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Do you cook with cast iron? Is it the hassle everyone says it is?
I've been thinking about getting into cast iron cooking. I need a new skillet, and I've seen recommendations for cast iron, but some things seem daunting:
- Seasoning. How bad is it really? Did you purchase a pre-seasoned pan and just cook with it? Do you re-season occasionally? How often? What oil do you use? What is your process?
- Cleaning. How do you clean your skillet? Soap and water? How do you know when you are done cleaning? What materials do you use?
- Unknowns. What did you not know until you started cooking with cast iron? Any surprise benefits/costs?
Have any of you used cast iron, then returned to Teflon or stainless steel after being disappointed in the experience? What are the biggest differences between cooking with cast iron and other materials?
Considering that non-stick manufacturing poses environmental risks, and iron may provide a net positive effect for folks needing more iron in their diet, it seems like this is a natural way to go.
There are people who are going to tell you that you need to spend hours and hours to season your skillet. Those people are, frankly, lunatics. Just cook some bacon in it first thing, or rub a thin layer of canola oil and let it get nice and hot a couple of times. It's really not that deep. Also, don't use dish soap containing lye, which I seriously doubt you were going to do anyway. If your skillet ever gets too much buildup and things are sticking, or if the bottom gets scorched, just give it a good scouring and re-season it.
To make it a bit more explicit, regular dish soap is just fine to use on your cast iron. Don't, like, soak it in soap overnight or anything, but cleaning it and drying it is completely fine.
I'm going to tack my tip onto your comment because I follow your philosophy of simplicity:
After cooking and regular cleaning/wiping with a little bit of oil, I store my cast iron pans in the oven, so every time I use the oven, they get a bit of an extra seasoning without me having to think about it. Easy peasy.
Why would anyone store them anywhere else (unless they're consistantly using the full amount of oven space they have)? I'll usually give mine a scrub with steel wool, towel dry, then heat up the oven (where they're stored) to ~350 to ensure they're truly, undeniably dry. I've found if I don't, I'll end up with a bit of rust over time.
It takes the oven forever to heat up with a bunch of stuff inside.
Here in Japan, it’s standard to have a microwave/oven combos. Standalone ovens are extremely rare, and American sized ones are special import and setup :(
If you are a vegetarian household, don't worry about cooking bacon or something fatty in it to start. Just start cooking with lots of olive oil and clean only as much as necessary.
We cook eggs in ours occasionally but i wouldn't say it's nonstick like some would make it out to be. Disclaimer we have been only using cast iron for cooking for 10 years, 2 meals a day, we love it.
Yeah avacado oil has a really high smoke point too, and works great from what I've heard. Sorry for not thinking about vegetarians!
So does flax seed oil, that’s what I use.
That's actually what I use mine for most! Not scrambled either - sunny-side up or over-easy. Mine are well-seasoned enough that eggs pretty well just glide around after "breaking free" the edges.
Grapeseed oil will season it via air exposure if it's applied thin enough. Best oil I've tried for seasoning cast iron via the normal method too.
I do season my pans when I get them, but it's also not particularly difficult. I rub a layer of oil on it (top and bottom front and back) and then put it in the oven for an hour, and then turn the oven off and let it cool. It takes almost no effort at all.
Caring for cast iron pans is really easy. They are my favourite pans when you think about them in a value-for-dollar way. The one I use right now is 10 or so years old and just gets better with each use.
It's one of those things where 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the way. Do you need a two hour season that you do a couple of times? Nope, the difference it makes is so minor you'll never notice it in comparison to a one-hour season.
I find it really easy to use. Cook, clean with regular dish soap (I do use a skin friendly one because it's not very perfumy), air dry, reuse when needed. I don't use my pan that often, to be fair, but I've only seasoned it once three years ago and it's still good.
The best thing, imo, is being able to go from hob to oven. Get a nice omelette or similar going, dump a bunch of cheese on top, stick it under the grill in the oven to crisp up, yums.
I haven't seen comments yet on the primary benefit of cast iron specifically: heat retention. It's what separates cast iron from stainless steel and even carbon steel.
Cast iron is very slow to heat (relative to other pans), because it has a lot of thermal mass and poor conductivity. For the same reasons, it's also prone to developing hot spots if heated rapidly without time for heat to disperse throughout the pan. Once hot, though, it stays hot, which is a huge benefit for things like searing, frying, baking.
It's a change, for sure. If you're into cooking, having a cast iron in addition to other, more conventional pans is the way to go. I don't think "returning" to stainless is the right framing. If you're not into cooking, I wouldn't necessarily pick a cast iron as my one and only pan, but there's no real reason you couldn't.
The heat retention of cast iron is not important for cooking at all, and it's actively detrimental for the things you listed. It will work sure, but it's definitely not ideal. You said it yourself, the conductivity of cast iron is very bad. Since you have a heat source supplying energy to the pan, the pan will get to the temperature of the heat source, but when you go to sear a steak, the searing only happens by the pan conducting energy into the steak, even though cast iron can store a lot of energy, it can't dump that energy into the steak, and whatever energy it does dump, if that is higher than it's conductivity with the heat source, it will get cold and take longer to maintain temperature. For searing you want maximum conductivity, yes thermal mass matters, but less than you think. A stainless(aluminum cored) pan with adequate heat source can conduct heat more effectively from the heat source to the steak, for example .
The king of course, and it's why you'll see them in Michelin restaurants all over the place, is copper. Higher conductivity than aluminum, more thermal mass than cast iron. They are just expensive. Modern copper pans with stainless lining vs tin are heat safe to any temperature you want, making them by far the best for searing.
Sorry to um actually you. But this is a nitpick of mine when people talk about cast iron. I still have some cast iron pots etc for baking, where it largely doesn't matter since everything will be at oven temp regardless, but for stovetop cooking, I will choose copper, then stainless, then carbon steel, then cast iron last. (I don't cook with non-stick ever)
I think you're right on the details, but wrong on what they imply :)
When a cold steak hits a pan, the limiting factor for the first several seconds isn't "can the pan conduct fast enough" — both cast iron and aluminum-core stainless conduct far faster than the steak's own internal conductivity can absorb energy. The steak surface is the bottleneck, not the pan. So pan conductivity above a fairly modest threshold doesn't buy you much. What actually differs between the two pans is what happens to the pan's surface temperature during that contact. A high-mass pan barely dips, because it has a large reservoir to draw from even with mediocre conductivity, since the energy doesn't need to travel far (cast iron is much thicker, so it's drawing from material close to the surface, not relying on rapid transfer from far away). A low-mass, high-conductivity pan recovers fast (because conductivity is high) but it also drops more initially per unit area before the burner replenishes it, because there's just less stored energy near the surface. In practice, with most home burners (which are conductivity-limited at the burner-to-pan interface, not the pan-to-food interface), cast iron's huge reservoir tends to win for sustained searing of something like a steak, because the bottleneck is burner output, not pan conductivity.
