Cast Iron Restoration and Maintenance ｜ From Start to Finish

In this video today I'm going to demonstrate how you use the self-clean oven method to clean a skillet. I'm going to be doing five skillets today. These are ones that I've found over the last couple of days, but there's one here that's really nasty. It has a gate mark, so I think it was made before 1900. This is a Lodge Chef skillet that I found. It's not very dirty at all, but it hasn't been used before. You can even still see the sticker mark on the inside. So I'm going to go ahead and let that have a run-through as well. This I'm not sure what this is going to be yet, but it's really nasty. It's probably the nastiest skillet that I've had to date. So that is going to go in the self-clean oven. This is a Wagnerware that I found yesterday. It's not too bad, and so that's going to get a run-through. This is a really nice Griswold No. 9 Block EPU logo. It's in really good shape. It's really, really smooth, and that's going to go as well. Okay, all the skillets have been loaded into the oven, and usually I try to get as many in there as I can. So I'm doing five, as we said before, and so I'm going to go ahead and close the oven and let it go for two hours. The self-clean cycle has ended, and I'm waiting for the skillets to cool. After they cool, I will wash them with soap and water. Usually I use just some plain ivory liquid, and I'll scrub them with some gray 00 steel wool. I'll dry them with these Scott shop paper towels. They're great. I get them from Home Depot. They're lint-free, extra-absorbent, great for all kinds of cast iron maintenance. After they're dry, I'll inspect them, and if they need it, I'll go over each skillet with my wire cut brush that you see here. Okay, the skillets have cooled for the most part. They're still a little bit warm. That's why I'm wearing a mitten, but not warm enough to cause any problems when I run it under the water. So I'm going to take the gated one out first, and when you first pull a newly-cleaned skillet out of a self-cleaned oven, you're like, oh man, look at all this rust. But it's not rust. It's just the stuff that's burned off of the skillet. So you can see, you remember how grimy this one was, and we're going to take this over. We're going to run it under some water and start to clean it. And you're going to notice that pretty much this stuff just washes right off. Look at that. It's coming right off. Sometimes you never know what you're going to get on the cooking surface. This one isn't quite as nice as I had hoped it to be, but it's all right. It'll still be a good user. I'm going to take some elbow grease on the inside, but I'll scrub this for a little while and then take a few of the other ones out and let you see those. And then after we get these cleaned, I'll show you how to wire wheel a skillet. So it definitely won't be one of my number one users, but it is an interesting skillet. It only cost me $8, so I'm not complaining. So let's take one of the other ones out of the oven and see what they look like. OK, I have no idea what this one was, but this one was really bad too. So let's take this over and get this rinsed off and see what it is. You guys get to find out the same time as me. Are you ready? A miracle. See how that stuff just pours right off? OK, now immediately I see a Made in USA, but nothing else yet. All right, number 8B7, 10 1⁄4 inch, Made in USA. So I'm not sure what this means. A friend of mine in the cast iron cooking group said he thought it was a Birmingham stove in the rain. So maybe once he sees this, he can positively identify it. All right, we've added some light on the other side of this in hopes that you can kind of see this a little bit better. But this is a great skillet. It's really, really extremely smooth on the inside. And what I am noticing is there's still some, I guess this is kind of some factory roughness on the inside. And sometimes when you go to season and you're using a paper towel maybe to wipe your skillet or to maybe wipe some oil on it after cooking in it, sometimes that roughness will make the paper towel pull a little bit and you'll get some lint. And so we don't want that. So this will be one that I'll take the wire wheel to. But this is a definite user. It's really flat on the inside. There's no concave or convex warping. Really would like to know what this is. Once again, it says number 8-B7. I've never seen that before, but I'm sure somebody out there has. But this cleaned up nicely. No rust whatsoever. Remember, it did have a little bit of rust. This spot did okay. You can see there's probably a little bit of heat damage on the outside of this. But we'll season right over that. And this is a perfect skillet, number 8. It's a good one. Eight bucks, not bad. All right, we're still scrubbing the skillet, the Griswold skillet. And you might be asking yourself, how clean do I need to get a skillet? I think the thing to remember about when you clean the skillet is eventually you're going to turn that skillet black. And when it gets a few layers of that black patina on it, it's going to be totally black. So I don't think it's bad to have some imperfections on the skillet. Like you can see I'm washing this one now. I'm not quite done scrubbing it, but there's some black along here. And if I scrubbed it a lot more, I could probably get it out. But I don't know if you want to be that uptight about those type of imperfections on your skillet. If you can get it clean, great. But if not, don't worry about it. If you remember before, I don't know if I showed you this Wagner before, but it did have some rust on the outside of it. And one of the things about the self-clean method is its effect on rust is really, really minimal. That's why eventually I want to