Easy Seasoning

 
The seasoning on our Braising Skillet was looking a little rough after a summer of campfire cooking. Had I taken to the wider internet for advice on how to refurbish it, I may have started to get anxious. Looking up cast iron care online can be a little bit like googling medical symptoms: you will always find someone to tell you your skillet is dying.

We’ve specifically designed the surface on our cast iron to build seasoning easily through cooking. To refresh our skillet at home, I didn’t take it through a laborious reconditioning process. This is what I did instead:

I cooked some onions.

I caramelized them low and slow, for about an hour and a half in ghee. The end result is not picture-perfect, but it looks pretty great for doing something I would have been doing anyways. The finish will continue to deepen as we use the skillet in our day-to-day cooking. This onion exercise gave our seasoning a little bit of a boost, but I also could  have let it ride, and the result would have eventually been the same.

(For a Seasoned Dutch Oven, my preferred reconditioning method is popcorn!)

I'm sharing this to demonstrate that cast iron care is easy and you do not have to overthink it. I am frequently asked if a skillet should be "stripped" with oven cleaner and re-seasoned in the oven when shiny black carbon starts to build up on the cook surface. In the first photo above, you can see there are some darker areas. That is carbon - i.e., burned on food! It can happen easily if a skillet is not cleaned well, or if food is seared on at high heat. I don't like stripping. It is laborious, chemical-laden, and suggests that seasoning needs to be uniformly black to be effective. Unless the skillet is a display piece, or cast iron care is a hobby, I would offer a "do less" approach.

My personal attitude toward carbon is that if you can't feel its profile with your finger, you can let it ride. The seasoning will even out. (Pssst, seasoning is carbonized!) The carbon on our Braising Skillet is totally flat to the surface of the iron. Scraping it off any more aggressively may have risked scratching the iron itself.

The seasoning on a skillet is a patina of fats that have been bonded to the iron by heat. Its primary function is to seal the iron so that it cannot rust, but seasoning also has the effect of creating a nonstick cook surface that deepens over time. That deepening is a living process. It’s natural to expect that you will see variations as you live with your skillet and cook with it. It's also important to remember that true seasoning cannot be washed off - it can, however, be burned off!

If you have questions, please take a look at our simple care and use guidelines - and feel free to reach out! The answer is almost always to just keep cooking.

 

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