Re-seasoning Vintage Cast Iron
My sister and I were lucky enough to find vintage Wagner Ware cast iron skillets in my grandmother’s basement. The skillets hadn’t been so lucky though. After going unused possibly for decades, they were covered in an impressively nasty crust. Then my sister’s boyfriend got a Griswold Dutch oven from his grandmother’s basement. These are treasures, possibly some of the finest cookware ever made in America. But they needed work, and since my sister lives in a building where she doesn’t want to set the fire alarm off, I offered to do it for her (Project 11). And then they sat all scuzzy in my cabinets for over a year.
And she was coming in the middle of the month for a wedding! So, ack! I let it go to the very last minute, and then scrambled to get it done the day she arrived. (Also, ack! The month is more than half over!) To start, you have to get all the old seasoning off. The coolest way to do this is in an electrolysis tank. Hook your cast iron up to a battery charger in a tank of water, connect the other terminal to another piece of metal, and the electricity does all the work for you. I’m not cool enough for this though so I used Easy Off. I wrapped them up in plastic bags and let them sit overnight.
And with just a bit of scrubbing they came out nice and clean. Except for the little Number 3 skillet, which didn’t come clean in time for me to do it. Too bad, these little guys are perfect to fry an egg or 2. Now she’ll get that one back for Thanksgiving.
Anyways, the next step is to coat them with a thin layer of fat and then bake them in the oven at 500 degrees for an hour.* See, this is why she had some fear of the fire alarms. I read that very perishable flaxseed oil is the best, but I just used canola oil that I had on hand. Also, I dragged my feet through a week of cool weather and did this hot job when it got warm again. The good news is it didn’t actually stink that much.
*Non-American readers, don’t panic. That’s 260 degrees Celsius.
And then I turned my brain off for a moment and took the Dutch oven out and set it on the counter. Now I have that sought-after old Griswold logo burned into the polyurethane. (I was fortunately able to scrape off the bits of poly that stuck to the pot.)
If you’ll recall, this oak was a table top that I got from a friend’s basement and the plan was always to sand off the old finish and treat it with cutting board oil. Is this what will finally get me to… do that?
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Congratulations on the transformed skillets. And now you have something to add to your 30 day challenge list because I just know you are ahead of the game – right?
Setting the pot on the counter sounds exactly like something I would do. Hopefully, it does motivate you to refinish it. At least you got two of the pans done, we have a couple in the basement waiting for attention as well.
My oven doesn’t go up to 260! 220 is the max.
Good job on the skillets. They will serve you (or your sister) well for years.
We both got some!
Ha, ha! We’re talking Fahrenheit, not Centigrade, Francetaste!
I know! 500 F is 260 C. But my oven only goes to 220 C. That’s like 425 F.
I’m sure seasoning the pan will work at 220C. The only time I turn my oven higher than that is when I am using the auto-clean cycle, which I rarely need.
Nice job! I love the way cast iron cooks, but I can’t lift anything larger than a 9-inch frypan, so that’s what I have. When it gets close to disgusting, I clean it with a slightly dampened plastic scrubby, wipe it with a wet rag, then dry it and oil it with vegetable oil. Then, before I use it each time, I have to wipe it out, as the oil attracts dust and cat hair. I’ve had this one about five years, and I never had to resort to Easy-Off (which I discovered a long time ago I can’t use without fainting dead away in my kitchen). 🙂
Using it outside made me cough and wheeze. I don’t know if the fumeless version works better. My dad had a battery charger but loaned it to someone and never got it back; not sure if the trickle charger is good enough to do the job, but maybe I’ll try the electrolysis tank next time.
By the way, I have also deglazed the pan for a recipe by adding a half cup of wine. The iron pan really liked that, but I did have to re-season it afterwards. I think the only really wrong way to clean iron pans is to put them in the dishwasher or immerse and soak them in soapy water.
I read that the seasoning gets stronger and more non-stick as you use it, so I suggested that they cook things in fat and avoid acid (wine and tomatoes) for a little while first, but yeah, you don’t need to baby this stuff. My great-grandmother, an exceptionally calm and refined woman, got fed up with my great-grandfather and threw a cast iron frying pan down the basement stairs to vent. I think they can recover from most abuse short of that though.
LOL! At least she didn’t throw it AT him. Or was he in the basement at the time?
No she was the sane one in that marriage so she inflicted violence only against inanimate objects. (I didn’t hear of her doing anything like that more than once but from what I’ve heard about him she must have.)
Well, all this talk about throwing cookware reminds me that for years I had a set of copper-bottomed Revere stainless steel pans, consisting of three saucepans from my grandmother’s house, a small frypan and a large stock pot from my husband’s mother’s house, and a brand new large, deep frypan with a lid we received as a wedding gift. So that was three generations worth of cookware. They looked fabulous hanging on the wall, as I polished them whenever they got dingy, maybe once per month. When I got a ceramic cooktop stove, they didn’t work, because of all the little imperceptible dings and irregularities from being banged around. (This included a few generations of babies who were allowed to play pretend cook with them and bang them with wooden spoons to make music.) I had to get a whole new set of special cookware, so the pans went to one of our daughters–that would be the fourth generation on those original sauce pans. Now I’m back to a gas stove, I thought about getting another set, but then I thought how often I would have to polish them when they were used over an open flame. Would the nostalgia be worth the work? Not so much.
My mom has that same Revere Ware! I think what they make today is teflon coated and nothing like the old stuff, so you’d have to source it vintage. I have a copper bottomed frying pan that I let tarnish so heavily that I couldn’t get it shiny the one time I tried to polish it. Also, there are brownish stains on all of my stainless steel cookware. This bothers my mom but not me.
Did you try Revere stainless steel and copper cleaner? Or, since it bothers your mom and not you, you could send it home for her to work on. 🙂
My cookware is heavier than Revere and would leave a nasty bump on my head if I took it to her to scrub out. And no, I think I used Wright’s Copper Cream.
So she takes after the great-grandma? 🙂
I think she would in this case. She definitely wouldn’t be receptive to it
We have a lot of cast iron pans which are stored in the Cottage attic. Perhaps I should try cooking in one or two. Charlie would say, perhaps you should just try cooking. I’ll have to find a recipe that screams out for cast iron. When the folks on America’s Test Kitchen cook in cast iron they heat it in a 500 degree oven for 30 minutes prior to putting food in it. That seems like a lot of energy of different types to me. Jo @ Let’s Face the Music
i use cast iron skillets for oven roasted potatoes (sooooooooooo good – cut up red & sweet potatoes, add olive oil and sea salt, then roast at 400° for an hour, stirring every 20). and grilled cheese sandwiches – can’t beat a cast-iron cooked grilled cheese, especially if you have a grill press to put on top while it cooks.