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There is a pan hanging on the wall of my kitchen that has been in this family longer than I have been alive. It is black as coal and smooth as river stone, and eggs slide across it like a sled on fresh snow. And in all its years, that pan has never once been scrubbed with soap.
Most folks buy a cast iron pan, fight with it for a year, and give up. It goes rough, it goes sticky, a little rust starts in the corner, and every fried egg is a battle. But the old ones lasted a hundred years, and there is no secret to it that anybody meant to keep from you. It just got lost. So let me show you the way my grandmother cleaned hers, and her mother before her.
In this video:
✓ Why the black seasoning is your real non-stick, and how scrubbing tears it off
✓ The honest truth about soap on cast iron, and why hot water while warm makes it needless
✓ How to clean a greasy, cold, stuck-on pan the gentle way
✓ Why you must never pour cast iron grease down your drain
✓ The cold-water mistake that cracks a pan in one heartbeat
✓ The shine that tells you your seasoning is still whole
✓ Coarse salt and a woo
https://eliasyoder.com
There is a pan hanging on the wall of my kitchen that has been in this family longer than I have been alive. It is black as coal and smooth as river stone, and eggs slide across it like a sled on fresh snow. And in all its years, that pan has never once been scrubbed with soap.
Most folks buy a cast iron pan, fight with it for a year, and give up. It goes rough, it goes sticky, a little rust starts in the corner, and every fried egg is a battle. But the old ones lasted a hundred years, and there is no secret to it that anybody meant to keep from you. It just got lost. So let me show you the way my grandmother cleaned hers, and her mother before her.
In this video:
✓ Why the black seasoning is your real non-stick, and how scrubbing tears it off
✓ The honest truth about soap on cast iron, and why hot water while warm makes it needless
✓ How to clean a greasy, cold, stuck-on pan the gentle way
✓ Why you must never pour cast iron grease down your drain
✓ The cold-water mistake that cracks a pan in one heartbeat
✓ The shine that tells you your seasoning is still whole
✓ Coarse salt and a woo
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00There is a pan hanging on the wall of my kitchen that has been in this family longer than I
00:05have
00:05been alive. It is black as coal and smooth as river stone, and my wife cooks in it near every
00:11morning. Eggs slide across it like a sled on fresh snow. Nothing sticks, nothing burns to it,
00:20and in all its years that pan has never once been scrubbed with soap. Now I know how that sounds
00:26to
00:27a lot of you. You have a cast iron pan too, maybe one your mother gave you, maybe one you
00:32bought new
00:33hoping to do it right this time. And it is not black and smooth. It is a little rough, a
00:39little
00:39sticky. Maybe there is a spot of orange rust starting in one corner, and every time you fry an
00:45egg, the egg fights you the whole way. So you scrub it hard with soap and a green pad to
00:51get it clean,
00:52and then it is worse the next time, stickier than before, and you cannot for the life of you
00:58understand why the old ones lasted a hundred years and yours is falling apart in two.
01:04I am Elias Yoder. My people have farmed here in Lancaster County since we came over from the
01:10Palatinate in 1838, and in all that time near every meal this family has eaten came out of a cast
01:18iron
01:18pan. So sit with me a few minutes and let me show you the way my grandmother cleaned hers and
01:24her
01:24mother before her, because it is not hard, and it is not a secret anybody meant to keep from you.
01:30It just got lost, the way a lot of good plain things got lost. Before I go on, let me
01:36say one
01:36thing and then I will not say it again. I have gathered all of this, the cleaning and the seasoning
01:42and the keeping, into a book over at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version, everything written
01:49down plain so you can keep it in the kitchen drawer. If you want it, it is there. That is
01:54all.
01:55Now let us get to the pan. Here is the first thing you have to understand, because everything else
02:01grows out of it. A good cast iron pan is not naked iron. It is iron that has been given
02:07a skin.
