Bonus kitchen tip:
One of the biggest electricity hogs in your house is if you have a touch control stove top, even if it's induction. Hard knobs save juice. Get an external breaker for your stove and save power.
Oh! Well, if you’re making a dry dish, not a stew or braise, yes. The seasoning *is* oil that polymerizes as you cook.
I’ve never had a nonstick Teflon pan, too thrifty to buy a pan that can’t outlive me, so there are entire schools of cooking that passed me by.
Ps — my great grandmother informs me that you don’t need oil or butter, lard works even better. Wicked woman. @Sandra @j12i
I heard a rumor that with a seasoned/burned in cast iron pan you can cook without adding oil just like I cooked without any oil in non-stick* for 25 years. Mushrooms, frozen vegetables, tomato sauces, toasted bread, peas, carrots, all kinds of stuff.
If it's "just pour in oil or butter" is on the table, then it sounds a lot easier to just get a stainless steel one 🤷🏻♀️
But what makes cast-iron interesting is this rumored "you can make it have similar properties as non-stick pans" stuff. That you might have to re do every once in a while etc etc, weird oven treatment stuff that really intimidate and overwhelm me.
Just treating it like any old "ya gotta pour oil in every time" pan does not sound hard, but also does not sound worth the money and anti-rust–paranoia and the heavy weight discomfort.
*: Which was fucked up and I'm complicit in endangering the world. The food was good though.
If you’re careful to build up the polymerized oil, the pan does get nonstick. Probably that’s where the very fussy care habits come from, wanting to keep that. And if you never want to cook with oil , you can get there by baking the oil on.
Or yes, just get stainless pans! Stainless steel is wonderful, we should enjoy it more.
I sometimes clean mine with soap, even! As my great grandmother did and that was probably _lye_ soap. You lose some seasoning, eh, you can get it back.
A couple times while I was learning to cook I burned stuff onto it so comprehensively that we cleaned it by putting it in a bank of coals overnight and starting over with bare metal.
@j12i @Sandra
I got the impression, not sure if true or not, that you need to cook with oil or butter if you don't season them.