(upbeat, lively music)
- We're gonna talk about how to clean and maintain
your cast iron cookware.
One of the easiest ways to maintain it,
is to have it at the ready and leave it out on your counter.
- Because the more you use it,
the more you build up seasoning,
then you don't have to worry as much about rust.
Just keep it on your stove top.
Cook some fatty bacon in it, from time to time, once a week.
Who doesn't want bacon for breakfast once a week, right?
So let's say that we are using these every single day.
Let's talk about cleaning them.
- So for regular maintenance, when you just have
cooked bacon in it or whatever you've cooked in it,
and you don't have anything sticking to the pan,
the way that you want to clean it is just
while the pan is still warm,
not necessarily blazing hot, but warm,
and then you can pour in some warm water.
Bring it to a boil, de-glaze the pan,
and you can either scrub it out
or it may just come off naturally.
Then take it to the sink and clean it with soap,
a little soap and water.
It'll just save you from scrubbing it.
Shall we demonstrate?
- Yes!
(playful music)
Can I pour the water in?
- Yes please, Lesley, do the honors.
- Thank you.
(pan sizzles)
- Whoo!
- Can I do a little scrapey-scrapey?
Some people are gonna freak out about the plastic,
but mm-mmm you're not gettin' all up in there right now,
you're just loosening some stuff.
I think she's ready for the sink.
- Yeah, ready for a rinse.
- Because I don't want that anymore.
Okay, I just do a little bit of soap.
Y'all clean your pans with soap.
C'mon.
- As long as it's seasoned well, you can use it.
- Well I was gonna say you can hit them over the head
with a cast iron pan.
- (laughs) Donk!
I think you've done that to me before.
(clangs)
(laughter)
- You deserved it.
So yeah, just use some water.
- Yeah, you don't need to scrub hard.
You don't want to remove the seasoning.
- Stick with the dobes.
- Yeah, and don't use something like this.
(laughter)
You don't want to. That would just strip
the whole seasoning off your pan.
So then you wanna dry it off.
If there's any water on the pan, it can rust,
so you wanna dry it really well.
You can put it back on the stove top
and heat it a little bit.
- That's what I'm doing right now.
- Or you can put it in the oven and heat it on low
until it's fully dry, because otherwise you'll
get little rust spots.
- Garbage.
(playful music)
So if you have some really stuck on, stubborn food bits
in your pan, you might want to deploy the salt method.
Dump some salt in there and give it a good scrub around.
You're ready for this?
All right,
- You ready for this?
- Y'all ready for this?
♪ Ba, da, da, salt in the frying pan, ♪
♪ And salt in the pan ♪
All right, that's good, right?
- Yeah, and the salt just
- It scrubs it off, like a nice facial for your pan.
Love it.
Look at that.
- It's already almost all off.
You're a miracle.
- I'm miracle.
All right, so let's just take it over and wash it.
- Great.
- You're gonna wash it.
- I'm gonna wash this time.
While it's still a little warm, I'm gonna just
make a slurry in the pan.
If there's any little bits and I just use that to,
- Because there were some bits.
- And one of the good things about the salt
is it dissolves as you're scrubbing,
so it's not super abrasive on the pan.
It won't scratch off your seasoning.
- Exactly.
- And now, it's ready for a rinse.
I'm just gonna get all the gunk out.
- Yes.
- See what's left.
It's pretty much done.
- It's pretty beautiful.
(playful music)
- So now we've dried our pans.
They're bone dry, we put them in the oven.
And before you put them away and store them,
you just want to give them a very small coat of fat.
Very tiny. (laughs)
(ding) - Coconut oil's good.
(ding) Crisco's good.
Oh, do you want the Crisco?
- Sure. Do you want the coconut oil?
- Why not.
Do we need to show you how to rub a pan down with oil?
No, however, I think it's important to just
illustrate how little you should put on this thing.
Because it will build up, it'll get tacky and sticky.
It'll start collecting,
- And you wanna do the whole thing.
I do the whole thing.
And do the underside, the handle.
That way, you have an even coating always on your pan.
I take a dry piece and just wipe the whole thing down again,
with just a dry paper towel.
(playful music)
- But what happens if they get rusty?
- Well if they get rusty,
- After all of this.
- (laughs) After all of this.
It's highly unlikely that they will,
but sometimes if you're not using your pan a lot,
and if you live in an area with a lot of humidity
or moisture in the air,
sometimes the pan can get little rust spots on it.
We have an example to show you.
The rust spots can develop,
and they come right off if it's like this.
Obviously if you leave water in it, the whole pan will rust.
So this was just from moisture in the air.
So you can get the rust off by just scrubbing it
lightly with a Scotch-Brite sponge.
Probably a Dobie would even take it off.
Just a little.
And you can wet it a little.
- We're not doing this.
We're just doing that.
- And then you can just rinse it as you normally would
with a little soap and water.
And then you definitely want to dry it out really well.
And then it's time to re-season it.
- We don't have time to get into actually re-seasoning.
It's a whole thing.
If you go to the Wirecutter's cast iron skillet guide,
there's a whole section in care and maintenance
about how you re-season your pan.
And it's really simple, it's just time consuming.
But passive.
- Passive time. - Passive time.
- So on a rainy day.
- Uh huh. Just do it.
Should we cook some bacon now?
- Yes!
- Bye.
- (laughs) Bye.
- The full moon.
- Must be the full moon.
- All my blood is getting pulled to my skin right now.
- We're witches.
- (cackles) Happy full moon, everyone.
Let's clean some pans.