No. I polymerized it with the grapeseed oil. I tried it with sunflower oil. I polymerized until my apartment swirled with smoke. I wiped it down with nothing besides a paper towel and water. I followed youtube guides.
Nothing worked, and that goddamn pan would lose slickness in the heavily-used center every other day. Plus, I'd leave it unused for a few weeks while traveling, and upon returning, it'd be covered in rust! This happened with at least 3 different pans from 2 different manufacturers.
Low-maintenance my ass.
You oil it (with any cooking oil) and then wipe it all off. It needs to look and feel like it hasn't been oiled. Any visible oil or stickiness will burn to black shit that isn't seasoning. There is still oil there. The invisible, microscopic residue is what you want. When you heat it (in the oven around 180C) it will generate a faint smell around the cooker, not fill your home with burning oil smoke. Do the whole thing 3-5 times.
But for a skillet this is just a kick start. It is neither necessary nor sufficient. The real seasoning comes from use and is way better than anything you can do by explicit seasoning. Use it frequently. Fry in it. FREQUENTLY. And when you do use use oil, ffs. While it's newish, clean it promptly, dry it thoroughly and give it a thin wipe of oil before you put it away to prevent rust and help it season.
(If you're the sort that thinks never letting a single fat molecule enter your digestive system is a virtue, don't buy cast iron. It won't work for you. It'll rust and stick. Use teflon. It's the only thing you'll ever be able make a "fried" egg on. It might give you cancer but at least you won't accidentally ingest some butter. Also, if you cook once every 6 months, don't use cast iron. It needs use. Weekly at least, if not daily.)
One of our four cast skillets spent last night in the sink, full of water (see my other comment). We treat them how we please, scrubbing and washing them with detergent if needed, leaving them dirty if we want. They cook wonderfully, don't stick and will probably survive the death of the sun.
I bought a couple carbon steel pans I had to season myself and they're a constant nightmare.
You may want to try again with a different brand.
I had a few “ceramic” pans but inevitably they become scratched (and useless) after a year or two in everyday use
(this is a pain when you have parrots, because one overheated pan, and all birds in the house - big and small - will die)
As one example, I bought some hexclad pans. They had very strong wording about their use of teflon:
https://hexclad.com/blogs/posts/pfoa-free
when you try to figure out what their coating is, you are told:
"We’ve used a high-grade non-toxic Japanese coating infused with diamond dust for extra toughness." (https://hexclad.com/pages/hexclad-science)
and... well keep digging.
Finally you can find this:
Q: Are your pans free of PTFE?
A: Our pans are PFOA free but contain some PTFE. PTFE is in over 95% of all nonstick cookware including our ceramic-based nonstick. PTFE is safe and inert. In fact, it is used in surgical matches meshes, dental implants and heart stents which are all implanted in the body. We do not use PFOA chemicals and other chemicals that gave many other nonstick pans a bad name. Why do we use some PTFE? Sadly, non-PTFE nonstick cookware does not work well for long periods of time. In fact, in our tests, the largest non-PTFE nonstick in the world only held up for 45 minutes of consecutive use.
https://hexcladcommercial.com/pages/frequently-asked-questio...
What's especially ridiculous is that the "good" hexclad sets you can get at costco also put this coating on the BOTTOM of the pan, against the flame or burner! High temperature is the achilles heel for these chemicals.
took them back.
EDIT: also https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/y...
The only downside is that you have to wash them right away, dry them thoroughly. Cooking with a lot of acidic sauces will mean you'll likely have season them again.
People mostly really get into trouble when they try to stew tomatoes or something like that (I just keep a steel pan around for really acidic stuff).
I only see people struggle with cast iron when they think it must be cleaned with soap until it’s shiny. That’s an invitation for rust and problems.
If you do season the pan, the most important thing is to wipe off all the oil after applying it. You brush the oil on and then wipe it completely dry. It should be dry to the touch and matt, not shiny. You should not be able to see ANY oil. The microscopic invisible bit of oil left is all you want. Only then do you heat it. The temperature doesn't matter much. 180 C or so in an oven is what I've used. The kind of oil used also doesn't matter. For best results do the whole thing 3 or more times. If you bake a visible layer of oil onto your pan you're not seasoning it, you're just covering it in burnt crap.
And it's optional!
Note that the above is for skillets, which self-season because they're used for frying. (Hence "seasoning" - i.e. using them for a while.) The story is very different for some other things. For example, we have a dutch oven used for baking bread, which is not an oily process. For that you really do have to season. Ours came pre-seasoned but it rusted after an unfortunate baking mishap and I had to electrolyse it and then give it 5 rounds of oven seasoning (as described above), after which it has been a zero-maintenance workhorse.
Griddles are absolute fucking bastards and will ruin your life.
If you ever do electrolyse any cast iron (it's great fun and will restore anything), A) pay a few quid for graphite electrodes (overgrown pencil leads, available on Amazon), rather than using an old stainless steel knife and producing hexavalent chromium (Erin Brockovich's favourite chemical) and B) use a bench power supply because nobody sells the kind of car battery charger all the online tutorials tell you to use any more (they're all pulsed ones now, completely useless for electrolysis).
I then dry it with a towel, heat up the pan with Avocado or Bacon grease until it almost starts smoking. I then use a paper towel to wipe out the pan and it stays on the stove until the next use.
Of the pans I have now (bought over the past 2 years), 3 are seasoned well enough that they’re effectively non-stick.
Eggs pancakes, fish, no problems.
If you ever have the surface roughen up you can also strip the old seasoning by covering it in oven cleaner and heating it to cleaning temperature. The easiest way to do this is to stick it in an oven on high.
I’ve had the same frying pan for 10 years now and this is how I keep it non-stick.
Yes, complex hydrocarbons are not good for you, but PFOAs and their ilk are really really really bad for you and the environment. It's like comparing spent nuclear rods with brazil nuts. Yes, both are radioactive, but there is zero equivalence.
I have an old school cast iron skillet and pot. I wish I'd watched videos because newer types of cast iron apparently has a smooth finish and is thinner and lighter. When new, I washed it with soap and water, dried it, added a nice and thin layer of olive oil all around wiped it with a kitchen towel to take off the excess, then baked it for half an hour. Let it cool. Repeated that once or twice. You can even just heat it on a stove top.
Once I'm done cooking something, I rinse scrub and rinse with warm water to get all the food off and add a touch of oil. A little goes a long way.
That's all, really. It isn't complicated or particularly laborious. It just weighs a fair bit - it'll take your hands a couple of weeks to get stronger and then you won't care.
For instance, when making pancakes, my first step is putting the griddle on the range. Next, I start making the batter.
Of course, you can set the range to high and heat it up really fast, but then you end up risking overheating it.
