Care & Seasoning

The whole routine, in four lines

1. Wash it hot, with a brush. Soap is fine in small amounts; soaking is not.
2. Dry it on the burner for ninety seconds, until the last of the water steams off.
3. Wipe a fingertip of neutral oil across the face while it is still warm, then buff until it looks dry.
4. Put it away somewhere with air. Not in a sealed cupboard with a wet lid on.

The first ten cooks matter most

A new piece arrives with three coats on it. That is a floor, not a finish. Cook fat in it early and often — bacon, potatoes in oil, cornbread, anything shallow-fried. Each of those cooks lays down another molecular layer, and after ten of them the grinding marks will have disappeared under a bronze film.

Avoid long acidic simmers for the first month. Tomato sauce for twenty minutes is fine on a mature pan and a bad idea on a new one.

Rust is not a failure

Iron rusts. It is the whole reason the seasoning exists. If you find orange on a pan, it means the film has a gap, and a gap is a ten-minute problem.

Scour the rust off with steel wool and hot water, dry it hard on the burner, then apply three thin coats of our seasoning puck at 500 °F, an hour each, cooling in the oven between coats. It comes back every single time. There is a full walkthrough in the journal.

Things that genuinely damage cast iron

• Dishwashers. The detergent is aggressive enough to strip polymerised oil, and the drying cycle leaves it wet.
• Thermal shock. A screaming-hot pan into cold water can crack it. Let it fall below boiling first.
• Storing it wet with the lid on. This is how a dutch oven grows a fur coat.

Free re-seasoning, forever

If it goes badly wrong, post it back to the workshop. We will strip it to bare metal, re-grind if it needs it and re-season it from scratch, free, for as long as we exist. Get in touch and we will send you the details.