I’m guest posting again for Common Sense Homesteading; did I mention that is one of my favorite blogs, and I’m so thrilled to be able to write for such a great site? A big thank you to Laurie Nevermen for the opportunity!
Cast iron is my favorite cookware; I talk all about the reasons why here. Cast iron needs a little more care than most cookware, but the trade-off is that it will last forever (well, at least your lifetime and probably your child’s lifetime). There is a lot of cast iron of varying quality on the market today. Some of it comes pre-seasoned and some of it ships unseasoned. Believe it or not there are times when you will want to strip the pre-seasoning off a new piece of cast iron, but I’ll get to that in a moment. If you purchase new cast iron and it arrives unseasoned can you start cooking with it? You could, but you would probably have a hard time with food sticking to your cookware. The seasoning is the black covering (or patina) that makes cast iron non-stick.
I’m going to show you how to season your cast iron cookware so that it will have a non-stick surface. The more you cook with cast iron the more non-stick it becomes. It’s a process. You would also use this method if you found some old cast iron at a yard sale and it needed to be stripped and re-seasoned. I’m not going to get into the stripping in this post, but I will in a later post. For now let’s just say you have “naked” cast iron and you want to season your piece. Read More.
