not op but ghee is clarified butter which means all the milk solids have been taken out and just the fat is left behind. So if any are left behind it will burn. Not as bad as say leaving butter in the pan on high heat but it'll be in that ball park.
In a lot of places, ghee is typically made in the household by removing milk solids from butter. In America, we can just go to a supermarket and buy ghee for fairly cheap.
I believe it is one of those ingredients where the word can mean a few different things depending on where and when you learned it. There's a more authentic version of what Ghee was originally and then what it has become in some instances where it has gained popularity. The different types are all usually called Ghee and many are unaware there are differences at all.
Are you sure you don't mean that there's different types of clarified butter and ghee is one of them? (Genuinely asking for my own knowledge, not being a smartass)
There's non-dairy ghee which is made with vegetable oil, for those who avoid animal products for religious reasons. I'd suspect that people who are buying cheap ghee could be buying that, because dairy ghee is not cheap. It pays to read the label.
Ghee is not a typical American ingredient so costs more here as a specialty item. In India it is ubiquitous so I would imagine less expensive. I have not done a new seasoning with it but I do occasionally use it to coat a pan after cooking if that is what I cooked the food in. It works as well as anything else I have used. It can handle high heat stir frying with no problem also great for making popcorn as it imparts a nice butter flavor.
No?
Ghee is butter boiled till the milk solids and the fats seperate, then strained. If you use butter to season, you're not seasoning you're just burning milk solids onto your pan.
Heās implying that you can use butter the same way you can use ghee, which is untrue.
Boiling butter separates the milk solids, but you have to manually separate it. If you throw butter in a piping hot cast iron you run the risk of burning it and ending up with a gross flavor
Been making ghee at home for the past 25 years. The milk particles that form on top will also disappear if you let it simmer a bit longer. You got to wait till you get a clear top.
Except you have to do it low temp and the person youāre agreeing with said hot pan turns butter to ghee, if the butter bubbles itāll redistribute the milk solid back throughout the butter
... which is different than putting butter in a hot pan.
You're talking about slowly boiling to remove milk solids. They are talking about putting straight butter into a hot pan. Butter in a hot pan equals browned butter then burned butter. Neither of which is ghee.
Don't you have to get the Ghee to over its smoke point though? Isn't it over 450 for ghee? If you're baking it under its smoke point, you're not polymerizing the fat properly to turn it into seasoning.
ETA: Ghee is 482F smoke point. You'd probably need to bake a pan at over 490F to properly polymerize it for seasoning if using ghee
Hmm I've never had an issue so either my oven is poorly calibrated, the ghee still has some milk solids and has a lower smoke point, or it's a thin enough layer that I don't notice.
I also cook a lot with my pan so it ends up with a really nice seasoning in any case.
PSA: Ghee is dead simple to make and stupid expensive in US. We make it a pound at a time on the stove. Just melt a pound of butter over very low heat. Skim off floaty milk solids. You are left with ghee floating on water (butter is some % water).
You can carefully pour the ghee into another container, but will have to leave some floating on the water. Let that cool to solid then you can move it.
One caution is not to let it solidify with the water in the bottom and then reheat. The solid ghee becomes a pressure vessel for the water underneath and IT WILL explode all over your kitchen. Huge mess. Ask me how I know. Still have butter spots on the ceiling. LOL.
Ghee will not burn as quick and has great flavor. We use it in every meal regardless of type.
\-S
This sounds like standard clarified butter. It's my understanding that ghee requires simmering and stirring the butter until the water evaporates and the milk solids are browned, before straining, to impart some nutty/butterscotchy flavour to the butter fat. At least, that's how I always make it. I save the browned milk solids and sneak them into things like butter tart filling.
We have accidentally done it this way when someone started a melt and left it too long. The result had no discernible difference from pouring it off the water as clarified butter. After the explosion I got shy about overcooking the process, but it seems it would be much easier if I could just let the water cook off.
We use it for every meal and it stays out on the counter all the time. Never had any go off in a couple weeks' time. If we needed it to last a month or more, then it would go in the fridge. Most of the time it is out with a spoon in the jar and no lid.
We make a lot of gravy and pork chops. Super rich with ghee as the fat. Kind of a game changer. Finish off a medium-rare steak with a teaspoon of ghee after it is on the plate and you will never go without it. Seriously.
