It looks a bit "spotted". Is that normal or need I do something about it?
this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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Cast Iron
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Scrape it out with a steel spatula, don't treat it like a nonstick...and cook in it again.
I never seasoned any of my pans, didn't baby them either. Just bacon or butter or oil and used a steel spatula (one of those thick ones, winco is the brand I use) and just cook in it. All my pans are basically glass now.
Yeah...
Obviously an implied step was "remove what's stuck"...
Lots of people don't cook with animal products or use weird oil.
If you make bacon every morning, it's self healing. Make acidic vegetables and it's always going to be getting fucked up
Don't assume everyone uses a product the same as you
I make spaghetti sauce in mine....and what does it matter what you're cooking in it. I use peanut and corn oil for most of my cooking, it shouldn't get fucked up with regular use and oil.
Depends...
If your anemic, great idea.
If you have hemochromatosis or just worried about Alzheimer's risk...
Bad idea.
Could I trouble you for info on that last one? I mostly do tomato sauces in my enameled pan, but all the same
It doesn't just trip the "seasoning"...
Anything you cook in a cast iron pan, will end up with you eating a very very very small amount of the pan.
Because the iron leeches into what we cook, which is cool, we need iron. The acidic food that strips the seasoning, keeps stripping the fucking iron too, far and above non acidic foods.
If you anemia (low iron) it's a good thing.
However, people with hemochromatosis have too much iron already, if it's too high in blood it gets stored in organs which does cause problems. The treatment is just fucking bleeding tho, so most people who have the mutations for that, just donate blood regularly. They gets rid of iron, and they test your iron before to make sure you have enough.
Super easy to manage, not really a big deal.
There's a pretty good chance tho, that excessive iron can cause Alzheimer's. Research is still happening it'll be a couple years to definitively say that high iron over a long time is a contributing factor
For some people whos family gets Alzheimer's a lot, they may take extra precautions because their worried
But in context of the thread, I was just pointing out how different people use things diff and have different concerns
If someone eats a "traditional" American diet from when cast iron was popular, it's the easiest thing in the world
When I started eating healthier and losing a bunch of weight the last couple years, I eventually hung my lodge up. What I was cooking most often just wasn't working with cast iron.
I still break it out occasionally, but a cheap modern pan handles veggies and other stuff better.
My opinion: cast iron needs meat cooked regularly in it to be "easy", otherwise you're gonna be reasoning a lot
Oil, but yea meat does make it way easier to utilize. I have one pan I only cook fish in, and it's basically just oil and fish all the time. Nothing else.
You're not wrong though, cast iron was definitely created with meat eaters in mind. But the majority of people are meat eaters, vegans are not a huge portion of the population...nor are people who have to much iron in their blood lol
Thanks for explaining yeah. I cook more breads/pizzas in my skillet than big steaks or stuff like that. Interesting about hemochromatosis, I didn't know that stuff.
Not sure about the concerns op mentioned, but cooking fatty things in it is basically adding oil/seasoning. Cooking acidic food eats away at the coating, if only slightly, so you will need to season it intentionally more often.
Technically, if you only cooked tomatoes and other acidic food in it it will remove the seasoning over time if you don't do anything. Guessing they are saying that eventually you will end up with more iron in your food than you should have.
That's seasoning the pan silly.
Yea...true...but when people say season these days, they mean strip the old seasoning and then do the 900 steps of baking it in the oven with 47 different coats of some magical oil and let it hang out in the sun while sacrificing a goat to Amon Ra...so it doesn't rain while the sun is baking on that final layer...
When someone says "season it" or "re-season it" I usually interpret that as add another coat. Not a full strip and redo.
A lot of the cast iron groups are super into "gotta strip it and to properly get it seasoned"
Yeah there's some real intense people out there.
In everything I suppose. Internet is full of elaborate 48 step routines for practically anything you can imagine. One can make a terrible fuss out of everything if one wants to.
That said, it seems that you may actually need to do things slightly differently depending on for example your diet. That doesn't mean slipping into 900 step "seasoning routine", but you may need to take care of your cast iron tools a bit differently if they don't get fat from meat or if they're frequently exposed to high acidity foods.