Your claim that "if the pan dumps more energy than it can receive from the heat source it will get cold" is true but irrelevant to searing performance, because the timescale of a sear (seconds to low minutes per side) is short compared to the timescale needed to deplete a cast iron pan's reservoir, even with a so-so burner. That's the whole reason cast iron is prized for searing in the first place — not despite low conductivity, but because mass compensates for it on the timescales that matter for a stovetop sear.
(Also -- most pro kitchens, even starred ones, overwhelmingly use heavy gauge aluminum pans, not copper.)
Someone else linked a YouTube video from Chris Young where, when all pans were brought to temperature, heat turned off, and a pork chop placed inside.....the high conductivity pans achieved the same sear in less time than the heavier carbon steel or cast iron, even though the cast iron had plenty of thermal mass to sear longer, the conductivity matters not just between the pan and the food but the pan with itself. Cast iron will not move the heat from the rest of the pan to the now colder spot under the food, it simply can't do it the way that more conductive materials can.
I assure you that a copper pan, especially a high quality one, which will be nearly as heavy as cast iron, my copper pans are so heavy my wife cannot use them :( , will give you the best sear of your life, because it has superior conductivity and comparable thermal mass.
I will freely admit that I've never cooked with a copper pan with the same thermal mass as cast iron. However, I'm not sure that's really a relevant comparison, since at that point we're talking about a pan that is several hundred dollars versus one that's about $20.
If the question is "what's the best pan imaginable," then I believe you. But the question in this post was about someone asking about their first cast iron. Saying that cast iron is outdated because a copper pan of equal thermal mass delivers better performance is like recommending a Ferrari to someone who is trying to choose between a Peugeot and a Renault.
...you did make me want to get one, though.
Well, in my defense I suggested a stainless clad, which is much more affordable! I think you're also going to get very good or better results with that than cast iron. There's just not really any benefit and there's a reason that restaurants basically never use cast iron. They use stainless or carbon steel almost exclusively. Cast iron is outdated, which isn't to say it can't make good food or that it can't be nice/beautiful, like I said I have a few enameled cast iron Dutch ovens etc that work great, but I just don't see a reason to fuss with cast iron for stovetop cooking.
Totally true that professional kitchens don't use cast iron, but the fundamental mechanics of searing completely change on a commercial range. A high end prosumer range, of the kind almost nobody has, might put out 17,500 BTU. A commercial range starts at 30,000 and goes up from there. If thermal mass is more important when you only have 17500 (or less; your average electric range is probably something like 10k BTU equivalent on the biggest burner) to reheat the pan, conductivity (to your point) is more important when you can crank 30k or more BTU back into the pan. Plus, the weight and relative fragility and finickyness of cast iron are huge drawbacks in a restaurant but not necessarily a home.
If someone was going to get only one pan, I would also recommend stainless clad. But I think you're reaching a bit when you claim that cast iron is worse for searing!
That logically shouldn't make a difference. Cast iron staying hot but not transmitting much heat is similar to something else cooling down but immediately transmitting almost all heat.
As a minor nit/question, I'm guessing that you'd need to buy a sufficiently high output burner in order to make use of that greater thermal conductivity, right? I was debating a big honkin' induction burner + the thinnest pan I could find for similar reasons (but admittedly this was for wok cooking, not steak searing -- still high temp/high energy throughput, though)
Potentially yes, my intuition is that a large burner should supply more heat energy than most food could possibly intake, but that's where at least for searing, a high thermal mass pan(whether copper or very thick aluminum) can quickly conduct all of its stored heat into the food, though after that it would be constrained by the heat source itself. This is why if you're searing steaks you would want to give the pan some time to come back up to temp before dropping another cold(comparatively) steak into the pan. Yeah with woks they are usually carbon steel and thin because there wouldn't be any advantage to making it thicker for stir frying, it'd just be a pain in the ass to handle haha. There is also an argument that when you're using oil, the oil gets to pan temp and then conducts energy into the food via itself, so it's not quite as cut and dry as I made it seem, but it doesn't change anything about pan materials at least
100%. The weaker your burner, the more you want a large thermal mass. The stronger your burner, the less it matters. That's why for most homes cast iron is the best tool available for searing, but a commercial kitchen wants a thinner aluminum or steel pan.
This has been my experience — not with searing steaks specifically (I'm a vegetarian), but with other kinds of high-heat cooking, especially stir fry.
I don't have a fancy stove with a wok burner, but with my cast iron wok (which has a particularly thick bottom because it's designed to sit flat on a trivet), I can get absurdly high heat even on just my medium burner. It's way too heavy for tossing, but the poor conductivity of the steel also means that I get a lovely temperature gradient up the sides of the wok, which is super handy for stir fry that you have to actually stir instead of toss.
Fun ~15 minute video comparing different pan materials: https://youtu.be/LdORIBH3R88.
By Chris Young, he does advertise his thermometer in all his videos but the actual info about the pans is pretty neat. Though I don’t fully recall it all that well, I think it does line up mostly with what you’re saying here.
I used to live in an apartment that had an electric resistance stove top. Buying a cast iron was a huge savior for ensuring our food cooked evenly over a period of time. The coils would cycle on and off but the cast iron kept the temperature steady. We didn't even know when we bought it, but it definitely leveled up our cooking.
I have both. I use stainless for high acid dishes like shakshuka and for risotto. (No logic behind the risotto, I just do.) I use cast iron for searing and anything that I want to pick up flavor from the seasoning. I use both for deep frying. I have some really old cast iron that I think my partner’s grandma seasoned with lard, the inside of those pans are smooth like glass. I also like to use it car camping at places that have a grate over the fire.
The main downside to it for me is the weight. The old bigger pans I have have a handle on the far side so I can use two hands to lift it; I refuse to use our 14” Lodge with only the one handle. My wrist just collapses under that weight from RSI.
For the older pans that are really smooth it's typically because the inside was machined or otherwise finished at manufacturing whereas the typical Lodge or other inexpensive cast that most people readily find is essentially cast, pre-seasoned, and sold.
There are some companies that make machined cast still (Finex is one I've used) but the pans are much more expensive and there's still the matter of building the seasoning.