02:07We call it the seasoning, and it is not spice. It is not flavor. It is a hard black coat,
02:14baked right onto the metal from oil and heat, layer on layer, year on year. That black coat is
02:21what makes the pan slick. That is your non-stick, and it did not come from a factory, and it
02:27did not
02:28come in a spray can. It came from cooking. Every time you fry in a well-kept pan, you are
02:34adding to it
02:35a little. And every time you scrub it down hard with soap and steel, you are tearing it off. So
02:40the whole art of cleaning cast iron, the entire secret of it, is this. You must get the pan clean
02:47without stripping off that skin. Clean, but gentle. That is the needle you are threading. And once you
02:55understand that, every single thing I am about to show you will make plain sense, because it is all
03:00just different ways of getting food off the iron without taking the seasoning off with it. Now most
03:06folks, when they hear an Amish man say, do not use soap on your cast iron, they think it is
03:12some old
03:13superstition, like not walking under a ladder. It is not. There is a plain reason behind it, and I will
03:20give it to you straight so you are not just taking it on my say-so. The old lye soaps
03:25my grandmother used
03:26were fierce, strong enough to cut grease clean off a butchering table, and they would strip that
03:31seasoning right down to bare metal. So the rule got handed down, no soap on the iron. Now I will
03:38be
03:38honest with you, because I would rather be honest than sound wise. The gentle dish soaps most of you
03:43have under your sink today are milder than what my grandmother had, and a small bit of it on a
03:49well-seasoned
03:49pan will not ruin it the way the old lye would. But here is the thing. When you clean the
03:55pan my way,
03:56while it is still warm, with hot water, you will find you almost never need the soap at all.
04:02The heat does the work the soap was doing. So I do not use it, not because a drop of
04:07it is poison,
04:08but because I have never once found I needed it. Why reach for a thing you do not need? Keep
04:14it simple.
04:15Keep it hot water. That is the real secret if there is one. Heat. Clean the pan while it is
04:22still
04:22warm from cooking, and half your trouble is gone before you start. Grease that has cooled and gone
04:29hard and gray is a chore to shift. That same grease, while it is still warm and loose, wipes away
04:36like
04:37nothing. My grandmother never let a pan sit dirty and cold overnight if she could help it. She cleaned it
04:44right there while the stove was still warm before she ever sat down. And so the pan was never a
04:51battle. It was a wipe of the cloth and hang it back up. I can see her yet, standing at
04:58that stove.
04:59She was a small woman, and she stood on a little wooden stool my grandfather made her so she could
05:05reach the back burners. And I remember asking her once, I was maybe seven or eight, why she fussed over
05:13that black pan so, wiping it and hanging it just so, when there were newer, prettier pans in the
05:20cupboard she never touched. And she looked at me and she said, This pan fed your father and his father,
05:27and it will feed you, and if you tend it, it will feed your children too. A thing that will
05:35serve you
05:35that long, you serve it a little back. That was the whole of her philosophy about most everything,
05:42come to think of it. You tend the things that tend you. She was not talking only about a skillet,
05:50but she was talking about a skillet too. And I have never cleaned one since without hearing her say it.
06:02There is a whole way of living folded up inside those few words, and it is the opposite of the
06:10way
06:10most things are made and sold today, which is to be used a while and thrown out and forgotten.
06:17But life is life, and sometimes the pan does sit. So let me walk you through it for the hard
06:25case,
06:25a pan that has gone cold with grease and stuck food in it, because if you can handle that,
06:31the easy days take care of themselves. Say you fried up scrapple and eggs for the family,
06:38good and greasy, and then the day got away from you and the pan sat on the back of the
06:44stove till
06:45the next morning. The grease has gone hard. There are little bits of scrapple stuck to the bottom.
06:51First thing you do, you put it back on the heat, medium heat, nothing wild. And because there is
06:59stuck food in it and not just grease, you add a little water. Not cold water, mind you, I will
07:06come
07:06back to that, but a little water right into the warming pan. You let it come up until it is
07:13steaming
07:13and just barely at a simmer. And you will watch the whole mess loosen. The hard grease melts and lifts.
07:22The stuck bits of food let go of the iron and start floating free. The hot water is doing under
07:30the
07:30food what your fingernail could never do, getting underneath it and prying it up gentle. Now, while it
07:38is hot and steaming, you take a little brush, a stiff brush with bristles, not a metal pad, and you
07:45give
07:45it a swirl around, working the sides where grease likes to climb, working the bottom where the food
07:52was stuck. And be careful here, that water is hot enough to scald you, so keep it in the pan
07:59and off
08:00your hands. A few seconds of that and you will see the water go dark and dirty with everything it
08:07has
08:07lifted. Here is a small thing my grandmother taught me that I have never forgotten. Do not pour that
08:15greasy water down your drain. Ever. Because all that fat you just melted loose, the moment it hits the cold
08:24pipe under your sink, it hardens right back up. And it does it a little more every time until one
08:31day
08:31your drain is stopped solid and you are paying a man to come dig it out. So you pour it
08:38out somewhere
08:38else. My grandmother poured hers on the weeds along the path, and the hot water helped keep them down,
08:46and the drain never once clogged in fifty years. Pour it on the ground, pour it out back, anywhere but
08:55the drain. Now, that cold water business, let me stop and make this plain, because this is the one that
09:03will crack a pan and break your heart. Cast iron is tough. It will outlast you and your children, but
09:12it
09:13has one weakness, and that is a sudden shock of temperature. You take a pan that is screaming hot
09:19off the stove and you run cold water into it, and that iron can crack right across, ruined in a
09:25heartbeat, because the one side shrinks fast and the other has not caught up. It is the same reason you
09:32do
09:32not pour boiling water into a cold glass. So the rule is simple. Hot pan, hot water. Warm pan, warm
09:41water.