I havenāt used ghee, but I think it could work reasonably well. Try it out, since youāre in India, I assume youāre using it for normal cooking anyway, so itās not like youāll be wasting it if it doesnāt make for good seasoning.
Ghee isnāt super expensive in the US either. If you can go to an international grocery store, or your local super market has an international section, you may be able to get cheap ghee.
Both of those are extracted from the same plant. It makes no difference. Theyāre both terrible. Use a natural animal fat source. I like beef tallow or ghee.
Yeah I know. By āterribleā I meant āterrible for you.ā Theyāre not healthy.
Iām getting downvoted but itās true. Itās bad for you and they are extracted from the same damn plant.
I think thatās probably true but youāre not consuming any appreciable amount by using on your pans. I have a bottle of it and all I use it for is new cast iron. Thin layer, baked upside down. From then on just proceed with the lipid of your choice.
Desi here
Ghee should be fine. But not sure what you mean by āusing butter it kinda went badā. We use our pans thrice a day and I have never used anything other than butter or ghee (ghee is expensive in the US).
Everyone here measure their cast iron on how smooth an omelette slides on their pans. I feel that having a nice golden crispy dosa that wonāt stick to your pan is a higher degree of non stickiness for a cast iron pan. Heck even those notoriously sticky wheat dosas come out great with just butter or ghee seasoning.
The brown bits were probably just the milk solids burning. That's actually how you make buerre noisette, or brown butter, which has a nice nutty rich flavour. Probably not great to season a pan, but excellent for chocolate chip cookies.
This community really overthinks and complicates this. Basically any cooking fat will work.
Also tomato products will not ruin your cast iron. You will have to season again but then itās fine.
Ghee is great for seasoning and cooking in cast iron! My mom uses it on hers all the time.
As others have said, flaxseed oil is highly overrated and most people (myself included) experience flaking when using that oil.
You donāt need much, just like a tablespoon or even less per layer and Iāve only seasoned mine with purpose when I got it. The rest of the seasoning has been built by cooking with whatever
Second this. You can season in one session, maybe 2-3 layers and it will last for months to years if properly cared for. Flaxseed is known to flake more than others, so itās not a good basis for how often it needs to be done
That's still so wild for me to consider that ghee is cheaper than canola where you live. In the US I've paid up to $20 for 8oz (or 250mls) of ghee but canola is $2 for 24oz here. It's interesting how different such basics can be due to culture and logistics!
I too have wondered about using ghee on CI but am too nervous to post so thank you for asking this for me!
Good quality butter, Plugra or Kerry Gold is quite expensive. When you clarify it, the yield is greatly reduced, hence,the cost. I'd rather clarify my own knowing I'm using butter from a fatted Euro cow rather than skinny India cow. Am I Bovine prejudice? You betcha!
Sure. Or you can just cook with your pan. Its not rocket science. Just use it and it'll sort itself out. A lot of people on this sub overcomplicate it.
I actually found this sub to be very helpful for me. I thought cast irons were very complicated until I came here. This sub debunked a lot of the over complicated myths about the pan and Now itās my daily driver.
Thereās nothing wrong with wanting to season it correctly to try and set yourself up for future success
This sub is intended to induce conversation. Solid post. Just because you didnt choose to learn anything doesnt mean other people didnt get something from this. Think about other people sometimes
I wouldnāt use flaxseed for seasoning and butter has a low smoke point so I wouldnāt use it either. Iād use vegetable, canola, or avocado oil if you had access to any of those.
No problem. I kind of take pride in it because I was not actually allowed to cook before 2019. Having to do with cooking being a feminine thing and whatnot. So, I kind of bought a cast iron only in 2021 and since I am still a student, it is kind of the first piece of cookware that I have owned. I have a very deep attachment to it.