My current favorite is the stainless clad, aluminum core, carbon steel that let's me use a 12" pan full of food and not make my wrists hurt or risk throwing food on the ground like with a Matfer carbon steel with its low slope sides.
Have you tried carbon steel, by any chance? Similar performance to cast iron at about half the weight.
My wok is carbon steel, I do really like it. Haven’t looked into it for other pans.
I've cooked with cast iron for many years and it's the lowest fuss cookware I've ever used. It just works. It heats up slowly because it has a larger mass, but it holds heat much longer and more evenly. I don't have to worry about it denting and malforming. If it cools down too quickly it won't bow out or warp. It can be used as an impromptu self defense weapon. It's great!
As others have said, the seasoning watch is overblown. You don't need to constantly season, just when you feel it needs a refresh. I have a cast iron crepe/pancake pan that needs to be refreshed soon because it doesn't get much oil compared to the standard cast iron plan that has all kinds of oils tossed in it when it is used.
Just don't soak it and avoid heavy soaping. That's pretty much it. That's the treatment. Enjoy your cast iron!
I cook with cast iron all the time, it's less work than non stick cookware otherwise I wouldn't do it.
As noted above, get some oil on it, get it hot. That's it for seasoning. I essentially never use soap on it, I wash with very hot running water and a cloth. For most dishes, get it hot before applying the food, there are pores in the surface, they close up once it's warm and you don't want them closing up on food that's already there, holding it on.
New non stick is easier, but it needs to be treated way nicer. Middle aged non stick is about the same amount of work and still needs to be treated nicer. Old non stick is a pain in the arse. Old cast iron is the same as new cast iron.
I nearly exclusively use cast iron, but how could it possibly be less work than nonstick? The only thing I can think of is not worrying about scratching or chipping the surface.
Cleaning middle aged to old non stick I find to be harder than cleaning cast iron. Then yes, there's the ability to be rougher on cast iron.
You can't just throw it in the dishwasher?
Non stick tends to not do well in the dishwasher. Most new ones I've seen does say it's diswasher safe, but I've had too many bad experiences trying
Yeah cast iron is a massive pain in the arse. I do not have time for a pan which needs it's hand holding like cast iron does. Ooooh, hand wash only, wah wah wah don't use metal tools, boohoo you need to strip the coating off and reseason me, are you using the right sort of oil? Stuff that. I am busy. My cookware gets a kicking and goes in the dishwasher and if it doesn't like that then it's not welcome in my kitchen.
If you really want to go down that route, carbon steel outperforms cast iron in just about every way - it's cheaper, tougher, easier to handle and has considerably better thermal performance - but the best thing to do is learn to cook on stainless. That's what professional chefs use more than any other sort of pan, and there's a reason for that. I got rid of my cast iron and carbon steel in favour of mostly stainless. I do have a non-teflon ceramic non-stick pan for cooking eggs and pancakes in, and because it's only used for those relatively low-temperature things, the coating is still super slippery after several years. But non-stick is best thought of as a consumable anyway.
I was told that iron cookware doesn't really impart much iron into your diet and particularly seasoned cast iron won't do so at all because the polymer layer is between the iron and your food. A nice cast iron teapot does a little bit though. And you get to have a nice cast iron teapot, which doesn't need any special treatment.
I wash my cast iron in the sink with soap often, and use metal tools by preference.
They came pre-seasoned; I did a half-arsed additional seasoning with a little oil and an hour in the oven and I'm not 100% convinced they even needed that. 10 years of regular use and I've not had to reseason once.
I cook acidic food, eggs, basically whatever I want to eat without a single thought to "can I cook this on cast iron".
I've never understood how people seem to have so much trouble with them. I'm a seriously lazy cook and they "just work" for me.
I think it's because people got into the mentality of "this can last long enough to be an heirloom" without realizing that cast iron can last that long just because it's a giant chunk of metal. They're not delicate, keeping them clean and dry is really the only requirement for longevity. It's not like our grandmas avoided cooking specific foods or using specific tools, they just cooked.
I'm in the same boat as you regarding using my cast iron, with the only difference being that I don't use soap often because I don't find it necessary for cleaning the pan most of the time.
The dishwasher comment seems weird to me. There's plenty of nice kitchen stuff that definitely shouldn't go in the dishwasher, including cutting boards and good knives. Washing one more item isn't that much of a burden, and if I do the pan first it can dry on the stove while I clean the other two.
I think the commenter's point of just regularly tossing their pans in the dishwasher would rapidly destroy a cast iron skillet, no? I'm ... unwilling to verify that empirically 😅
I admittedly didn't have trouble with upkeep on my skillet, but I still diligently cleaned, dried, and oiled it after every use. My stainless steel skillet regularly languishes overnight with crud stuck in it, soaking, and has gone through the dishwasher a few times. No issues so far.
Putting it in the dishwasher will destroy the finish, but not the cast iron itself — except, arguably, the very outer layer, which turns into rust. It would take many, many, many washings to damage it irreparably.
I once picked up a really dirty, rusty old cast iron dutch oven from a garage sale. Its owner used it for camping and left it outside in the weather for months or years, so it was in a pretty sorry state. I used a wire brush to knock all the crud off, ran it through the dishwasher to finish cleaning it, soaked it in vinegar (to remove the resulting rust), hand-washed it to remove the iron acetate (i.e., what vinegar turns into when it touches iron), and re-seasoned it in the oven. You would never know it had been neglected.
My partner and I have a very cheap enameled cast iron saucepan that we put through the dishwasher, even though there are some chips on the underside where my partner accidentally dropped it on the stove trivet. We've run it through the dishwasher over hundred times or so since the damage occurred (we use it about once a week and we've had it for several years), and it's definitely rusty where it's chipped, but it's holding up fine. I think it will probably survive many hundred more washes before we have to replace it — and that's with never de-rusting or oiling the exposed cast iron.
Makes sense! As you note, I think the damage is supposed to be cumulative, based on some brief Googling? That said, I'm surprised that the enameled cast iron saucepan hasn't fallen apart from the chip -- I guess cast iron stands up better than I'd thought, and the breakdown isn't all that rapid!
Your comment, along with /u/Banazir, /u/Zorind, and /u/kacey, made me want to do a trial. I've always heard the advice that cast iron never goes in a dishwasher, but a bunch of the traditional cast iron advice is absolute bunk, so I am doing a trial. I have an old cast iron skillet that I have been meaning to start using, but has been sitting in the garage for years now. I took some before pictures and just started it in the dishwasher. I will post an update once the cycle is done. Honestly I am expecting it to come out perfect or slightly rusty. Dishwasher soap doesn't use lye soap any more than dish soap does anymore, so it shouldn't pull the seasoning off.
