Cleaning a Cast Iron Pan

Let me tell you about an old cast iron pan I recently restored.  Here's the finished product.

Here's what it looked like when I started - no lie!

I started cooking with cast iron a couple of years ago with a 10" pre-seasoned Lodge Logic pan I bought at Wal-Mart.  I love cooking with cast iron!  It heats very evenly, and you can get it very hot which is great for searing.  I had never successfully cooked omlets until I started using cast iron.  I have an electric stove, and the coil wouldn't heat the pan evenly - cast iron has solved that!  I cook in a cast iron pan almost every single day...

This was actually my grandmother's old cast iron pan.  Since my brother had expressed an interest in cooking with cast iron, I thought it would be cool for him to have one with a history, so I asked my parents if they could scrounge up one of my grandmother's old pans.  We grew up on a farm next to my grandparents.  They've both passed away now, and we fixed their house up to be a kind of hunting house and I knew that most of her old cookware was still down there.  Luckily, my parents found two of her cast iron pans which meant one for my bro and one for me!

Since I wanted to give my brother his pan at Christmas, I had to clean it up quickly after arriving at my parent's house, and I ended up grinding the massive carbon build-up off of the pan with a variety of sanders and steel wheel brushes attached to an electric drill.  It was a really messy job, and I looked like I'd been working in a coal mine!

I have since learned a better (and cleaner!) way of rehabbing cast iron.  Here is a great website for all things cast iron - I used the oven cleaner method to clean my grandmother's pan.  All you do is spray aerosol oven cleaner all over the pan, wrap it in a plastic bag (to help control the fumes), and wait.  I put mine in a cold oven just to keep it out of the way and let the oven cleaner sit on it for eight to twelve hours at a time.  I did this probably four times over a couple of days.

This removed the vast majority of the carbon build-up, but I wanted to speed things along.  To remove the last of the build-up, I used the hot coals method, where you build a fire and place the pan on the hot coals.  I think this method could be used for the entire cleaning process and would like to try that sometime.

I used the fire pit in my back yard for this job.  I had read that using this method could cause the pan to crack if you heated it too fast, so I built the fire and while it was dying down, I set the pan on the grilling rack to start warming it up.  When the fire burned down to coals, I put the pan directly on the coals and left it for an hour or so.  Afterwards, the carbon build-up looked gray, and when I touched it, it literally fell apart and blew away like baby powder - wow!  I also like this method because it gives me a good excuse to sit by the fire with my dog.

Samson, helping...

My grandmother lived to be 97, and she fried everything.  My mom pointed out that she wondered how many calories had passed through this pan over the years - I can't even imagine!!

SHA-ZAM!

This pan appears to be a pre-World War II pan based on the weight and smoothness of the pan.  It also has a break in the heat ring at the twelve o'clock position which is indicative of a Lodge pan.  Here is a great link on old vs. new cast iron pans, and here is a picture of my new Lodge pan on the left and my grandmother's pan on the right.