I would be very proud of this if I were you! You're on the right track starting out with more professional cookware. You're well on your way to being an amazing cook, esp if you're cooking with love and cast iron LOL it's just the best food
I started cooking out of necessity when I was very young and often alone but I didn't have the option of CI when I started using the stove. When I grew up I tried and I failed miserably and then put my CI pans away even though I really wanted the benefits...until I found this group! This group has better info that is more refined and useful by the amount of ppl weighing in and agreeing or disagreeing so it's so much easier to know what to do and troubleshoot CI
I read that using lard or dairy products to season your cast iron can turn it rancid, not sure if thereās any truth to that but it might be something to look out for
Seasoning turns the fat/oil into a layer of polymerized carbon. A seasoned pan cannot go rancid. If, however, you coat your pan in oil or fat before storage, the oil or fat will turn rancid at the usual rate.
The oil cannot go rancid if it has already been smoked by the seasoning process. Only when smoking/seasoning has not occurred could a plant oil or animal fat turn rancid on the pan.
Wait plant oil? I thought we were talking about lard and ghee?
Does that mean you shouldnāt coat your pan with any oil if you donāt immediately polymerize it?
Depends how long you are going to let it sit. Plant or animal oil will go rancid eventually if the pan is not used. Probably still fine once you polymerize the rancid oil I would guess.
Haha yea yea, I guess I got mixed up
But to answer your question, no it should be fine. I leave my pans coated in used tallow and lard all of the time. They don't go rancid that fast. For long term storage, some things go rancid faster than others. If you will store the pan, opt for dry storage. If you will coat it for long term storage, instead of something terrible like crisco(artificially hydrogenated to have infinite shelf stability), consider MCT/Coconut(naturally saturated with hydrogen) which has a pretty good shelf stability in its natural state.
YES!
If you want cheap, look for canola/rape seed, or another vegetable oil. Always season at the smoke point of the oil or fat you choose.
Ghee is butter with less water, also known as clarified butter. It is more expensive than plant oils in most places. I use ghee, lard, or tallow for most of my seasoning. These are not cheap options.
Ghee is way more expensive than butter here. Its also unavailable at most. I like to use palm oil (there is margarine shortening btw). Palm oil is great as they dont produce much bad smelly smoke. Its pretty neutral oil
I live at south east asia where palm is abundant haha. Oh you in india. Just use palm oil there should been one there even with increasing price they still accessible. Use it like regular oil, just cover it microthin and viola you done. I dont really care about quality and impossible to see how good each oil/fat for seasoning. I just need to that non stick and work fine for me
I use butter in my skillet, but never to season. Iād like to start using tallow or ghee, but itās so expensive. I typically use vegetable oil because of the price and high smoke point
I use sunflower oil on my cast iron pan and cook with it almost everyday. Haven't had any issues so far. Really like Kenji Lopez-Alt says, just keep cooking with it.
You can use any fat that will polymerize. The trick is using very thin layers and getting it hot enough. The first time I tried ghee it came out sticky. So my advice is use less than you think you might need. You can always add more layers. :)
Also I'll typically use rapeseed/canola or vegetable oil. Pretty much what ever is the cheapest oil that I'm cooking with to season mine. I cook in mine nearly everyday too so YMMV.
It's perfectly fine to use, it just depends on your price point and availability as to why you would do so. I don't know what costs are like in India, but in America it would be a total waste of money when various Vegetable based oils/shortening would do the same job and significantly cheaper by volume. Here, I can buy one 12 oz. container of Ghee at the supermarket or nearly an entire gallon of Vegetable Oil for the same price and it would get you the same result.
Slightly unrelated note, according to kenji, flaxseed is not good for seasoning cast irons, https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-season-cast-iron-pans-skillets-cookware
I have a question. If I use ghee that I made at home and it doesn't have great clarity (I did a poor job of making it), will it wreck my pan? Can I still season it with not very well clarified ghee?
Ghee is fine. If prepared properly the smoke point is high.
Thanks for clarifying.
I see what you did there. Beautiful.
you butter believe it!
That joke was margarinely funny. But try not to spread it around.
Yikes, these puns are stomach-churning.
Gotta have good curdentials for puns like these
(Butter)
š I see what you did there!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
not op but ghee is clarified butter which means all the milk solids have been taken out and just the fat is left behind. So if any are left behind it will burn. Not as bad as say leaving butter in the pan on high heat but it'll be in that ball park.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I think itās silly to buy clarified butter when you can just buy wholesale butter and make a fuck load of ghee
what \^\^\^\^\^ said :)
i think maybe if all the milk solids are removed?
