Rafael

And do it outside. The dust is iron and it gets everywhere.

The surface is the whole thing and there is a shortcut nobody mentions: you can smooth a rough pan yourself.

Sandpaper or a flap disc on the cooking surface, working up through the grits, then re-season from bare metal. An hour of work and a cheap pan behaves like an expensive one, because that is literally the only step the expensive one had done for it.

Not for everyone, and it is genuinely the difference. Worth knowing before paying four times the price for a step you can do with a drill.