>> Otherwise, pan frying it with basic seasoning is fine.

No, make it into a pilaf. In a ceramic oven vessel. If you're from the Middle East, or anywhere around the Mediterranean, that's what your heart yearns for, and your heart knows best.

Also, saturated fats but that's not why I brought up your heart :P

> These views are strange to me. You can most definitely cook it any old way

The thing that cracks me up are yuppies caring for their cast iron skillet like it’s a newborn baby. “You can’t use soap on it… You can’t treat it like that… To maintain it you must…”

I promise that generations of dirt poor Southerners had bigger things to worry about than following Alton Brown’s directions for cast iron maintenance.

As someone who comes from "generations of dirt poor Southerners," I can assure you Alton Brown got his directions from people like my Grandma.

IIRC he went to culinary school with the intent of becoming TV Chef. A lot of his early stuff was lifted right out of a culinary school program.

It's possible that your grandma has a lot more classical cooking skills than you think. A good bit of "southern cooking" is classical French cooking that's evolved over time and has been adapted for local ingredients.

That is certainly a possibility.

Alton Brown literally says to use soap and water on your pan if it's very dirty, just dry it before storing:

https://altonbrown.com/how-to-care-for-cast-iron/

To me the whole point is that it’s indestructible/recoverable. Things go really south you can steel wool / sand it and re-season. If it’s any coated pan it’s not usable for cooking after it takes some damage

Too much bloody work. Too heavy, and too bloody impractical.

I don't want to spend my life honing my cookware. I want to toss it in the dishwasher and get on with my precious leisure time.

Forever chemicals are pretty terrible.

In fairness, it's nice to know how best to avoid needing to sand/reseason more than necessary due to preventable mishaps. It's not a fun chore to have to add to your list.

The only soap you can't use on cast iron is lye soap. That does strip that polymer smooth black coating. Basically it turns the patina into more soap.

I use a chainmaille scrubber with dish soap. Works well.

I use soap every wash on well-seasoned cast iron too, no problem at all. You need to make sure to wash all the soap off, and dry it well -- or at least I believe it's important to do that, I guess since I always do it, I could be making assumptions too, maybe it's just fine if you don't?!

But yeah, the idea that you have to leave the cooking grease and fat on cast iron and aren't allowed to use soap to cut the grease and get it off.... is an odd one.

You are supposed to take your greasy cast iron pan, and put it in the blast furnace it the backyard to clean it!

Maybe I've been playing a bit too much GTNH.

My grandmother used to literally build a fire in the back yard and throw the skillets in whenever she thought they needed it (maybe every few years).

This was long, long before Alton Brown was a thing.

Best way to dry it is to throw back in the stove on high for a few minutes.

If you can't use soap in it, you've got a dirty pan, not a seasoned one.

That's the point, the oil from the seasoning process (or rather, the residue it leaves behind) is not dirt, it's an actual layer of coating - and if you use soap on it you wash away the coating.

No, sorry, if it washes away you have not seasoned it properly - it should be carbonised and bonded (polymerised?) to the actual pan, not just a layer of grease sitting on top.

I have multiple cast iron items in my kitchen that I can wash with washing-up liquid, gently scour with wire wool even (sure, too much vigour would probably start to remove it, or at very least scratch up the surface and make it harder to clean/things stick more) with no problem or loss of seasoning.

A product having once been ubiquitous, and it's maintenance therefore common knowledge that you'd pick up by habit, does not mean it's stupid to have to pay attention to this knowledge many decades later.

Some misconceptions do exist, for example dish soap not usually being a detergent that damages the patina nowadays. While other practices are a development, like our general food hygiene standards having changed significantly, and keeping a patina on cookware therefore requiring more deliberate attention.

You can clean cast iron with soap of course, if you're using it often and well you don't have to. Most of the time all I need to do is wipe it clean with a paper towel and let it be like that until I use it again a few hours later.

I figure this is probably what those "dirt poor southerns" were doing too, since it's simple and effective.

