Cast Iron: To Keep Cooking or To Reseason

First off, sorry if this thread is in the wrong place.  I couldn't tell if this should actually go in the Gear forum.  Feel free to move it.

Long and short of it is I'm not a very good cast iron Mom.  Sometimes I forget it's not supposed to have tomato sauce or wine or lemon juice in it.  Sometimes it just gets set on a hot burner and left empty because my husband or I get distracted.

This is probably anathema on this forum but I often clean it with Dawn dish soap.  I was led to believe that was okay because modern soap isn't made with lye.  But maybe the degreasers are ruining the seasoning?

I always oil it with a thin layer of shortening after it's dried off on a warm burning.  Maybe I'm using too much oil?  A thin layer is subjective.

All that to say the seasoning isn't getting better and better as I cook. The surface looks like the lunar surface and seasoning sometimes just flakes off the side of the pan.

So here comes the pictures.   Do I just need to strip it and reseason or will season build up over time and correct itself?

My recommendation is to keep cooking with it, but focus on your cleanup. I have a suspicion that you might be getting carbon flakes, not seasoning flakes.

Do you use a metal spatula at all? I found that has helped my cast iron egg pan become the best it has ever been.

I also have recently received a chainmail scrubber for my cast iron and it works amazingly on my pans, especially when things get accidently burnt.

Focus less on the visual appearance of your cast iron being photogenically black and even and look towards if your food is sticking. My egg pan doesn't look 'sexy' but it works incredibly. A true heirloom from my grandmother.

I am with Timothy on the keep cooking with it.

I usually use my cast iron mostly for frying stuff.

Then when I make something like gravy, I immediately wash with hot water using no soap. I dry it well then wipe with some oil.  Then the next time I use it I will be frying something.

I have a smaller cast iron for frying eggs.

Soups, stew and spaghetti sauce goes into stainless steel pots.

I am on the side heavy use.  Rust is my trigger for a start over.

on a tangent note.  Coffee filters are a lint free paper that doesn't leave a trail like paper towels.

Thanks everyone for your input!  That's very helpful and I'm glad I don't have to worry about it being perfectly smooth in appearance.  I don't fry a lot of foods, but maybe that's an excuse to make more bacon.

Tom Digerness wrote:on a tangent note.  Coffee filters are a lint free paper that doesn't leave a trail like paper towels.

Okay that is an excellent idea, thank you!  The bits of lint always bug me.

Timothy Norton wrote:

I also have recently received a chainmail scrubber for my cast iron and it works amazingly on my pans, especially when things get accidently burnt.

I'm coming back to say that I did buy a chain mail scrubber and it does work great.

Also in other news, I still have not managed to get a thick season on this pan. But I use it for things that don't need to come off perfectly so that's fine. The weirdest thing I've had happen with this pan is as follows.   I saw a cooking tip on a YouTube video claiming that baking soda makes meat (and veggies) brown better because of the change in pH. Well I wanted to try it of course.  I think it instantly removed the seasoning from my cast iron because the onions that I was cooking suddenly turned bright yellow!  I wish I'd been smart enough to take a picture! The only thing I can figure is that it took like years of embedded color from various curries off. So avoid super high pH as well as low ph I guess!

Anna Hutchins wrote:I think it instantly removed the seasoning from my cast iron because the onions that I was cooking suddenly turned bright yellow!

When I was learning to caramelize onions, one of the tips involved adding a very small amount of baking soda to the onions to encourage the process to happen faster. I was a little ham fisted with the soda and ended up creating a yellow sludgy onion mess. I can't speak to the cast iron seasoning but I do know that the PH shift causes the color of onions to change. I now just skip the soda and substitute time.

A recommendation that I would pass on for meat to get better browning is to utilize some kind of weight on top like a burger press. Personally, I just use a smaller cast iron pan on top of the meat to have that much more contact to the hot surface.