Which Oils I Use and How Many Coats
I use plain vegetable oil or Crisco, thin coats, four to six times. That's the whole secret. People want it to be more complicated than that. It isn't.
Why not something fancier
You'll see a lot of talk online about flaxseed oil being the "best" seasoning oil because it polymerizes harder. It does. It also flakes off in sheets after a while, which is its own headache, and it's expensive for something you're about to bake at 400 degrees in a parking lot. I don't bother. I'd rather use something off the shelf at Macey's, or whatever's already in my cupboard, because the oil matters far less than the number of thin coats and the heat you give it.
Crisco is my actual favorite. It's solid at room temp, which sounds like a downside but means you can't accidentally glob on too much — you scrape a thin layer with a paper towel and it's genuinely thin. Vegetable oil works fine too. Canola, same. Any plain cooking oil without a strong flavor will season a pan.
What I don't use: olive oil (low smoke point, goes gummy and sticky instead of hard and smooth), butter (it burns, and the milk solids bake onto cast iron into a mess you don't want), and anything cold-pressed and fancy you paid real money for. Save that for salad.
The steps
- Strip and clean the pan first. Brand new or freshly stripped, wash it and dry it completely — and I mean completely, our air is dry enough it'll flash-rust if you leave it damp. More on that in the rust lesson.
- Warm the pan slightly. Just enough that the oil spreads instead of sitting in a puddle. A few minutes in a low oven or over low coals.
- Rub in a thin coat of oil. All over — inside, outside, the lid, the legs, the handle. Paper towel, not a brush. Then take another clean paper towel and wipe most of it back off. This is the part people skip, and it's the part that matters. You want it looking almost dry. Shiny and wet means you used too much.
- Bake it hot, upside down, with something under it to catch drips. 400 to 450 degrees, an hour, cool it in the oven if you can. Upside down so the oil doesn't pool in the bottom and set into a sticky ring instead of a hard finish.
- Repeat. Four to six coats total for a new or stripped pan. Each builds on the last. Yes, it's boring. It's supposed to be — you're not doing anything skillful, just repeating a step until the surface changes color and starts looking like a dark, slightly matte brown-black instead of gray iron.
How you know it's working
The color is your signal. Bare iron is gray. Properly seasoned iron is dark brown going on black, and it should look almost dry, not greasy. If the pan comes out shiny or sticky after baking, you used too much oil per coat — wipe it down harder next time, almost to where you'd swear there's nothing left on the towel.
This is one of those things where I can hand you the exact number of coats and the exact temperature and it still won't feel real until you've done it once and watched the color change under your own hands. A lot of things are like that. I did the same hike above Tibble Fork in February one year, in the cold, because I'd decided back in October it was "my route" now and I was doing it no matter the season. It was miserable. My fingers didn't work right for twenty minutes afterward. I'd read about that trail — I knew the elevation gain, I knew where the ice usually sat on the north-facing part — and none of it told me what being up there in February would actually feel like until I did it. Seasoning's the same. You can read "thin coat" a hundred times. You don't know what thin looks like until you've wiped one on and it still worked.
A quick caution
The oven's going to sit at 400-plus for an hour with an oiled pan inside, upside down. Put a sheet pan or foil underneath to catch drips, because burnt oil on the bottom of your oven is its own unpleasant afternoon. And don't wander off for long stretches — a smoking oven and a real fire are different things, but you want to know which one you've got.
Before next time
Bring your pan already washed and bone dry, plus whatever plain oil or Crisco you've got at home. We'll do the coats together in class so you can watch the color change in real time instead of just taking my word for it.