Is it different for other types of cookware? If a wipe with a paper towel removes all traces of the food, is that good enough?

You're talking about a surface that gets hot enough to kill every possible pathogen on it every time you use it.

Scrape-and-wipe is about 90% of my cast iron "cleaning". I only take it to the sink occasionally.

I’m mostly wondering about why the “cast iron” part is relevant. If a wipe is enough for that type of pan, isn’t it good enough for all of your pans? If there’s food stuck on, you’re obviously going to do whatever it takes to remove that. But when that isn’t the case, is a simple wipe good enough?

Copper and stainless steel invariably get food adhered to them very well. (Try cooking eggs in stainless steel) A properly-seasoned cast iron pan is, in many ways, like a teflon-coated one. So, I suppose my comment would go for teflon-coated pans, as well.

If I still used stainless steel, you bet I'd be soaking them overnight then scrubbing the hell out of them in the sink the next morning.

I think it really depends on how often you use it. If you use it every day, then I think wiping it down (maybe with a bit of added oil depending on what you just cooked) is more than adequate most of the time. If you use it once a week then put it in a cupboard before using it again, then you'd want to clean it more thoroughly because you might get stuff growing on it otherwise.

I’ve ran mine through the dishwasher. It’s fine.

I have no dishwasher (or rather, that'll be me).

I inherited my pan 20 years ago; it ws in poor shape. I stripped it with caustic soda, and re-seasoned it, which took about a day elapsed. Ever since, it gets washed-up using detergent, and immediately dried. It's as good as when I first seasoned it. I've never had to repair the finish.

I blame the novel Silence of the Lambs. It has some weird aside where it mentions that soap never touches her cast iron pan. So the pretension has existed long before Alton Brown showed up.

Soaps had lye that would've washed away the seasoning on the pan. Today's common dish detergents do not, so this is just advice that used to be helpful, but it isn't anymore.

Some people are stuck in their ways, never really understood why they shouldn't use soap in the first place, or didn't notice that the soap they grew up with is different from today's dish detergents... I think there's a lesson to be learned here about re-evaluating our assumptions every so often and not doing things just because that's how they've always been done.

This red herring is presented with such delicious haste every single time cast iron cookware is mentioned. I think it's because of some pop-science cooking channel on the internet

While I will not pretend to know all the reasons in fact that this practice has reached such common use, washing your cast iron pan with soap won't strip the seasoning that is already set, but it will strip all of the unset oils left over from cooking that are on the surface. If you spend tons of time maintaining cast irons, you will find that the single most important practice to building a smooth surface that never sticks is leaving a thin (towel dry / buffed, leave too much and it turns sticky) film of oil on the surface of the pan after every use. If you need to or want to use soap to remove the (again, unset non-seasoning) layer of oil on the surface, you can dry off the pan, add some oil and buff it with a towel before storing. Using some heat during this process, but not smoking the oil is necessary to expand the pores of the pan (or make the oil more viscous and better fill the static surface of the pan, whichever mental model helps you sleep). This process takes extra time and effort to achieve the effect you already have with a well seasoned cast iron after cooking: Food debris washes right off with some light scrubbing and water, leaving a clean surface with a thin layer of oil on the top that has nicely filled all the cracks on the surface.

I use dish soap on my cast iron skillet fairly regularly, and it does ruin my ability to fry an egg, at least until I smoke off some oil again.

This is a fantastic take. I’d never thought about this before but you’re right that this might be Patient 0 of the modern rich white person’s exposure to cast iron and associated care.

My mistake, it was Hannibal published in 1999.

“Mapp had inherited her grandmother’s skillet and used it often. It had a glassy black surface that no soap ever touched. Starling put it in front of her on the table.”

I read the series long after publication date and remembered going, “wait, the no soap thing has been around THAT long?”

Long before that. I heard that advice as a child in the 70's. Had the impression is was what my parents learned in the 40's.

My parents were certainly no yuppies but those were my moms rules 30+ years ago. I always thought "no soap" was common knowledge, not a fad.