Okay results are in, and pings for everyone: /u/Banazir, /u/Zorind, /u/kacey, /u/Minithra, /u/dirthawker, /u/R3qn65, and /u/RNG.
And before you jump to the after pictures and see all the rust, keep in mind this pan was not in perfect condition before. There was already a bit of surface rust before the dishwasher, so we should expect more rust afterwards.
Before: Bottom | Edge | Inside
Anyone who loves and babies their cast iron, look away now! I washed these with the only suitable dishwasher detergent as decreed by our lord and savior Alec in the holy video book Technology Connections, powdered detergent from good.store.
After: Bottom | Inside
To my eyes, it looks basically identical. There was rust on the bottom before, there is rust after. The inside cook surface looks just as good as it did before. One test does not a conclusion make, so I plan to do more. After it came out, I gave that pan the good scrub and re-season it needed. I also did the same to a weird corn cob baking tray that I have had for years and never used once. I will get those into good condition and leave them in my dishwasher for a month. If they survive that (and I feel like they will given these results), I will feel confident recommending anyone put their cast iron in the dishwasher.
Once I am done with that test, I'll throw together a new tildes post with the results.
Thanks for doing that! Beautiful vintage pan. I'm definitely still not going to put mine in the dishwasher, but I think it's awesome you tested it.
If you really want to see rust, take a steel brush grinder to the inside of the skillet to strip off the seasoning, and then put it through the dishwasher. I've done this before, and it's a pretty shocking change! But after you remove the rust and re-season it, it's silky smooth — better than new.
Its not about the seasoning, though you'll have some damage there, definitely. Sitting that long in that much steam is going to really sink into the cast iron, i wouldn't be surprised if you have rust on less seasoned areas
Also my understanding is that dishwasher detergents are a lot more harsh than the kind you use at the sink, plus dishwashers get the water directly from the hot water line. I'm lazy with my (steel) chef knives, so I've seen after 10-20 dishwasher cycles they develop small rust-like spots. So I suspect some damage is going to happen to the CI.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Eh, very easily fixed. Rust is super easy to remove, and the edge is super easy to sharpen if it gets a little banged up. You should be sharpening them frequently anyway.
Lots of high-carbon blades (axes, chainsaw blades, whittling knives, carving chisrls/gouges, etc.) get far harsher treatment than a kitchen knife's occasional trip through a dishwasher, and they last for years and years and years.
You should turn it into it's own post. Excited to see the results! Also, I think it's stuff like this that keeps me coming back to tildes, I love the culture here.
As already mentioned, the seasoning isn't the issue, rust is. Seasoning is a protective layer, so losing it means losing protection. The steam and consistent heat is likely to cause spots of damage, which is where rust spots will form. Surface rust isn't the end of the world, a quick scrub with steel wool or even just a scouring pad should remove it. If left alone though, you'll have to break out sandpaper or power tools depending on how bad the rust is.
In a way, I'm hoping I'm wrong, so best of luck! Also, this experiment might need to be done over time with multiple washes.
Ok I love this, thanks. Please ping me in the update too.
You're far braver than I 😅 I wish you (and your skillet) good luck!
100% agreed with this comment; I have very rarely found a need for my cast iron skillet after learning how to use a stainless steel pan properly (broadly: let it get hot, use more oil than you expect at first).
I've heard great things about the tri-ply carbon steel laminated pans (e.g. Strata), if you're into the idea of fairly non-stick cookware that avoids the moral rigmarole of buying PTFE coated cookware, too.
I cook every meal (exception is acidic stuff, like tomatoes, because it'll strip the seasoning) in my cast iron pan. Also have a Dutch oven, wok and griddle pan I use on the regular.
I do nothing special. I throw some fat in it when it heats, cook whatever I want and then leave it. Sometimes I clean it the same night, other times I wait until the next day. Cleaning is always the same: rinse in hot water, scrub any sticky on bits with a stiff brush or steel wool if necessary, dry and done.
No need to over complicate it. You think settlers and frontiersmen were arguing with each other and fussing over how to properly season, clean and use their cookware?
I used to fry tomatos in my cast iron at least 4 or 5 times a week for years and never had a problem. Still cooking tomato based stuff in it pretty often for that matter.
As long as you’re regularly cooking other stuff with some kind of fat it shouldn’t be a problem because you’ll be continually reseasoning it by doing so.
Generally people will say the problem is that acid can leach metal into the sauce and make it taste off, but I’ve never noticed it. It’s possible I have an insufficiently sensitive palate or the tomato sauces I’m making aren’t sufficiently acidic.
I use a cast iron 2-3 times a day. Get a good metal spatula, it won’t hurt the bottom and will help smooth it out over time.
I seasoned it myself, and cook enough in it that it stays nice.
I wash with dawn dish soap and water every night ish, or at least wipe it out. Make sure it’s dry. Then I put a tiny dab of oil in it wipe it around and leave to use next day.
Do you have a gas or electric stove top?
I follow this ritual almost verbatim, and have been for about 15 years. Not a spot of rust on my cast iron. After washing, I'll toss the skillet on high heat on the stove for 5 minutes to dry it out and then re-oil it while it's hot. I've tried coconut oil, vegetable oil, avocado oil, and bacon fat, but I feel peanut oil gives me the best "finish" when I'm getting ready to put my cast iron away. Doesn't take much, just a tiny splash and I rub it around with a paper towel.
I've been using cast iron since my first apartment in college, before that it was a camping-only tool. I honestly don't understand why people act like it's harder to use, these are the pans that settlers used in wagons as they travelled west - the pans can take abuse and be just fine. You can use any utensils on it, cook anything in it, and as long as it stays clean and dry in the meantime it will outlast you.
I only season mine when I do something stupid, like leave it on high heat for too long or put a lid on it and forget that I didn't actually clean it*. When I do have to season it, I just oil it lightly and throw it in the oven at 350° F for an hour, then I'll repeat if it doesn't look quite right. Any kind of fat or grease works, I use canola because that's what we cook with. I got a big pack of chicken thighs once and ate them for a week by roasting them (2 in the skillet at 400′ F for 30 mins), that was the best the seasoning ever looked.
I got one of those chainmail scrubbers and I just use that and hot water. Most stuff just lifts free, and even stuck-on sauces and burnt food comes off with the scrubber. If there's congealed fat, like leftover gravy or bacon grease, that gets removed before I take it to the sink to avoid clogging drains. After that, I dry over the stove on low heat, add a drop or two of oil, and it's ready to use. It sounds complex, but is it really different than using any other pan in that regard? Remove solids, scrub, dry, store properly.
