How To Season an Iron Skillet

Now that summer is technically over many of us will be moving the burger cooking indoors. There are different methods to cooking an indoor burger and using an Iron Skillet is my favorite - there is something fantastic about the taste of a burger cooked on a "well seasoned" iron skillet. Not to mention the smell of the sizzling burger floating throughout the house. A guilty pleasure!

Proper “care and feeding” – seasoning and maintenance - of an iron skillet will let your family enjoy using this natural non-stick frying pan for generations. The more a skillet is used the better the flavor of the burger.

Proper Skillet Care Steps:

• Seasoning your iron skillet is not something you can do by just rubbing some oil on a warm skillet. It’s a process that evolves over many times of cooking in it and properly cleaning it. “Uncle Dave Macon”, of Grand Ol’ Opr’y fame, had a song titled “I keep My Skillet Good ‘n Greasy All the Time”: That’s how to treat your iron skillet.

• Before the first time you use an unseasoned skillet, coat the inside with lard then place it in a 250F oven and turn the oven off. Leave it until the oven has cooled then wipe it out with a paper towel. Hang it up if you can. You are trying to get as much grease as you can as deep in the pores as you can. However, this does not constitute seasoning, contrary to what some folks will tell you. True seasoning of a skillet occurs in time and will start to show after about 6 uses.

• After you’ve used your skillet, scrape or wipe out food residue and rinse it well - NO SOAP! (this will get easier as it becomes seasoned better). Use plain hot water and preferably a copper scrubber, clean off any stuck food, rinse, and dry it immediately with a paper towel. This will even clean gravy out. The principle is to get it before it dries and sticks to the skillet. After I clean my skillet I often pour a little oil on it, light the burner and let it briefly get hot.
  

• Repeat this process and over a period of time the pores in the cast iron will become filled with carbon residue from the hot grease. A well seasoned iron skillet will develop a slick shiny surface that behaves much like today’s Teflon coatings. You now have an iron skillet that’s a joy to cook with and simple to maintain.

• If you burn something badly in it, you will lose some of the slick surface in cleaning it but it soon recovers. If you’ve gotten more stuff stuck in it than you can clean with the copper scrubber, a razor blade type scraper will make the job easy. I keep one at the sink for use on any cookware that has stubborn food stuck to it.

Additional Tips:

• Anything that gets fried will benefit from being fried in a well seasoned iron skillet.
• Clean your skillet immediately – it’s easier than waiting until food has dried in it.
• Don’t drop your skillet – cast iron can break or crack with a sharp blow.
• NEVER soak an iron skillet in water, especially water and any cleanser.
• NEVER clean an iron skillet in the dishwasher.
• NEVER let anyone else mess up your skillet (a well-seasoned iron skillet is worth its weight in gold).