The Pan Amish Women Refuse to Cook On (And What We Use Instead — $12, Lasts 100 Years)

My name is Darlene Hollis. I cooked in a school kitchen for thirty-five years, feeding four hundred children a day, and the old skillets there outlasted every coated pan the county ever bought us. You bought the nonstick pan and treated it gentle. A year and a half later the coating was peeling up at the edge, flakes of it in your eggs, so you bought another. You didn't fail that pan. It did what it was built to do. Cast iron isn't the fussy pan. The coated pan is. Heat a thin coat of oil hard on iron and it quits being oil. It bonds to the metal as a hard, slick shell, more like varnish than grease. That is polymerization, and every breakfast adds another layer. Extension bulletins handed this method out by the thousands in the 1930s. It didn't get lost. It got outsold. The fix is one skillet, around twelve dollars new at the hardware store. Scrub off the rust with soap and steel wool, dry it on the burner, wipe on a thin coat of oil, and bake it upside down at 450 degrees for an hour. After that it is thirty seconds a day. Replacing nonstick runs around three hundred dollars over twenty years. The skillet costs twelve dollars once. In this video I show you how to pick a good old skillet at a rummage sale, how to scrub rust down to gray metal, why a towel won't dry iron, how thin the oil coat has to be, the nightly habit my mother Ada called feeding the pan, how to rescue a solid orange skillet with white vinegar, and why a cold pan sticks. I also tell you where it falls short. It's heavy, the handle gets as hot as the pan, and a young seasoning doesn't love an all-afternoon tomato sauce. --- **WHAT YOU WILL NEED** Cast iron skillet, 10 1/4 inch, about $12 new or $5 to $10 used Steel wool, a nickel's worth Plain dish soap Plain vegetable oil and paper towels Aluminum foil and a stiff brush White vinegar, one gallon, under $4 **A WORD OF CAUTION** Don't leave a skillet in vinegar more than about an hour, or it starts on the iron itself. Never soak it, never put it in a dishwasher, never put it away damp. The handle gets as hot as the pan, so use a dry pot holder, because a wet one carries heat straight to your hand. I put up the old kitchen ways here, plain and cheap, so subscribe and next time we make real cornbread in this skillet. #castiron #castironskillet #seasoningcastiron #amish #frugalliving #oldfashionedcooking #kitchentips #homemaking