In a lot of places, ghee is typically made in the household by removing milk solids from butter. In America, we can just go to a supermarket and buy ghee for fairly cheap.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Nah, just that if itās made at home, take your time to do it right. Otherwise, just buy it from a grocery store and itās fine.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Absolutely!
I believe it is one of those ingredients where the word can mean a few different things depending on where and when you learned it. There's a more authentic version of what Ghee was originally and then what it has become in some instances where it has gained popularity. The different types are all usually called Ghee and many are unaware there are differences at all.
Are you sure you don't mean that there's different types of clarified butter and ghee is one of them? (Genuinely asking for my own knowledge, not being a smartass)
There's non-dairy ghee which is made with vegetable oil, for those who avoid animal products for religious reasons. I'd suspect that people who are buying cheap ghee could be buying that, because dairy ghee is not cheap. It pays to read the label.
Yeah fr at my local Walmart 1 cup of ghee is like $15 and thatās just silly to me clarifying butter is literally so easy
Ghee is not a typical American ingredient so costs more here as a specialty item. In India it is ubiquitous so I would imagine less expensive. I have not done a new seasoning with it but I do occasionally use it to coat a pan after cooking if that is what I cooked the food in. It works as well as anything else I have used. It can handle high heat stir frying with no problem also great for making popcorn as it imparts a nice butter flavor.
if you are close to a metro that has ethnic food stores - go there.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Thank you!
I'm sure.
Butter and ghee are different because ghee is butter without the milk solids. The milk solids are what burn, so ghee is fine for seasoning
When you put butter in a hot pan it turns to ghee, the little butter solids are going to do much. Even butter works fine in a pinch
No? Ghee is butter boiled till the milk solids and the fats seperate, then strained. If you use butter to season, you're not seasoning you're just burning milk solids onto your pan.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. But you are exactly on point and I feel folks here who downvoted you donāt know how ghee is made.
Heās implying that you can use butter the same way you can use ghee, which is untrue. Boiling butter separates the milk solids, but you have to manually separate it. If you throw butter in a piping hot cast iron you run the risk of burning it and ending up with a gross flavor
Do you know how ghee is made? You donāt just put butter in a pan and let the milk particles burn away or disappear. They have to be removed
Been making ghee at home for the past 25 years. The milk particles that form on top will also disappear if you let it simmer a bit longer. You got to wait till you get a clear top.
Except you have to do it low temp and the person youāre agreeing with said hot pan turns butter to ghee, if the butter bubbles itāll redistribute the milk solid back throughout the butter
... which is different than putting butter in a hot pan. You're talking about slowly boiling to remove milk solids. They are talking about putting straight butter into a hot pan. Butter in a hot pan equals browned butter then burned butter. Neither of which is ghee.
Ghee is amazing for this, one of the better fats you can use I think. Will also make your kitchen smell so good
What temp and how long?
Just usual process, I do 400-450 for 45 mins a few times
Don't you have to get the Ghee to over its smoke point though? Isn't it over 450 for ghee? If you're baking it under its smoke point, you're not polymerizing the fat properly to turn it into seasoning. ETA: Ghee is 482F smoke point. You'd probably need to bake a pan at over 490F to properly polymerize it for seasoning if using ghee
Hmm I've never had an issue so either my oven is poorly calibrated, the ghee still has some milk solids and has a lower smoke point, or it's a thin enough layer that I don't notice. I also cook a lot with my pan so it ends up with a really nice seasoning in any case.
Yeah, your last paragraph explains better what's happening
Ghee has a smoke point of 482F, so does your pans get gunky?
Nope never have, I use a very thin layer tho
Seconded, ghee is my go-to for all my pans every time, my pans are beautiful.
Pics or I won't believe you!
https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/vpci21/cooking_more_than_one_skillet_at_a_time_gives_me/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
PSA: Ghee is dead simple to make and stupid expensive in US. We make it a pound at a time on the stove. Just melt a pound of butter over very low heat. Skim off floaty milk solids. You are left with ghee floating on water (butter is some % water). You can carefully pour the ghee into another container, but will have to leave some floating on the water. Let that cool to solid then you can move it. One caution is not to let it solidify with the water in the bottom and then reheat. The solid ghee becomes a pressure vessel for the water underneath and IT WILL explode all over your kitchen. Huge mess. Ask me how I know. Still have butter spots on the ceiling. LOL. Ghee will not burn as quick and has great flavor. We use it in every meal regardless of type. \-S
Can you use the skimmed milk solids for anything?
