Seasoning Iron Skillets

I've had these skillets for a while now. I believe I seasoned them once right after I bought them. They were new and didn't need it, but I was really gung-ho about becoming an iron skillet owner and wanted to try it myself. Over time, they've become, well, nasty. I still use them because nothing nasty is going to survive on a 400°F surface, unless it's an extremophile and since I've got a "No Extremophiles" sign in my kitchen, I'm safe.

Anyway, I read online about how to clean off the old seasoning and decided to give it a whirl. It involves "auto-cleaning" an oven with these things inside and it works well. I put them in the oven and started the three-and-a-half-hour auto-clean cycle at about 6PM. It didn't generate any smoke in the house, but by 7PM, I'd decided that my eyes were stinging too much and my home had become temporarily untenable. I turned on four bathroom-type fans around the house and left.

I ended up at Fry's where I bought a breakout box. I'd always wanted one, but never remembered enough to go get it. Here's what a breakout box looks like. It's for "decoding" what pins are doing what on a serial connection. In the picture, you can see some of the LEDs are lit up. Those are the ones that have some signal on them. The other end of the cable is plugged into my computer's Com1 serial port. I can't wait to use it. I do have a use for it in the near future, just not at the moment. Once that was acquired, I headed over to On the Border for some beef quesadillas.

Back to the skillet.

I got back home at 10PM and opened the oven to get a peak. I was amazed at how clean they'd become when I pulled them out, even though they were coated with what looked like a rust powder. You can see the original gray color of the iron shining through the rust powder. It's not often that I see iron in an un-oxidized state. I think that the original seasoning had bonded with the oxidation in or on the pans prior to being extracted by the auto-cleaning cycle. When the heat forced out the original seasoning molecules, each one had a rust-buddy attached to it. The lines on the big one are where I pushed the powder around with a spatula prior to taking the picture. Not much more came off of it with that scraping, so I decided I needed to scrub them under hot water.

Usually, we're told never to scour cast iron with something as abrasive as steel wool, but I'm pretty sure that only matters if the seasoning has already been applied. Since I'm about to re-season these, it shouldn't have mattered. I didn't have steel wool, so I had to settle for one of those green scour pads. A few minutes under hot water and some elbow grease and the clean iron surface shone through brighter than before. Still some rust on it, but that's edible right? We all need iron in our diets.

Once they were mostly rust free, I could start the actual seasoning process. I decided to use bacon fat. I live in the South, so I have a coffee can of bacon fat. It's how we roll. I pulled out a few chunks of the refrigerated fat from the coffee can and microwaved it. Once in a liquid state, it could be applied easily to the cooking surface of the skillets. There's no real need to season the underside, but you can if you wish. It may help to stave off rusting from moisture in the air I suppose, but I also suppose that the flame or heat on the underside from normal cooking is enough to wreck the moisture barrier too. So, I didn't bother seasoning the underside. In this photo, only the left pan has had the grease applied. I suppose it's like spraying water on white cement and it turns brown. Colors are a mystery.

So, I finish applying the grease to the other one and put them in the oven at 250°F. Another round of "oh-my-eyes-sting" ensues and then after two hours I pull them out. They've still got some grease pooled in them so I wipe that out, let them cool and all is done.

Here is the final result of all the breakout-box buying, auto-cleaning, rust-scrubbing, seasoning and eye-stinging;
Two black, shiny oh-so-clean iron skillets not to use while I continue eating Subway sandwiches and cereal. Pretty nice.