I got cast iron because I didn't have much money and I needed a "do it all" pan. Cast iron was the perfect choice. The unexpected part was wanting more, so now I have three skillets, two dutch ovens (one with legs for use with charcoal while camping), a pizza steel, a baking dish, two muffin trays, a loaf pan, and a carbon steel skillet (like cast iron but thinner). I am now "that guy" and friends and family come to me for advice.
*My wife used my dutch oven to boil some yucca, then put the lid on it and left it on the stove. She thought I cleaned it, I thought she cleaned it, nobody checked for a week and we were both too lazy to move the stuff needed to put it away. The inside was rusty enough to need scrubbing eith aggressive sandpaper and a complete re-seasoning. This is probably the worst I've done with my cast iron though.
I love those chainmail scrubbers!
One of the biggest reasons I prefer cooking in cast iron is because I can use a chainmail scrubber without worrying about scratches. I wish I could use it on everything. It's so annoying dealing with burnt food, etc., on my non-cast-iron cookware. (For them, I use a EuroScrubby pad, which is pretty good, but chainmail is better.)
My cast iron pans are my only fry pans. Using them daily helps keep them in better shape.
Unlike others I DO cook acidic food in mine. It does strip the seasoning but whatever. I don't oil it after cleaning. I use soap and a chain mail scrubber and I half ass towel dry it afterward. My flat pan still seasoning, my regular shaped pan that I cook tomato sauces in doesn't really have seasoning left in it. I don't think they perform that differently.
The only special thing I do is use BUTTER specifically when frying eggs. Oil works but butter is special somehow and works better.
When we fry bacon, we fry it seperately, then seperate out and keep the grease. I've never used butter for eggs (don't like the taste as much), but bacon fat is something I can't recommend enough if your diet (not vegan, muslim(?), etc) allows it
SMOKE. I'm bad at it, so that's part of it, but you will get a LOT of smoke while learning and even sometimes when doing things right. Vent your area or get used to remembering that there's no sane way to silence a fire alarm
I just pull my smoke alarm off the ceiling and leave it outside until I'm done cooking. (My kitchen was designed by morons so there's no ventilation anywhere near the stove. At some point I want to add a range hood.)
Yeah....i had mine hang by the (very very sturdy with quick release) wire and would just yank it when i went to cook,.
I do not recommend this, because yeah obvious reasons, but uh...yeah. These days i have a nice vent hood so it's not as much of a problem, but it's a thing to keep in mind if you don't have good ventilation.
I bought mine at an op shop, gave it a good scouring so I could be sure any grime on it was my grime, and started cooking stuff in it. Never bothered with any specific seasoning techniques as just using the frypan to fry stuff ends up working fine. I've usually used olive oil but I've recently started using peanut oil due to moving into a place without an outside ventilated extraction fan and wanting to try something with a higher smoke point.
I wash it a bit of detergent and water and a bit of a scrub with the dish brush. Sometimes I won't even bother with the detergent if I wasn't using copious amounts of oil. It's clean when any crusty bits are off and there's no large amount of oil left on it.
I do like not having to pussyfoot around with utensils like one has to with nonstick pans, it's good to be able to just use metal stuff and not have to worry about scratching anything.
I've got some cast iron saucepans as well and they also work fine, I find the slight roughness of the surface means things something catch a bit more than they do on the stainless saucepan but I haven't really run into anything that gave me any grief with them.
Pro tip: if you get your cast iron at a thrift shop, test it for lead. These are often used to melt lead in, and you definitely don't want to cook food in one that's been exposed to lead.
When you say "often"... How many people are melting lead at home vs getting rid of a pan they don't use
In the area's where you can get a cast iron skillet at a thrift store, I'd bet the odds are high. My grandfather used to melt lead in a skillet to make bullets. It's not as uncommon as you might think.
There are cheap, rapid-result swabs you can buy to test for lead. It's not a huge burden, and worth a couple of bucks if you are purchasing vintage.
I live in an urban midwest area and cast iron is common in thrift stores and the demographic is not "melt your own bullets" here. I am just genuinely wondering if there's some sort of data about the need to test your cast iron because it's a frequent occurrence vs a rarity
ETA: I can't find actual #s but most of the opinions on cast iron specialty forums seem to be that unless you're shopping truly antique or for smaller (more suitable for melting for lead) vessels, odds of lead exposure you can't see is very slim. Vintage (between 100-20 years old.. yeah the 2000s count ಠ︵ಠ) is far less of a concern. You're more likely to get a false positive on a home test.
So if you're a collector or buying certain pieces in particular vs someone's lodge from 25 years ago in your local thrift you may have different priorities.
I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and my grandfather would go to muzzle loading competitions and it was common to make your own rounds by melting lead in a cast iron pan. It's probably not common throughout the world, but it costs basically nothing to do a lead test on your cast iron that you thrift.
In the cast iron fora it suggested that you're far more likely to get a false positive, unlikely to find it on a typical skillet vs a more apt shaped pan, and that there's usually a visible sign if it's been used for that.
I do think it's fairly rare but if I were shopping in a particularly rural area or buying a deeper, smaller pan for it maybe. That said it's not something most folks need to worry about and false positives can overstress you.
We have a couple of cast iron pans and a flat top/griddled ...grill(?) that we lay on top of the stove sometimes.
Here's my unknown for you:
My partner can't really use them well. Or, more accurately, he can't manipulate them well on the stove. His manual dexterity is fine, but due to being in a chair, the angle he has on the stovetop is bad for lifting something so heavy. Which also means cleaning them is complicated/difficult/something he needs help with too.
Physically they can be difficult for some people to use and even I find them annoying to get out/put away. Our grill mostly lives on the stove but that just gets it dirty from grease splatter.
So accessibility, whether due to disability or just comfort, is a factor.
So I cook with a mixture of cast iron and also non-stick pans, and have been doing so for several years. A lot of the comments here have already discussed the pros/cons of cast iron. There are two things that make me reaching for the cast iron more often recently compared to the non-stick pans. The first is that while both sets of pans are over 5 years old, the non-sticks are starting to stick more often as the coating wears down, while the cast iron is still the same. I now view the non-stick pans as a consumable, where each use shortens its lifespan, whereas I do not have the same viewpoint with the cast iron. The second thing I really enjoy with a cast iron is that I can start a meal frying something on the stove top, and then finish it by sticking it in the oven to bake or broil (really useful for crisping up cheese on the top of a dish).
