I have tried to figure this out on my own but throughout all the reading I have done, it seems like I keep finding conflicting answers or the instructions they give are unclear… Am I supposed to just wipe out the pan after cooking with a paper towel, am I supposed to use water, or am I supposed to lightly wipe it out with soap & water and rinse? Thank you in advance!
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It depends on what food remains is in the pan. There is no need to wash the pan for food safety reasons as the pan gets extremely hot when cooking so no germs or even toxins will survive. But you need to clean out most of the food after cooking as this will burn and char the next food you make on it. For this purpose you can scrape it, wipe it with paper or towel. It just depends on what kind of food and how much is left. You can even rinse it in water although you need to dry it afterwards to prevent rusting, you can dry with either a towel or just evaporate the water droplets.
You need to be careful with soap though. The pan have lots of oil in it which is what makes it non-stick. Every time you cook you refill some of the oil. But if you use soap then it will dissolve this oil. The first issue is that the pan might start rusting as there is no protective coating of oil. The other issue is that food are much more likely to stick to the pan the next time you use it because all the oil is gone, even if you add more oil before you cook it have not gotten into the pores of the iron. You may sometimes have to use soap to clean the pan. Sometimes even things like boiling water is not dissolving remaining food in the pan. But you should be aware that soap does temporarily damage the pan. So you need to go through a seasoning process afterwards by heating oil in the pan so it will get into the pores of the iron.
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