move to the electrolysis method because that's really effective, as I've seen, on rust. So I'm going to scrub this, and we're just going to see how it did on the rust. Hopefully the steel will be enough to take care of it. If it doesn't take care of it, probably what I will have to resort to with this skillet is a vinegar soak of white distilled vinegar, 50% vinegar, 50% water. So I'm going to scrub this, and I'll get back to you in a second and let you see it. Okay, as you can see, the steel wool was more than enough to knock that rust off. And once again, this skillet is in absolutely perfect condition. Really, really smooth on the inside. Alright, this skillet is still really smooth, but I do want to get out some of those visual imperfections in there. And I do want to make it just a little bit smoother, so I am going to wire wheel this one. So I'm going to show you how to do that. Alright, I don't have a workshop, so what I've done is I've got a couple cutting boards, and I've got some weights that I use to work out with that are weighing down the skillet since I don't have, like, a work table and a vice and all that kind of stuff. So I'm going to wire wheel this. I've got just a rag kind of protecting the cutting board from the skillet in there because I don't want black marks on my nice, loose cutting board. And so I'm going to go ahead and wire wheel this. And so now you are going to know how to do this. This is, like I said before, a 2-inch wire cut brush, and I'm just going to go really gently inside this skillet and get the visual imperfections off. I'm not trying to grind the skillet down. I'm just getting imperfections off, and that's it. So here we go. Now one thing you notice, this skillet is turning a silver color. That silver color is the residue from this wire cut brush. I know when I first wire wheeled my first skillet, you know, I thought that my cast iron was special, like it was made out of some silver or whatever. I thought it was going to stay like that, but someone told me that that's just residue. So important, you want to make sure that you get that residue off before seasoning your skillet. So after each skillet is wire wheeled, we always take it back to the sink and give it a light scrub with soap water and the gray 00 steel wool. So we're going to finish wire wheeling this, and on this one I'm only going to do the cooking surface, the walls of the skillet, and probably the top of the handle. I'm not going to worry about the back of that because we don't care. Okay, before I continue, I want to show you a little bit about what I do to wire wheel the sides. I've seen a lot of people use different types of wire wheels on a skillet, but really all you need is a cut brush. It's good enough to do the cooking surface and the sides. To do the sides, you just want to kind of come up in here like that, and then you can also come in and go up and down on them like that, and they come out perfect. But that's pretty much how you do the sides. You can see that there's no wire wheel marks. There's no circular marks in here. It's just all really, really smooth cast iron. So that's a really smooth skillet. It would be great for cooking eggs or anything where smoothness is desired. All right, this is good enough for the inside. One thing I do like about the silver-looking residue going onto the skillet is it lets you see where you've been and where you still need to go. So I've got pretty much even coverage from the wire cut brush on this skillet. So now I'm going to flip this around. I'm going to put the insides of the skillet under this so I can do the handle. All right, this skillet is dry and is ready to go into the oven. What I'm going to do first is all of the skillets, I'm going to bring them up to a temperature of 200 degrees, and I'm going to apply a layer of Crisco. And so once I get all the skillets in, I will show you that. So this is going into an oven that is already preheated to 200 degrees. You want to preheat, if it's a gas stove, you want to preheat your oven to 200 degrees before you put anything in it because a gas stove is going to give off a little bit of water vapor when it first starts up, and it will cause some flash rust on an unprotected piece. So preheat your stove to 200 first. The first skillet that we put in should just be about to 200 degrees. So I'm going to remove that. Now, when I season, I use Crisco shortening. Some people use a lot of different things. Some people use lard. Some people use olive oil. Some people use coconut oil. Some people use flaxseed oil, which I highly do not recommend. It's a very inconsistent method. I use Crisco. It's worked great on just about all the 66 skillets that I have so far, now like over 70. When I use Crisco, it works great. Ultimately, what you want to do to season your skillet is to cook in your skillet. You cook bacon, you cook hamburgers, whatever. Every time you cook something with animal fat in it, it seasons your skillet just a little bit more. So we're going to take a little bit of Crisco on a rag, and the skillet is already kind of hot, and we're just going to rub it into the skillet. Now, one thing to note, when you season a fresh skillet like this, it's almost like the skillet just soaks up the oil. So I usually do two seasonings on a new skillet. Some people just do one and start cooking in it right away. I like two. And if you want the skillet to look gorgeous with a nice shine to it, you can go ahead and maybe do three or so. But usually the shine in mine comes from the maintenance program that I have, and I'll show you that either in this video or another video. So we're just going to rub that down good with Crisco. And you can see, I mean, the skillet is just soaking the oil up right into the pores of the metal or the