I seasoned mine in the beginning, but after scrubbing it with soap the seasoning got ruined. So now I just sometimes coat it with some oil, and otherwise I keep cooking fatty foods in it. To clean, I scrub it with metal (spatula or sponge), no soap. If it gets particularly bad, then I will boil some water in it & scrape with a spatula at the same time. The most important thing is to never let it stay wet - I always heat the pan until all water has evaporated.
Besides that, it gets better with time & cooking. The thing I appreciate the most about isn’t necessarily the nonstick coating (though that’s definitely nice) but the amount of heat it can “store”, and how evenly it is released into the food.
Tl;dr don’t overthink it.
I have a Lodge cast iron I’ve been using for ~5 years now, and 3 more I’ve acquired since then.
The first time I used it, I put a bit of canola oil in it on medium high heat, made sure it spread out over the whole inside, and then right when I saw the first wisp of smoke I took it off the heat & wiped out the excess oil.
Since then, I don’t do anything special. Cook in it with oil, use metal spatulas/flippers.
After use, once it cools most of the way, I wipe it out with hot water, dish soap (Palmolive from Costco), and a scotch blue scrubby (so not the super harsh one).
Then I dry it with a towel, and put it away.
The only things to really worry about is not letting it soak, not leaving it wet (or it will rust), and not putting it in the dishwasher.
I bought a Lodge brand cast iron pan from target 10 years ago for $20 when I was in much the same position as you. It comes pre-seasoned so I just started using it. I have never seasoned the pan. I don't use soap on it, just hot water and a heavy duty scrubber, towel dry and put a little bit of oil on it and spread it with a paper towel. It works even better than new. In my mind the only downside is that it is extremely heavy and so my girlfriend won't use it at all. Perhaps that is an advantage to some people.
I think everybody else in this thread already went through everything, but as the primary cook in my house, I use all three varieties of pans, cast iron, stainless steel, and non-stick. They all have their purposes, and learned how to use each one is just that, a learning process.
Regarding seasoning the pan. If you bought it box fresh from Lodge, they advertise "pre-seasoned" but I would personally throw it in the oven at 350 first thing, get it hot, put a really light layer of canola oil on it, and let it cool to room temp. You can spend the time baking seasoning layers on, but it's not worth it IMO.
Cleaning is easy. If there's stuff stuck on the bottom, put some water in the pan and let it boil to get it come off. Otherwise wash it with Dawn or whatever other commercial dish detergent and it's fine. Dry it well, and apply canola oil whenever it starts to not shine.
Other thing...Things will stick to the pan! That's good! It's how you develop crusts on steak, and get fond for pan sauces. Patience is important!
We use cast iron daily in our house. They have replaced almost all other pans. We spent the extra bucks and got Finex pans that come with the cooking surface milled "smooth". The only thing we don't use the cast iron for specifically is acidic foods (no tomatoes no lemons etc.). As far as maintenance this is the routine:
And that's it, that's our whole routine and we've got a good season going thus far.
Everyone else here has touched upon care and feeding of cast iron; I'll just say I use cast iron 98% of the time and I'm never going back. The last straw for regular cookware for me was when we spent $800+ for a really good Williams Sonoma cookset with non-stick diamond coating or whatever they call it, that should last an eon or two. Or at least at that price it should. After three months of use, everything stuck to it like glue. In reading forums the only advice was, "yeah it sucks, turn down the heat". You had to turn down the heat so low it was useless. All the teflon coated cookware I've used over the years is good for perhaps three to four years before the coating starts peeling off. Enameled cookware lasts longer but everything eventually sticks to it and they inevitably chip.
Some of my best cast iron buys have been at yard sales. You can get a pan or griddle often for $5 or $10, versus $50 to $80 you might pay for something new, and they've already been broken in and well-seasoned. Cast iron lasts a lifetime and your grandchildren will likely be able to use them a lifetime as well, if taken care of.
My absolute favourite cast iron pan is an old mid-century 5-inch pan I bought for $10 from a flea market; after cleaning off the gunk and rust, it's the smoothest, nonstickiest pan I own. I have two other cast irons I abuse for whatever, but this one is my egg-only pan that makes perfect nonsticking eggs.
I have no real point to this, just backing up the love for thrift finds!
I hear ya. Cast iron is probably one of best thrift finds to buy. As long as it's not cracked or warped, it's good!
If I were to be using an open flame like a gas stove or a campfire, yeah, I would absolutely reach for a cast-iron skillet. But they’re too heavy for every day use, and if I’m going to have to wash them between uses anyway, I’d rather use a lighter material that doesn’t require special techniques for cooking eggs, which I do almost every day.
I have some stainless steel pans, but they’re an absolute pain to use because their handles are at a weird angle that makes them difficult to use on my induction hob.
I have some carbon steel pans, but I don’t use them because if they get hotter than an extremely low temperature (for carbon steel), they warp on the bottom and won’t sit flat on my induction hob. So they’re pointless. I went with a 9.5 and 11 inch from Ballarini, so maybe I didn’t get a good brand. Pretty disappointing if I’m honest.
Aluminum won’t work with induction without a special stainless steel bottom, and I just haven’t arsed myself to spend the money and try them because the pans I have now do everything I want them to do so far.
I actually cook in a modern type of ceramic nonstick. It’s from a brand called CAROTE. I use silicone tools on it, even though it says that I can use metal and other types of tools like wood. I also hand wash every time instead of using them in the dishwasher even though they say they’re “dishwasher safe” because I don’t believe them. I don’t believe any nonstick when it says that I can use metal or throw them in the dishwasher.
On cleaning: if you pour water in it while it's still hot, ideally immediately after you finish cooking, the burnt food bits get much easier to scrape off with a spatula. Even if you're going to use soap on it afterward, it means you have much less scrubbing to do at that point.
Deglazing to make a pan sauce is the same thing except you usually use other liquids and don't discard the result.
I don't have many preferences in cookware materials. Over the years, I've tossed out most of the cast iron pans I had, due to them warping. I bought a carbon steel skillet and hated it. The seasoning would pop off that thing if you said a cross word to it. And it warped even on medium heat. It's long gone in the trash.
What I'm left with is a hodge-podge of cookware I've bought or inherited. Most of my pans and skillets are stainless steel, with copper bottoms. Some of them date back to the 1960's. I don't have any issues with them, since I don't expect them to have much, if any non-stick properties. They're not hard to clean.
