The Best Way to Save a Rusted Cast Iron Pan (The Farmhouse Way)

The Best Way to Save a Rusted Cast Iron Pan (The Farmhouse Way) There is a cast iron pan somewhere in your house that you gave up on. In the back of a cupboard, or down in the basement, or out in the garage where you set it after the last time. It is not ruined. Rust on cast iron is not damage the way rust on a car is damage. It comes off in about twenty minutes with a piece of steel wool, and the iron underneath is as good as the day it was poured. And your eggs did not stick because you did something wrong. They stuck because there was almost nothing left on that pan to stop them, and nobody ever explained what seasoning actually is. Seasoning is not oil sitting on the surface. When you heat a very thin layer of fat past a certain temperature, the fat stops being fat. The molecules link into one another, harden, and bond onto the iron itself. It becomes a solid black skin, closer to a plastic than to a grease. That skin is what food slides off, and yours was gone. In this one I show you the whole thing: ➤ How to take the rust down to bare grey metal without being gentle about it ➤ Why the pan has to be bone dry on a burner before oil ever touches it ➤ The step that goes against every instinct you have, which is putting oil on and then wiping almost all of it back off ➤ The one mistake that sends people away believing cast iron does not work, and it is the opposite of what you would guess WHAT YOU NEED ➤ Fine steel wool, or coarse salt and a rag ➤ Any cooking oil you already have ➤ Paper towel ➤ An oven WHAT I MENTION ➤ Marion Trozzolo put the first American nonstick skillet on sale in 1961 and called it the Happy Pan. There is one in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. ➤ Nonstick coatings generally last three to five years with good care. ➤ Griswold was casting iron in Erie, Pennsylvania before 1900, and Wagner in Sidney, Ohio from 1891. Those pans are still being restored and cooked in today. Tell me in the comments whether it came out black. And tell me your county, and whether that pan came from somebody, because there are pans sitting in cupboards tonight with a grandmother's name attached to them and I would like to hear about them. I read every one. Nothing here is lost. Just untaught. #castiron #farmhouse #oldways #kitchentips #castironcooking