without touching soap and water 🤔
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To clean a cast iron pan, you can use a paper towel or a brush to scrub away any stuck-on food particles. Then, you will rub a little bit of oil onto the surface of the pan to replenish the seasoning layer. This process is called “seasoning” the pan.
The oil used to season the pan also helps to clean it. As you heat the pan, the oil heats up and helps to break down any remaining food bits. The oil also helps to lift any residual flavors and smells from previous cooking sessions.
There are various ways to get a cast iron pan clean. Heating water in the pan and then scrubbing with a plastic scrubber can work. Even better, there are chainmail scrubbers. Because they are hard they get even baked on food well, but because of their curved edges they apparently have little effect on the seasoned surface.
And despite what some people will tell you, a little dish soap will not hurt. At worst, once you have it properly clean, you can always season it once in the oven.
I know your body says without soap and water, but they get cleaned with soap and water.
The myth comes from the time that people would make soap at home out of animal fat and lye. If some of the lye didn’t bond with the fat in such a way to become soap, then it would react with the season and destroy it. Nowadays that risk is nonexistent as modern dish detergents and soaps do not contain free lye.
Wash your cast iron, heat it on the stove to evaporate any surface moisture. Add a *very* thin layer of oil to protect from oxidation/corrosion/etc. I have restored more than 40 cast iron pieces over the years and if I could tell anyone anything it’s that you should clean your skillet with soap. It’s going to work better and your food is going to taste better.
Cast iron pans are supposed to have a coating of oil that has been baked at very high temperatures into a smooth non-stick layer on top of the metal. You can rinse stuff off it with water and/or gentle abrasives like salt. If you use strong soap on it or wash it with soap often, it can dissolve the coating layer. But a lot of the time people are re-seasoning it (re-applying oil and baking it on) from time to time anyway, so it’s not the worst thing in the world if you use a little soap on a cast iron pan.
The simplest way is to use scalding hot water, steel wool, some paper towels, and a bit of either cooked bacon grease or cooking oil (I prefer Avocado Oil).
Get water scalding hot, put on rubber dish cleaning gloves, wash pan using only the scalding water and steel wool to remove any stuck on food. NO SOAP IS TO BE USED AT ALL. Once all food particles have been removed and the pan looks clean you then dry the pan off using paper towels, and finally you “re season” the pan by using a single paper towel that has some of the cooked bacon grease on it or the oil (I prefer avocado oil due to its very high smoke point of 500F) and you wipe down the inside of the pan with the oil giving it a light coating.
Here is where some people soak the paper towels in the oil and leave it on the pan, others do what I do and give it light coating. Either way at the end you place the pan back into the oven (with the oven OFF) and that is where it sits until you are ready to use it again.
Edit: Instead of using scalding water from the sink you can opt to boil water in the pan, then use hot water from the sink but you do run the risk of burning yourself if you are not careful.
List version:
1. Use extremely hot water (scalding levels), while wearing kitchen dish gloves. Use CAUTION when doing this to prevent burns.
2. Under that extremely hot water you scrub cast iron pan with steel wool to remove all food particles. DO NOT USE SOAP OF ANY KIND.
3. Once food particles are removed you dry the pan with paper towels
4. Once dried you can use cooked bacon grease or a cooking oil of choice, I recommend Avocado Oil due to its 500F smoke point and health benefits.
5. Apply either the cooked bacon grease or avocado oil to the inside of the pan by either soaking the paper towels in the grease/oil or by giving it a light coating. If soaking the paper towels they stay in the pan, if coating its just a coating and then trash the paper towels.
6. Place pan into oven with the oven OFF for storage until ready to use again.
This is how my family has done it for generations, I still have my grandmothers cast iron pan from the 1920’s and its still as good today as it was back then using this exact method. So keep downvoting, lets fucking go.
You use detergent. The no soap thing is no ***lye based*** soap.
I use detergents and a chain mail scrubber to clean my cast iron after I use it. Been doing that for years.
One way to clean a cast iron pan without soap and water is by using a salt scrub! It helps remove residue and maintains its seasoning.
I’ve had my cast iron skillet for 30 years. I wash it each time I use it in hot soapy water, rinse, dry, put away. I think the rumors of how delicate cast iron is is WAY overblown.
And if it did happen to get messed up, re seasoning it is fairly straightforward.
Seasoning aside, as far as being “clean” it really doesn’t make a difference if you use soap or not.
As long as you remove the actual food particles afterwards, the pan is sanitized every time you heat it up, killing any microbes.
So the pan is actually at its cleanest after you cook on it, you just don’t want to leave any organic matter to decay and grow microbes.
You technically don’t have to clean a regular pan either, but the burnt on grease can interfere with nonstick coating, and it’s not known to positively contribute to the flavor like cast iron, as far as I know.
Normal lye-free dish soap and not scrubbing the everloving shit out of it is really all you need to keep in mind.
YMMV with anecdotal processes from there.
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