The Picard ManeuverYou should be able to see your reflection in it!
TreczoksAt least, the pan as such is not ruined. You’ll just have to season it back into the proper condition.
And this is how I discovered pan seasoning.
Given the recent horrible things about non-stick pans, I wonder if I should just buy seasoned cast iron pans.
You can buy pre seasoned cast iron.
My advice, as someone who has owned a cast iron pan for a while, is to take care of the pan. When you use it, wait for it to cool after use, then immediately clean it. Once cleaned, use heat to dry it (just put it back on the stove and heat it up to boil off any water), let it cool again, then add oil to protect the pans surface.
Don’t use just any oil for it, there’s a specific set of oils used to condition/season cast iron. I use grapeseed oil, but there’s plenty of others. A quick Google search should yield some options for you.
The main focus is on keeping the pan protected from water, as it will rust the iron. Using water while cooking/cleaning is fine, but having water standing on the surface of the pan, even microscopic amounts, will cause rust to form. The moisture in the air can also cause the pan to rust, hence the oil coating after cleaning to protect the surface of the pan.
I got rust on my cast iron once after I left the pan for too long after cooking with mushrooms, which are very high in moisture. I had to scrub away the rust, which left a shiny spot on my pan (where the seasoning/conditioning was lost), and I had to re-season the pan.
IMO, cast iron cookware is a pain in the butt to take care of, but well worth it. Easily one of my favorite pieces of cookware. It holds heat really well and it cooks pretty much everything very well. Something that’s always bothered me about regular cookware is the thermal cycling, you throw room temperature ingredients into a hot pan and suddenly, the pan isn’t hot anymore… It takes a while to get back up to temperature. Not nearly as bad of a problem with cast iron.
Just so you know my favorite way to clean cast iron is to run it dry until the bits start to burn then throw in water to deglaze it hot, dump the water and wipe with a cloth then back on the heat to dry and a little bit of oil back in the pan.
I get water is an issue but it shouldn’t be that much of an issue.
It’s not really an issue if you’re paying attention. As long as it doesn’t sit to air dry for days, generally rust shouldn’t be a problem.
My issue with the mushrooms was that I made a kind of gravy with them after cooking the meal and the combination of the moisture and other stuff in the mushrooms plus the moisture from making it into essentially gravy, then leaving it in the pan for more than a day, did me in.
I just forgot about it after the meal, and didn’t look at it for the next few days. It’s entirely my fault that it happened. No question about that. Careless cooking habits can ruin cast iron pretty fast.
If you’re coming mainly fatty foods in the pan, then there’s not a lot of worry there, the natural fats will protect the surface, so you can be, more or less as lazy as you want; but with some foods, you really want to clean it as quick as you’re able to prevent any damage to the coating/seasoning/nonstick polymerized layers that protect the pan.