Hiya! Getting more into cooking, you're the best cook I follow online. Do you have a recommendation for the oil you use when seasoning a cast iron pan, and either a short list of instructions or a link to a guide that you trust? Asking bc theres a ton of arguments and I didnt find a conclusive answer on your blog when I looked through the tags.
i could have sworn i had a write up on here but i can't find it 😭 BUT to give a few basics:
basically any oil will work for polymerization, i tend towards canola, i know some people swear by crisco but i find it harder to get a good thin coat with a hydrogenated product
to season, you're gonna want to start with a clean pan -- if it's got gunk/rust/old seasoning, take some time with dish soap and a steel wool to take it off. in severe cases you can use oven cleaner but i've never had to. you can usually skip this bit if your pan is fresh from the store
heat your clean pan on the stove, giving it a little oil (maybe like a teaspoon, enough to coat the surface), and then using paper towels (and a gloved/mitted hand to maneuver the pan) to coat the entire surface with oil, including the bottom and handle
once it's coated, use a fresh paper towel (or a few balled up to keep from burning yourself) to wipe the whole surface down again. seems silly but you want as thin a coat as possible, oil will soak into the surface of your hot pan well enough that this will give you a good coat
put your coated pan in your oven, set the heat as high as it will safely go (mine goes to 500), and once it fully preheats and reaches that temp, set a timer for an hour
after the hour, turn your oven off WITHOUT OPENING IT (sorry to yell. important) and let the whole thing cool down on its own (will take an hour or two)
you'll need to repeat this a few times for a good coating. you'll see the seasoning develop first as kind of a splotchy shinier surface, this is the oil we put on and it's been polymerized from the heat. polymerization produces a ton of smoke that isn't super safe to inhale, which is why we do this in a closed oven and not the stovetop (in addition to creating a more even coat). as you repeat it'll get more uniform, the goal is to have a fully shiny surface; this can take around 5-8 repeats of the process which feels a little tedious, but it'll give you a good relatively nonstick surface and make your pan more durable
as it wears, you'll have to touch up the seasoning occasionally by doing this process (minus the intensive scrubbing, just keep her clean) once every now and then/whenever you notice the seasoning wearing through (depends on how often you use it, how acidic the food you cook in it is, etc)
as always to keep it clean just wash with a sponge and dish soap the way you would any pan, only difference is that you want to make sure to never leave the pan wet since they rust easily. just wash like normal, rinse, and then put it on a medium-low burner to dry off
if it does rust, you can always scrub the rust off and start this over -- which is annoying, but less annoying than buying a new pan imo. the only real way to "break" your cast iron is to temperature shock it -- usually pretty hard to do, basically just make sure you're not putting a cold/room temp pan directly onto a hot grill or induction burner and letting it heat up gradually instead
a note - correctly applied seasoning will never be sticky to the touch and will never come off with commercial dish soap. if it's sticky, scrub it off and start again (shouldn't happen if you follow the procedure above bc the time and temp make more than enough room to fully polymerize the material, more to keep in mind if you get a pan from someone else)