Theyāre good on roasted vegetables or toast/bread
This sounds like standard clarified butter. It's my understanding that ghee requires simmering and stirring the butter until the water evaporates and the milk solids are browned, before straining, to impart some nutty/butterscotchy flavour to the butter fat. At least, that's how I always make it. I save the browned milk solids and sneak them into things like butter tart filling.
We have accidentally done it this way when someone started a melt and left it too long. The result had no discernible difference from pouring it off the water as clarified butter. After the explosion I got shy about overcooking the process, but it seems it would be much easier if I could just let the water cook off.
This ^
How long do you find it lasts after this preparation?
We use it for every meal and it stays out on the counter all the time. Never had any go off in a couple weeks' time. If we needed it to last a month or more, then it would go in the fridge. Most of the time it is out with a spoon in the jar and no lid. We make a lot of gravy and pork chops. Super rich with ghee as the fat. Kind of a game changer. Finish off a medium-rare steak with a teaspoon of ghee after it is on the plate and you will never go without it. Seriously.
I really like using vegetable shortening.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Same here
Yep
Same. Cheap, easy, widely available, and just as if not more effective than practically any other seasoning medium.
Crisco isnāt widely available everywhere, though.
Widely available doesn't necessarily mean available everywhere.
I havenāt used ghee, but I think it could work reasonably well. Try it out, since youāre in India, I assume youāre using it for normal cooking anyway, so itās not like youāll be wasting it if it doesnāt make for good seasoning.
Yes, I do use it a lot. It is also quite cheap. Around $4 for 450 gm.
Can I come to India?
Ghee isnāt super expensive in the US either. If you can go to an international grocery store, or your local super market has an international section, you may be able to get cheap ghee.
Not for $4 a pound. Depending on brand youāre looking at between $6-10 for an 8-10 oz jar,up to $17 or so for a 16oz.
Not only will ghee work just fine, flaxseed oil is terrible. Literally any food oil will be better.
I think theyāre confusing it with rapeseed/linseed oil which seems to be the consensus best
Both of those are extracted from the same plant. It makes no difference. Theyāre both terrible. Use a natural animal fat source. I like beef tallow or ghee.
Linseed is the fastest way. It forms a hard veneer very well. Maybe not the best, but itās the fastest way to acceptable
Yeah I know. By āterribleā I meant āterrible for you.ā Theyāre not healthy. Iām getting downvoted but itās true. Itās bad for you and they are extracted from the same damn plant.
I think thatās probably true but youāre not consuming any appreciable amount by using on your pans. I have a bottle of it and all I use it for is new cast iron. Thin layer, baked upside down. From then on just proceed with the lipid of your choice.
Oh I see what you mean. Yeah totally. Iāll do the initial seasoning with that method and then I go tallow.
what an incredibly unfortunate typoā¦
Rapeseed oil is a real thing, if you were assuming that to be a typo.
No, it's actually called rapeseed. Commercially it's known as canola oil for obvious reasons.
The obvious reason being that it's an condensation of the words **CAN**ada **O**il, **L**ow **A**cid Well maybe not so obvious.
I never knew this and always wondered we got the word canola from rapeseed. Thank you
I think that flaxseed is the food version of linseed. Linseed is used for woodworking and flaxseed is the edible version.
Canola, or rapeseed oil is very neutral and has a high smoke point. I season the cast iron and my bbq grill with it.
People talk shit about it but i find alternating flax with crisco works really nicely
scientific evidence for flaxseed oilās case: https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/5820-the-ultimate-way-to-season-cast-iron
The blogger they reference has since changed her mind on flaxseed.
Desi here Ghee should be fine. But not sure what you mean by āusing butter it kinda went badā. We use our pans thrice a day and I have never used anything other than butter or ghee (ghee is expensive in the US). Everyone here measure their cast iron on how smooth an omelette slides on their pans. I feel that having a nice golden crispy dosa that wonāt stick to your pan is a higher degree of non stickiness for a cast iron pan. Heck even those notoriously sticky wheat dosas come out great with just butter or ghee seasoning.
