CARING FOR YOUR SKILLET

Here are my suggested best practices for skillets, old and new. It’s significantly easier than keeping an apartment plant alive—I’ve never been able to do that, but my skillets are just fine, thanks.

SEASONING

Whether you’ve just discovered a rust- and grime-free skillet in your basement or purchased a new one that needs seasoning, here’s what to do:

Some extra essentials for your cast iron:

• Flaxseed oil (such as Barlean’s)

• Silicone oven mitt (such as OXO)

• Tawashi palm scrubber (such as one sold at Korin)

PREHEATING

Because cast iron is slower to heat and does so unevenly, preheating, essential for searing, is also almost always recommended for frying, roasting, and baking. You can do this in your oven or, when you’re doing a stovetop preparation, on a burner. Ideally, it should be done gradually. This is easy enough in your oven—just put the pan in there while you preheat the appliance.

It’s a little more involved on the stovetop, but not much: Start the skillet over low heat, incrementally increasing that to whatever your desired cooking temperature is. Make sure you place the pan an inch or two off center and rotate it every couple of minutes, so it circles the heat source; this keeps the middle of the skillet from receiving all that direct heat and developing a hot spot. J. Kenji López-Alt recommends you give this a solid 10 minutes. If you think your pan is too hot for the pending task—making naan, for example—lower the heat, and remember that cast iron is slower to register temperature adjustments.

CLEANING

When I asked Mike Whitehead, founder of FINEX Cast Iron Cookware Company, what he’d tell someone who said she didn’t want to get started with cast iron because it’s too difficult to clean, he replied, “Get over it and start living.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. That said, there are a few easy tricks.

Always wash your pan by hand; never put it in the dishwasher. When you rinse your pan after cooking in it, with or without soap, match the water temperature accordingly (don’t introduce your hot skillet to a rush of cold liquid). A soft-bristled brush or a Japanese tawashi (a vegetable scrub brush) will help remove any minor debris without endangering the seasoning.

If you’re faced with more substantial sticking, you can boil water in your skillet and use a wooden spatula to scrape the caked-on particles off the pan. Or go on and bust out your metal spatula: Dave Arnold discovered that “the gentle scraping of metal along the bottom of the pan while cooking helps to even out the surface of the seasoning and make it more durable, not less.”

A natural exfoliant, kosher salt is another excellent option for removing the clingier bits. Sprinkle enough of it on your skillet to cover the interior, then, using a dampened paper towel, or, as I’ve seen done, the cut side of a halved potato, start scrubbing. The salt will get dirty as it lifts the gunk off your pan. (Repeat the process if necessary, rinsing the salt out before applying more.) When the surface is clear, rinse the dirty salt out.

After cleaning your pan, dry it thoroughly by hand and on the stove, over low heat, for a few minutes. Finally, rub it down with a teaspoon of the cooking oil of your choice. (I use flaxseed.) Make sure you follow this quick last step every time. It prevents rust. So does removing your baked items from your skillet as soon they’re cooled and storing them elsewhere because, as Mike Whitehead notes, “depending on how seasoned your cookware is, the food might be damp enough to cause some slight corrosion.” Don’t leave your pan sitting under running water for a long period of time or soak it, either.

FUN FACT: Pop Star

I’ve heard that the phosphoric acid in Coca-Cola allegedly reacts with corroded cast iron and turns the rust into ferric phosphate, which you can scrub away with ease. I don’t keep Coke in my fridge; if I did, I might give this a try.

STORING

If you’ve got the kitchen wall space to hang your skillet, do it. That way it’s always within reach. It’s weightier than most pans, so make sure it’s well supported. My 10-inch skillet stays on my stove because it’s the one I cook in most often, and I use it a lot. The rest of my cast-iron pans are kept in a dry space—I nest them in my cupboard, one inside the other, and place a piece of paper towel between each to protect its surface from rust or dust.

REMOVING RUST

No matter how hard you try, it’s likely that at some point you’ll find rust on your cast iron. You have not failed, and your skillet is not a goner. This is when you “get out the steel wool”—not the soap-filled kind, the plain stuff. When you use an abrasive on cast iron, you will strip it of any rust, which is great; you will also strip it of its seasoning. You’ll simply have to start over, as though you’d just procured your pan, and re-season it. Take it from the top!

Oil Spill

You’ll know if you’ve overoiled your pan, because it will be noticeably tacky just like it would be if you didn’t season it at a high enough temperature. Or else you’ll start to notice black flecks on your food. Dave Arnold explains: “The oil polymer on a well-used piece of cast iron is built of many thin layers deposited over time. Thick layers can flake off in large pieces. Thin layers will remain adhered to the pan and will slough off microscopically.”

If your pan shows these signs, get your steel wool out and re-season it. And if you need to correct a neglected or seriously botched seasoning job, and you’ve got the moxie to do it, Dave Arnold says you can put your skillet in your oven and turn on the self-clean cycle, or place it in your fireplace. Somewhere near 800°F, the offending coating will be incinerated, and its ashes are all that’s left of it.