I stripped a flea-market skillet back to bare metal last month and I'm four thin coats in, oven method, wiping until it looks completely dry before it goes in. It's brown and slick-ish. Someone in my house is now convinced I should keep going for weeks because of the videos. Is there a point where extra coats stop adding anything, and a point where they start actively flaking off?
The thing that built my pan wasn't oven coats, it was six months of frying onions and bacon in it. Base coats stop rust and give you something to cook on. Everything after that is use. You cannot shortcut use with an oven cycle, however many times you run it.
Bacon specifically. Something about rendering fat slowly at moderate heat over and over builds a surface that no oven schedule replicates.
And it's self-correcting — the spots that get used most are the spots that get slickest, which is exactly where you need it.
Beginner report, since I did exactly this in spring: three coats, then I cooked in it daily for a month, and by week three eggs stopped sticking. I did nothing clever. The one habit I changed was drying it on the hob for a minute after washing instead of leaving it in the rack.
Slight pushback on 'four is enough' — if you're going straight into acidic cooking, a few more base layers do help the pan survive an early tomato sauce. Not a hundred. Six or seven, and thin enough that each one looks like nothing.
The mistake I made for years: too much oil and too low an oven. If you don't get the pan above the oil's smoke point during the bake you get sticky varnish rather than seasoning, and then you blame the oil.
@litterbox_lex · last mo. · 3 replies
There is a point where they start flaking and it arrives much earlier than people think. Seasoning is polymerised oil bonded to the iron: thin layers bond, thick ones sit on top of each other and eventually shear off in sheets. The hundred-coat videos are a bit — the pans look glassy because of how they're lit, and half of them get stripped again for the next video. Four good thin coats, then cook on it.
Reply
Report
@rust_bloom_bo · last mo.
Flaking is exactly what happened to my last attempt and I assumed it meant I hadn't done enough coats.
Reply
Report
@upright_uma · last mo.
Almost always the opposite. Wipe until you're convinced there's no oil left on the pan, then wipe it again with a clean cloth.
Reply
Report