just doesn't work. You _will_ inadvertently put tomatoes or lemon juice into your skillet, it _will_ lose it's "seasoning", and you _will_ attempt to "re-season" it with only 25% success rate but a guaranteed 100% stinky and smoked-out household (complete with 9 smoke-alarms beeping) rate.
Instead of giving someone cast iron cookware (akin to giving someone herpes, but slightly less intimate and curable), give them a teflon skillet - it will work immediately and unfailingly. It will lose it's charm slowly and gracefully (instead of the first time it is cleaned, as with a cast iron skillet). They will know when to replace it.
Let the posts from the alleged hundreds of blissfully contented cast-iron skillet users now commence.
My experience is a counter-example. I've been using my iron pan for years and I've never had those problems. After I bought it used, I cleaned off the gunk, rust spots, and dust bunnies with soap, water and steel wool. I dried it over the burner, and wiped it with some oil. I wiped away the excess oil, and that was it. No oven-baked seasoning process.
To clean after cooking, I usually just wipe it out. Every now and then I do a more thorough cleaning, essentially repeating what I did when I first bought it. Wash with soap, scraping with a spatula to get stuck bits off. Dry it over the flame, and wipe on a thin layer of oil, and wipe off the excess. When I'm done, I can sometimes see a dull reflection of myself in the bottom of the pan. It is quite smooth.
I have cooked with citrus, tomatoes, vinegar, alcohol, etcetera. It is not "non-stick" enough to cook eggs or fish without oil, and usually those foods necessitate washing. I have never had to do a bake-on seasoning process. I have never started a smoky grease fire with it.
More high-maintenance than a stainless pan, certainly, but I like the cooking characteristics. I like that I can scrape hard with a metal spatula to release food after searing. I like that it reacts to temperature changes more gradually. I like that it heats with a significant temperature differential. I like going from stove top, to oven, to broiler, to grill, to wood fire without damaging the pan.
I am happy with mine. I ever thought of it much until I read a few articles written by people who want to spend more time messing with their pans than cooking on them.
Using cast iron is simple. Take a pan, throw in some oil, cook, clean, wipe down with some oil. I grew up using nothing but cast iron skillets and all of this talk about how only a perfect organic oil combined with a special oven can create a decent seasoning is bs. I use vegetable oil and they work fine. Also, my pans have a sandy surface and they work fine. I didn't buy mine at an estate sale, but at a store years ago and they work fine.
I fry food in mine, stick it them the oven to bake, make eggs, steaks, bacon, vegetables. I pretty much cook everything on cast iron because it is easy to take care of and lasts forever. People turn this into something it isn't.
I also grew up making lots of bbq in Texas. People do the same thing with bbq - they spend so much time working on perfecting their tools that they forget to cook the food.
a) Why attempt to make judgements about how other people "feel" when you simply don't know. For example, in this case I feel neither "rightious" nor "validated" from what others post. Instead I _know_ from my own experiences over several decades how cook-unfriendly cast-iron cookware is.
b) It's "righteous", not "rightious". Perhaps you could enable a spell-checker. It is much easier to read posts with correct spelling (and grammar).
My statement in an earlier post, which you reference here, was neither baiting nor rude. I know how passionately people feel about their cast-iron skillets. Indeed so much so that they simply cannot resist showing their cast-iron love. Making fun of that is fair play.
Pointing out a misspelling, even if only one of tens of thousands made on this and other Internet groups, is simply a honest reminder that literacy is valued even on the Internet. I said nothing rude. Your calling the correction "lame" _is_, however, at the least ambiguous and at the worst truly rude, since you may be making (incorrect) assumptions about my internal state of mind.
My Favorite Article on Cast-Iron Skillets:
"Why Do I Have a Cast Iron Skillet? By Sonia Saraiya
Okay. I <3 my cast iron. I haven't gone to the full effort of seasoning it like the article says, but I have done a bit of work on it and it's worked great for me. I do dislike the whole "stinks up your house" part, though I've never had it set off smoke alarms--sounds like you may have had residue from other stuff in your oven, or maybe you used too much oil or it had too low a smoke point.
I make tomato (or other acidic things, like spinach or chard) stuff in it fairly regularly and as long as I clean it within a few hours and give it a little mini-seasoning (re-oil, cover with lid, set on hot burner for awhile, turn off and let return to room temp while covered) it's fine. Keeping it covered is key to minimizing the stinky house problem.
Maybe if I followed the article I wouldn't have to do that, but it's just not that hard now that I have the habit and I really like the cooking characteristics of cast iron (how well it holds heat, etc.) so I'm going to stick with it (pun intended ^_^ )
I'll refrain from gushing about grandma's pan coated with 70 years of lard & love, etc. :D It's not for everyone. But I will say you should skip the teflon and buy an enameled pan instead. They can be quite cheap and are much tougher than teflon.
But as good as it is, it will never be as truly non-stick as a good teflon pan.
Don't get me wrong, I use and love both my cast iron and a few old All Clad stainless with copper cores. Teflon will never sear as well, never give you the ultimate maillard you're looking for.
But you can crack an egg into a teflon pan without oil and slide it out without leaving a trace.
"Cast iron seasoning" is a scam. There, I've said it. I've got a full set of cast-iron cookware and have made repeated furtive and unsuccessful attempts to use it it over a period of 30 years. It just doesn't work. You _will_ inadvertently put tomatoes or lemon juice into your skillet, it _will_ lose it's "seasoning", and you _will_ attempt to "re-season" it with only 25% success rate but a guaranteed 100% stinky and smoked-out household (complete with 9 smoke-alarms beeping) rate.
Instead of giving someone cast iron cookware (akin to giving someone herpes, but slightly less intimate and curable), give them a teflon skillet - it will work immediately and unfailingly. It will lose it's charm slowly and gracefully (instead of the first time it is cleaned, as with a cast iron skillet). They will know when to replace it.
Let the posts from the alleged hundreds of blissfully contented cast-iron skillet users now commence.