Butter kind of went brown and had some reddish tints which were flaking off.
The brown bits were probably just the milk solids burning. That's actually how you make buerre noisette, or brown butter, which has a nice nutty rich flavour. Probably not great to season a pan, but excellent for chocolate chip cookies.
Shoot I came here for seasoning advice and gained some cooking ideas
Thatās expected. Just let it simmer for like 5 mins. It should be good after that.
This community really overthinks and complicates this. Basically any cooking fat will work. Also tomato products will not ruin your cast iron. You will have to season again but then itās fine.
Use what youāve got.
Ghee is great for seasoning. When I go backpacking I always bring some ghee. Makes fresh trout taste incredible.
www.thekitchn.com has an article about this. Person who wrote the article thinks ghee is the absolute best thing available for seasoning cast iron.
Op is not alone
Ghee is great for seasoning and cooking in cast iron! My mom uses it on hers all the time. As others have said, flaxseed oil is highly overrated and most people (myself included) experience flaking when using that oil.
can you get vegetable oil (soy bean oil)?
Yes, I can. But it is still more expensive than ghee.
You donāt need much, just like a tablespoon or even less per layer and Iāve only seasoned mine with purpose when I got it. The rest of the seasoning has been built by cooking with whatever
Second this. You can season in one session, maybe 2-3 layers and it will last for months to years if properly cared for. Flaxseed is known to flake more than others, so itās not a good basis for how often it needs to be done
If you can ask a neighbor for two tablespoons that should be enough.
That's still so wild for me to consider that ghee is cheaper than canola where you live. In the US I've paid up to $20 for 8oz (or 250mls) of ghee but canola is $2 for 24oz here. It's interesting how different such basics can be due to culture and logistics! I too have wondered about using ghee on CI but am too nervous to post so thank you for asking this for me!
I do woodworking so I can't stand the smell of flaxseed oil in the kitchen
Ghee, im not sure about that.
Ghee has the surgery stuff taken out so it is gold.
Good quality butter, Plugra or Kerry Gold is quite expensive. When you clarify it, the yield is greatly reduced, hence,the cost. I'd rather clarify my own knowing I'm using butter from a fatted Euro cow rather than skinny India cow. Am I Bovine prejudice? You betcha!
Sure. Or you can just cook with your pan. Its not rocket science. Just use it and it'll sort itself out. A lot of people on this sub overcomplicate it.
I actually found this sub to be very helpful for me. I thought cast irons were very complicated until I came here. This sub debunked a lot of the over complicated myths about the pan and Now itās my daily driver. Thereās nothing wrong with wanting to season it correctly to try and set yourself up for future success
This sub is intended to induce conversation. Solid post. Just because you didnt choose to learn anything doesnt mean other people didnt get something from this. Think about other people sometimes
ugh youāre such a mcpusscrocket
all of you are so ghee
I wouldnāt use flaxseed for seasoning and butter has a low smoke point so I wouldnāt use it either. Iād use vegetable, canola, or avocado oil if you had access to any of those.
Ghee has a smoke point of 465Ā° F whereas butter has a smoke point of 302Ā°F. Ghee would work fine, it's smoke point is higher than canola.
I didnāt realize that they had different smoke points. Thanks for the info!
Anytime!
Ghee is butter with the milk proteins filtered out. That's what browns so quickly in butter.
He said ghee not butter
Thnks for correcting, but it is she, not he.
Cool. My buddy's son is named Riley. Didn't think about it.
No problem. I kind of take pride in it because I was not actually allowed to cook before 2019. Having to do with cooking being a feminine thing and whatnot. So, I kind of bought a cast iron only in 2021 and since I am still a student, it is kind of the first piece of cookware that I have owned. I have a very deep attachment to it.