iron. And always make sure you get your handle, too. Get down in that crevice. Good old Crisco. Good enough for my grandmother, good enough for me. Okay, got that really good. Now, the key in seasoning, what I like when I season a pan is I want it to have a nice, even black patina. I don't want pools of oil, of burnt oil, ruining the look of my skillet. I'm really, really anal about the look of my skillets, and so I want them to be a nice, even black color and get evenly black over time. So one of the things I have learned from many of the seasoning methods that are out there now is you need to wipe your Crisco off once you wipe it off. And some of you might say, huh? Yep, that's the secret to having a nice seasoning on your skillet, is to wipe it all off. So what I'm going to do, I've just coated this skillet with Crisco, and now I'm going to use my blue absorbent Scott shop paper towel that I get from Home Depot for about $2 a roll, and I'm going to wipe it all off. And when I say wipe it off, I mean wipe it all off. You can see that. And the surprising thing is, even when you wipe it all off, there's still some on there. So we're going to wipe it all off. Okay, that's looking pretty good. Wipe the handle too. And then we are going to put it back in the oven, and we're going to do the rest. All the skillets have been wiped with Crisco and then wiped off with my blue absorbent paper towels, so now they're going to go into the oven. And at this point, I'm going to up my temperature to 300 degrees, and I'm going to set my timer at this point for 15 minutes. Okay, 15 minutes has passed, and we're going to wipe our skillets one more time. Usually when I use these blue paper towels, I use two of them. It increases my absorbency, and I can also use one side, the other side, and turn it in like that, one side and the other side. So I can effectively wipe, I don't know, four to five skillets. So, I'm going to take these out, and I am going to wipe the ones at the bottom of the oven first, because those are the ones that are getting the most heat from the bottom of the oven. Okay, now Kristen, get close on this. Now, if you can see this, and that handle is really hot, and my gloves aren't helping me at all, but you thought we got all the oil off when we wiped it. And what you see here is excess oil that was on the skillet that has started to pool. If I let this go like this, that oil would burn in, and then I would have this design on my skillet. And that's not what I want. I want a nice, black, even patina. So at this point, after 15 minutes, this is what happens. So we're just going to take this, and we're going to wipe it. And you can see it kind of evens out. And that is why you need to wipe your skillet twice. Once at 200, heat it to 300 for 15 minutes, and then wipe it again. And now this skillet and the rest after I wipe them will be ready to go at 400 degrees for 2 hours. Okay, the skillets have completed their initial round of seasoning, and they look pretty good. I'm probably going to go back and do one more round of seasoning on these. I usually like my skillets to be kind of glossy and kind of have a sheen to them. So I am going to do one more round of seasoning, and I will let you see what it looks like after I complete it. Okay, the skillets have finished their second seasoning, and you can see they look great. All of them are perfectly dry, not sticky or tacky, and they have a nice luster to them. They look really beautiful. Okay, cast iron maintenance. This is going to be a really quick section of this video, but when I clean my cast iron, I use three things. Hot water from the faucet, a Scotch-Brite scouring pad if I need it, and this Lodge scraper. This Lodge scraper is like gold. It gets just about anything off with just some hot water from the faucet and just the scraper. So just those three things, that's all you need. That's all I've ever used, and so that's all you need. I never boil a skillet, which means putting water in the skillet and let it boil. To me, that destroys your seasoning, and I never, ever, ever use soap. Okay, this is a freshly washed skillet, and I'm going to show you what I do after each time I wash a skillet. What I'll do is I'll turn this burner on, and I'll put it on maybe about medium to medium-high, and I'll let the skillet heat a little bit. Now, once it's heated slightly, I'll coat it with a thin layer of Crisco inside and out. This is almost kind of like a little mini-seasoning every time you cook, but I guarantee you if you do this every time, your skillets will be beautiful in a really, really short period of time, if they're not already beautiful. All right, so once that oil is on there, I'm going to take my super-absorbent Scott paper towel, and I'm going to wipe it all out. I'm putting really, really good pressure on this to make sure I get all that oil out. Like I said before, I do this every time I wash a skillet. Do you have to do it every time? No. But, you know, I'm really particular about how my skillets look, and so I go ahead and I go through the trouble of maintaining them this way. That's pretty good. It's pretty dry. It's got a nice luster to it, but we don't want the skillet to be wet, which it is right now. So I'm going to put that on the burner, and I'm going to jack my heat up a little bit to about medium, medium-high. Once the skillet starts to smoke, then I'll turn it off. If you find after your skillet cools that it's still a little bit maybe sticky or tacky, just put it back on the heat. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll just put it on medium heat, and I'll just let it stay there for 15, 20 minutes, and that usually does the trick. But if you do this in between every cleaning, you're going to have a drop-dead gorgeous skillet.