The two cast-iron pans I have left are a small skillet, which I use to bake cornbread, and a round griddle, which would be great for making pancakes, if I liked pancakes, which I don't. So, I pull it out to warm tortillas, or make grilled-cheese sandwiches.
I also have a heavy aluminum sauce pan, 10" across, which I use quite often. It is anodized, so no weird tastes added due to the aluminium, and it works just fine with acidic sauces.
For eggs, or sauces that will stick easily (honey and soy sauce is a common culprit), I use non-stick cookware from Tramontina. Since I use them sparingly, the non-stick coatings are holding up quite well. By the way, why not clean non-stick in a dishwasher? It's not like the other dishes and silverware are going flying around in there. The soap is not harsh, and the temperatures in the dishwasher don't come close to what the pans face on the stovetop. It's a bit of advice that makes no sense to me.
others have said all of this -- but its very simple.
Don't ever let it rest with excess oil, though. You don't need a mirror finish, but you do want a consistent finish.
This isn't perfect, but its pretty good -- https://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-for-seasoning-cast-iron/
Got a 28cm pan from ikea. It's mostly used to cook steak.
Dish soap, brush / scouring pad.dry it by leaving it on the fire (induction is fun).
One thing I haven't seen mentioned: its heavy!I use it sometime to tenderize chicken breast before a deep fry.
As a small side note: We failed a couple times to maintain a cast iron (a bit of rust and not being in the best cooking environment = bleh). Where our cast iron use shined was a griddle top. I get people manage to cook in the pan-shaped ones but it honestly just pisses me off trying to maneuver the heavy stupid thing to get food reminense out or get a better angle with utensils. A cast iron griddle top, however, has now become one of the main ways we cook food now. We leave it on the stovetop with a light covering to keep dust off, and just being able to throw some stirfry or grilled cheese on the flat top quick is just... man, I really don't miss not having one.
If the typical cast iron pan doesn't work out for you, definitely give the griddle style type a shot!
im vegan. i just hit it with a drop of neutral oil, heat it, rub it down with paper towel, then water to get the excess oil off. i do this a few times until it "looks good" and that's p much it
Assume that I'm a total noob - what is neutral oil? Is that an oil with no strong taste, like sunflower oil? If not sunflower oil, what oil is good for this?
Vegetable oil is usually the go-to here for its high smoke point and neutral flavor. I use canola oil as it's neutral, has a slightly lower smoke point, but is healthier than vegetable oil (lower saturated fat, higher omega 3s).
I get the smoke point mattering, but does the healthiness of the seasoning oil matter? Isn't the point of the seasoning that it forms a sort of non-stick layer? Or is it a sacrificial thing, releasing into the food gradually but protecting the pan?
I think if the sole purpose of the oil is seasoning, vegetable oil is the best choice. The reason I don't have veggie oil laying around is that canola is better for other cooking purposes.
Ha, yes that makes sense. And at the risk of sounding pedantic, you also mean sunflower oil when you say vegetable oil? Is that a US thing? Because when I hear vegetable oil, I'd think of sunflower, maybe corn. I don't know if olive oil is also a vegetable oil (don't come at me with something about olives being a fruit and start calling it a "fruit oil"!)?
*Edit: I did a quick google and it looks like "vegetable oil" can refer to a whole bunch of things - is "vegetable oil" sold under that name in supermarkets where you are? I've always wondered, tbh. Because I often read recipes in English, which are, of course, often US, and there's often the odd ingredient that's either difficult or impossible to get (not saying that it can't be subbed, of course, but when something like "coffee creamer" or "50/50" (I think it's called that, it was some dairy product, I think) comes up, I'll often have to sit down and think "fine, but what does my local supermarket call this?".
Sorry I should've specified, in the US, soybean oil is just called "vegetable oil". All other oils, despite technically being "vegetable oils" have more specific names e.g. canola oil.
Worth noting for folks elsewhere, in the US oil labeled just "vegetable oil" can have canola or safflower or whatever blended in, depending on the cost of the crops each production cycle probably, but is usually soybean.
/Additive not contradictory
Half and half is probably what you're thinking of.
I feel the same way reading British recipes (or Aussie/NZ ones) and having to figure out what herb goes by a different name or what is the comparable level of fat to a double cream.
yep, you got it. sunflower oil, vegetable oil, canola oil, grapeseed oil, etc all work
Interesting, thanks for that. I'm not sure I can buy some of those oils from the supermarkets around me though, haha! I think sunflower and olive oils are the most normal around me, with coconut oil being the exotic new addition. The shops didn't know where to put it for a while, the same recipient would show up in the makeup section and then in the cooking oils section (this was a few years ago, to be fair, they've now sorted out a plastic tub for the makeup stuff and a more utilitarian container for the cooking one).
Do you have any recommendations for vegan dishes to cook with a cast iron skillet? I have recently gotten one after seeing a Lodge skillet for $25 and have now cooked some black bean patties and vegan cornbread in it so far. Note, I think you should use more than a 1 for 1 when replacing milk with soy milk.
it's excellent for searing, so i cook tofu in mine. i sear the whole block really well done so it's charred, then slice it and top a bowl of rice with it. add hoisin, then cabbage, green onion, and bean sprouts that you stir fried in oil and mirin. finally, top with sesame oil and sesame seeds
eat, and pass out cause it's so heavy
I don't cook with cast iron, but have, have grown up around it, and have followed quite a bit of modern discourse. I'll offer a blind opinion without reading other comments to try to offer what I understand and know from experience:
Unless you find one that's dull silver, all new cast iron (naked cast iron, not ceramic) is seasoned. This is by necessity, as it will rust from ambient moisture in storage. Seasoning does two things:
Every cook I will clean and season it. I grew up in the "Don't use soap" but the biggest thing is to finish cooking, take a warm pan and scrape it clean/dry, submerge and scrape if needed to really get stuff off it. Soaking can, and will, damage the seasoning. The best case scenario is your seasoning takes on dishwater flavor. The worst case scenario is you remove it and your food tastes like metal. I've experienced both.
Near the end of my dedicated tenure I would hand-wash with dish detergent. The big concern, and recent discourse, is that back in the days of lye soap you had unclear concentrations of lye, and lye-forward soaps which would damage the season and corrode the metal. Most dish detergents do not carry this risk, so are completely safe to use. If you make/buy a soap today that is large-scale, it'll also likely be superfatted to a point (more fat than can be reacted with), so if you're particularly hippy dippy you should be fine there, as well. But do what you want as long as that pan is completely clean and food-material-free when you go to dry/season.