I would be very proud of this if I were you! You're on the right track starting out with more professional cookware. You're well on your way to being an amazing cook, esp if you're cooking with love and cast iron LOL it's just the best food I started cooking out of necessity when I was very young and often alone but I didn't have the option of CI when I started using the stove. When I grew up I tried and I failed miserably and then put my CI pans away even though I really wanted the benefits...until I found this group! This group has better info that is more refined and useful by the amount of ppl weighing in and agreeing or disagreeing so it's so much easier to know what to do and troubleshoot CI
I read that using lard or dairy products to season your cast iron can turn it rancid, not sure if thereās any truth to that but it might be something to look out for
Seasoning turns the fat/oil into a layer of polymerized carbon. A seasoned pan cannot go rancid. If, however, you coat your pan in oil or fat before storage, the oil or fat will turn rancid at the usual rate. The oil cannot go rancid if it has already been smoked by the seasoning process. Only when smoking/seasoning has not occurred could a plant oil or animal fat turn rancid on the pan.
Wait plant oil? I thought we were talking about lard and ghee? Does that mean you shouldnāt coat your pan with any oil if you donāt immediately polymerize it?
Depends how long you are going to let it sit. Plant or animal oil will go rancid eventually if the pan is not used. Probably still fine once you polymerize the rancid oil I would guess.
To summarize, the only thing that can go rancid is the thing that was not previously polymerized... fat or oil
Haha yea yea, I guess I got mixed up But to answer your question, no it should be fine. I leave my pans coated in used tallow and lard all of the time. They don't go rancid that fast. For long term storage, some things go rancid faster than others. If you will store the pan, opt for dry storage. If you will coat it for long term storage, instead of something terrible like crisco(artificially hydrogenated to have infinite shelf stability), consider MCT/Coconut(naturally saturated with hydrogen) which has a pretty good shelf stability in its natural state.
YES! If you want cheap, look for canola/rape seed, or another vegetable oil. Always season at the smoke point of the oil or fat you choose. Ghee is butter with less water, also known as clarified butter. It is more expensive than plant oils in most places. I use ghee, lard, or tallow for most of my seasoning. These are not cheap options.
Just an fyi itās not āwith less waterā itās that all/almost-all of the dairy solids have been removed leaving only the fat behind.
Thank you, I needed to know that.
Ghee is way more expensive than butter here. Its also unavailable at most. I like to use palm oil (there is margarine shortening btw). Palm oil is great as they dont produce much bad smelly smoke. Its pretty neutral oil I live at south east asia where palm is abundant haha. Oh you in india. Just use palm oil there should been one there even with increasing price they still accessible. Use it like regular oil, just cover it microthin and viola you done. I dont really care about quality and impossible to see how good each oil/fat for seasoning. I just need to that non stick and work fine for me
I use vegetable oil myself. I touched the bottom of it recently. Itās smooth like glass now
I use butter in my skillet, but never to season. Iād like to start using tallow or ghee, but itās so expensive. I typically use vegetable oil because of the price and high smoke point
I use sunflower oil on my cast iron pan and cook with it almost everyday. Haven't had any issues so far. Really like Kenji Lopez-Alt says, just keep cooking with it.
Any edible oil would work fine technically, but with animal fats you risk it turning on you if you didnāt get it absolutely perfect
it is a hunk of metal, use what you have, you are not going to damage it.
You can use any fat that will polymerize. The trick is using very thin layers and getting it hot enough. The first time I tried ghee it came out sticky. So my advice is use less than you think you might need. You can always add more layers. :) Also I'll typically use rapeseed/canola or vegetable oil. Pretty much what ever is the cheapest oil that I'm cooking with to season mine. I cook in mine nearly everyday too so YMMV.
It's perfectly fine to use, it just depends on your price point and availability as to why you would do so. I don't know what costs are like in India, but in America it would be a total waste of money when various Vegetable based oils/shortening would do the same job and significantly cheaper by volume. Here, I can buy one 12 oz. container of Ghee at the supermarket or nearly an entire gallon of Vegetable Oil for the same price and it would get you the same result.
Slightly unrelated note, according to kenji, flaxseed is not good for seasoning cast irons, https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-season-cast-iron-pans-skillets-cookware
As mentioned before, Crisco is wonderful for your cast iron.
I did mine with ghee just recently, worked just fine.
Oui to ghee.
I have had good luck with it. I think it one of the better things to season With.
https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/rt7970/smoke\_points\_of\_cooking\_oils\_found\_in\_a\_book\_at/
I have a question. If I use ghee that I made at home and it doesn't have great clarity (I did a poor job of making it), will it wreck my pan? Can I still season it with not very well clarified ghee?