09:41Never a hard cold splash onto hot iron. If you keep the pan and the water near the same warmth,
09:48you will never crack a pan as long as you live. So you have rinsed it once with the hot
09:54water and the
09:54brush, poured that off. Usually there is a little grease left. You run your hot tap till it is good
10:01and hot, swirl that around, and by now the pan has cooled to just warm, and you take a plain
10:07cloth,
10:08a dish rag with no soap on it, and you wipe the bottom and the sides, and you will feel
10:14it come
10:14clean under your hand. You wipe that greasy water up into the cloth, and if there is still a film,
10:20you pour it off, hot water again, and wipe once more. Two rinses, three at the most, and I promise
10:28you
10:28that pan is clean. No food, no grease, nothing left but black shining iron. And that word shining,
10:37that is the tell. That is how you know you did it right. When you look down into a properly
10:42cleaned
10:43cast iron pan, it should still shine. That sheen is your seasoning, still there, still whole. If it
10:50shines, you have cleaned the pan without hurting the skin, and that is the whole game won. If you scrub
10:57a pan and it goes dull and gray and flat looking, you have gone too hard and stripped some of
11:02that
11:02seasoning off, and now you will have to build it back. So watch for the shine. Clean until it is
11:09clean, and stop the moment it shines. Now sometimes hot water in a brush will not do it. Sometimes you
11:16have baked something in the pan, a cornbread or a skillet cake, and there is a ring of it fused
11:22to
11:22the iron that will not float loose, no matter how you simmer it. For that, you need something with a
11:28little bite to it, but still gentle enough not to gouge the seasoning. And there are two good old ways.
11:35The first is salt, plain, coarse salt. You put a good spoonful of dry salt into the pan, and you
11:42take a
11:43wadded cloth or a stiff brush, and you scrub with the salt. The salt is just rough enough to grind
11:49that
11:49stuck food loose like a fine grit, but it is soft enough that it will not scratch through your
11:55seasoning the way steel wool would. It scours without stripping. My grandmother kept a little
12:01dish of coarse salt by the stove for exactly this. Scrub with the salt, wipe out the salt and the
12:07loosened crumbs, give it a rinse, and you are done. And there is a plain sense to why the salt
12:13works that
12:14is worth understanding, because once you see it, you will trust it. The trouble with getting stuck food
12:20off is that most things hard enough to scrape it loose are also hard enough to gouge your seasoning.
12:26Steel wool, a metal scouring pad, the edge of a knife, they will get the food off all right and
12:33take a
12:33good bite of your black skin with it. But salt is a curious thing. Each little grain is hard enough
12:40to
12:40work against a crumb of burnt food, but the grains themselves crush and crumble and roll under pressure,
12:46so they cannot dig a lasting scratch into the iron or the seasoning. They give way before the pan does.
12:53It is the same reason you can scour a dirty butter churn with sand and not ruin it. A hard
12:59thing made of
13:00many small loose pieces will clean a surface without scarring it, because it moves and gives where a solid
13:07tool would dig in. The old people did not need to explain it in those words. They just knew salt
13:13cleaned the pan and did not hurt it, and they handed that down. And it is true. And now you
13:18know the why
13:19of it as well as the what. The second way, and this is the one I like best now, is
13:25a wooden scraper.
13:26Just a piece of hardwood with one edge shaped a bit like a spoon, rounded to fit the curve of
13:31the pan.
13:32In the old days a man would whittle one from a scrap of maple in an evening, and every kitchen
13:38had a
13:38few. The wood is hard enough to scrape stuck food clean off the iron, but it is softer than the
13:44iron,
13:44and softer than your seasoning, so it will never scratch or gouge the pan. It just lifts the stuck
13:51bits away. You take that rounded edge and run it around the bottom and up the sides, and the baked
13:58on
13:58ring peels right up. I keep one hanging by the stove. Costs nothing, lasts for years, and does what no
14:06plastic scraper or metal spatula can do without harming the pan. If you are handy with a knife,
14:13or you know somebody who is, whittle one. It is an evening's work and it will serve your grandchildren.
14:20Once the pan is clean, whichever way you got there, you have one last thing to do, and it matters
14:26as much
14:27as all the rest. You must dry it, and you must dry it fully. Bare iron and water do not
14:35keep company well.
14:36Leave a cast iron pan wet in the rack overnight, and you will find rust blooming on it in the
14:42morning.
14:43So you take a dry cloth, and you wipe it out completely. And here is a good trick. Set the
14:50dried
14:50pan back on the warm stove for a minute or two. The last bit of hidden damp, the water you
14:57cannot see
14:58down in the pores of the iron, that low heat drives it right off, and the pan goes to bed
15:04bone dry and safe.
15:06And do not let a spot of rust frighten you into throwing a pan away either, for this is where
15:11so
15:12many good pans meet their end for no reason at all. Rust on cast iron is not the death of
15:18the pan.
15:19It is only the bare iron showing where the seasoning wore thin, and the damp got at it.
15:25A little orange rust scrubs right off with some coarse salt and a bit of oil, or a wad of
15:31steel wool
15:31if it is stubborn, and yes, for rust I will tell you to use the steel wool, because you are
15:37going down
15:38to bare metal there on purpose, and building it back. Once the rust is off, and the spot is clean,
15:44grey iron, you dry it, you oil it, you heat it, and you have begun to season it again right
15:50there.
15:51I have brought pans back from the barn, orange as a pumpkin and left for dead, that now hang in
15:57my
15:57kitchen black and slick. There is almost no such thing as a cast iron pan too far gone. That is
16:04the
16:04wonder of the stuff. It forgives. Whatever you did to it, or whatever the years did, you can nearly
16:10always bring it back. And now look at the seasoning one more time. If it is shining, you are finished.
16:17Hang it up. It is ready for tomorrow. But if it looks a little dull, a little dry, take the
16:23smallest
16:24bit of oil or lard on a cloth, just a whisper of it, and wipe a thin coat over the
16:30whole inside,
16:30while the pan is still a touch warm. Thin, mind you. A greasy pan going into storage will only go
16:38sticky
16:38and turn rancid. You want the barest sheen, just enough to feed the skin and seal the iron from the
16:45air. That little coat is you adding one more thin layer to the seasoning, the same way every meal does.
16:52That is how a pan gets better with age instead of worse. That is how mine got to be black
16:58as coal.
16:59Now here is a thing worth sitting with a moment. Why did all this get lost? Why does near everybody
17:06today buy a cast iron pan, fight with it for a year, and give up? And I want to be
17:11careful how I say this,
17:13because I am not telling you there is some scheme, some room full of men plotting against your
17:18grandmother's skillet. It is nothing so dramatic. It is quieter than that, and in a way it is worse,
17:25because it needs nobody to plant it. A pan that lasts a hundred years is a pan that gets bought
17:31once. There is no more money in it after that. But a pan that gets scrubbed to ruin and thrown
17:37out
17:37every couple years, or the whole rack of shiny non-stick pans that flake and peel and land in the
17:43trash on a schedule, well, those get bought again and again and again. Nobody sat down and decided to
17:50make you forget how to keep a skillet. The knowing just quietly stopped getting passed along, because
17:56there was no dollar in passing it along, and there was a steady dollar in you not knowing.
18:03The money runs the one way, and the old knowledge grows over like a path nobody walks. So let us
18:11walk
18:11it again. Here is what I would ask of you. Go and take down that cast iron pan you have
18:17given up on,
18:18the sticky one, the rough one, the one with a little spot of rust. Do not throw it out. Clean
18:26it the way I
18:26showed you. Warm, with hot water and a brush, salt or a wood scraper for the stuck parts, dry it
18:34well,
18:34and give it that whisper of oil. Do that a few times, cook in it a few times, and watch
18:41it start to come
18:42back to black. And then, come down to the comments and tell me. Tell me how old the pan is
18:48and where it
18:49came from, your mother, a yard sale, your own wedding day, and tell me if it started coming back to
18:56life.
18:57I read them, and other folks read them too, and every one of you that reports back gives heart to
19:04the next one to try. And the next time we sit down together, I am going to show you the
19:10other half of
19:11this. Because cleaning a good pan is one thing, but what if your pan has no seasoning at all, or
19:18you
19:18scrubbed it down to bare gray metal, or you found a rusty old one at a sale for a dollar.
19:24I am going to
19:25show you how to season a cast iron pan from nothing. How to build that black skin up from raw
19:33iron with
19:34nothing but oil and heat and a little patience. The old slow way that lasts. Bring your worst old rusty
19:43pan.
19:43We will bring it back together. So keep your pan warm when you clean it. Keep the cold water off
19:50the
19:50hot iron. Use salt and wood instead of steel. Dry it through, and feed it a thin coat of oil,
19:59and that pan
20:00will slide eggs for your grandchildren the way mine still does for me. The people who built this country
20:07with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.
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