My cast iron process is usually:
Cooking is a skill. Cast iron, stainless, carbon, and even raw aluminum pans are subsets of this skillset. The practices are more or less the same. Something I recommend is getting a cheap laser thermometer. I typically start cooking most meats once the pan hits 350, regardless of material. From there, on cast iron, you want to use more oil than you think you should, and ensure the proteins are fully set before you try to flip the meat. You'll know you're here because the meat will release.
I do all my frying in cast iron, with enameled cast iron for all my pots and pans. Not had any telfon (unless you count in my rice cooker!) for over a decade, just don't see the need for it anymore.
I worry about it very little, wash them in the sink with normal soaps, cook acidic foods, etc.
The only time I have "problems" is if I do not allow a frying pan to heat properly before I start frying, that is the biggest adjustment to make. Shortcut there and you will get stuck on eggs, get the pan properly hot first and all is well.
In current year, there is almost zero reason to cook with cast iron. I would highly recommend reasonable quality stainless clad (aluminum core) from reputable brands and simply learning to cook with stainless. You will get more advantages that way. If you absolutely want the best cookware, then copper is the way to go, it is just very expensive (but surprisingly, high end stainless can be as much as copper). I recommend any of the brands that are stainless lined vs tin. Yes, cleaning the exterior of copper is a pain if you want them to stay shiny, personally I don't care. I've also fucked up and left them on the stovetop more than once where an entire layer of oxidation happened to the copper I had to flake off and remove. Despite looking hideous, all of them perform amazing, and I'm sure I could polish them if I desired, but I don't really care. They get patina or dark spots or turn orange than green, cook the same no big deal.
There are way too many misconceptions about cast iron that don't really shake out. Yes, it is heavy. So it can hold more thermal energy than a lighter aluminum pan......but the conductivity is so bad you can't get that energy into the food, and they are often not homogeneous enough to have even heating, and if you have a high end stainless clad pan with a thick aluminum core that's comparable weight to cast iron.....it will hold more just as much thermal energy while being a better pan in every other way. Cast iron also has a bad surface finish, which contributes to sticking/bad conduction, and does not help seasoning the pan or any nonsense. Back in the day higher end cast iron was finished smooth in the inside, which was better, but because modern brands are leaning on the myths(and cutting costs) they just leave the cast finish.
Finally, stainless steel can also be seasoned, in the exact same manner as cast iron, there is nothing at all preventing you from seasoning stainless, and many of my most used stainless pans have a seasoning layer on them. Here is my pro tip actually: many stainless pans, even expensive ones from All-Clad or Demeyere, still have the lathe marks on the interior: sand these down to be glass smooth. A smoother pan is superior in every way. One of the other big factors in my love of stainless clad copper is because they are stamped and not machined, the interior is extremely smooth (they may sandblast them now that I think about it) and it both will take seasoning better, conduct heat better, and stick less.
I am ready and willing to fight anyone in the comments that believes cast iron still has merit :P
I have been seriously considering a really high quality stainless steel pan.
Have you got any advice for day to day use?
I use Tramontina, it came recommended by Kenji and NYT. Seems good to me, but I'm no great chef.
I'll second tramontina. My set has a thick bottom with different metals (no idea which other than stainless steel on the outside) I a love them. Nothing sticks to them and they never get burned. The easiest to clean pans I've ever had. If I ever need to get new ones (I've been using the ones I have for 8 years and they are perfect still) I'd see if they have any with that bottom system on the whole thing and not just the bottom.
I'm not super familiar right now, but Demeyere/All clad are high quality, I'm not sure if maybe there are better bargains out there, sometimes either brand can be bad on sale from various places.
I have my 10 year old $20 cast iron pan and a 2 year old $200 dollar all-clad stainless steel frying pan. They're both great...for different things. Stainless if I want to be bougie and make a pan sauce for a steak or something. Cast iron for everything else. You ain't cooking eggs on the stainless. Stainless is meant to stick, to develop fond. Regular home cooks are not going to have a good time using stainless for everyday meals and to advertise it as anything else is misleading at best and downright mean at worst when you consider the insane prices of good stainless. Literally 10x the price for the same size pan, and that's on the low end! Copper core is more like 20x!
I don't have any problem cooking eggs on stainless. Nor fish or scallops or anything else, as long as you let the pan come to temp, use oil, and let the food naturally release rather than trying to turn it too early it's fine. Restaurants use stainless fairly frequently without any issues of sticking. Yes, it takes technique, but technique is something you can develop over time. It's not a race or anything. The even heating and conductivity of stainless clad is going to result in better cooking most of the time. I mean there's countless evidence this is the case. Cast iron fell out of favor because it was a worse material, and you can't really work around its flaws, whereas with clad, you absolutely can. One of the best things I did for my own cookware was just trash all the crappy and cheap non-stick etc I'd accumulated over the years, and only keep stainless clad or copper cookware with the exception of a few Staub/Le Creuset enameled cast iron I'd been gifted.
If you use induction I'd skip Demeyere, they work great but at least the 2 I have the core vibrates and makes a racket that All Clad and others don't.
I went from mostly non-stick to mostly cast iron to mostly stainless. Nowadays I only use my cast iron for searing steaks, but that's mostly due to shape and size rather than something like heat retention.
Stainless is probably a bit less work than cast iron, when you balance scrubbing vs seasoning. Also, I like to flip my food with the pan, and cast iron is too heavy for that. I've also occasionally had issues with the seasoning flaking off the cast iron, which can be avoided if you're careful, but I'd prefer not to need to be careful.
I have been using a cast iron for years. I do all the things things people say you shouldn't like cooking with tomatoes and other acidic foods or washing it with soap. I don't do any maintenance on it, just cooking with oil will give it enough seasoning.
I do heat it on the stove for 5 minutes after cleaning to make sure it doesn't stay wet. I have a few times forgotten it on the stove for over an hour which has set my fire alarm off from getting too smoky. That ruins the seasoning and my next few times I use it will be rough, but then it's back to normal in a few days.
I have sometimes noticed small bits of iron in my food when cooking, but I brushed it off because your body needs iron anyway and it hasn't hurt me yet as far as I know.
I cook with cast iron. It's not a big deal and you shouldn't worry too much over it.
The seasoning gradually wears off from use and cleaning. I wash mine with soap and water in the sink and use a green scrub brush, and yes, it wears down the seasoning layer faster. Yes, it's getting water on the iron.
Water on the iron from washing is super easy to fix - put it on the stove until it's semi-hot and the water is gone.
The seasoning wearing down / off just means you lose some of your 'non-stick' effect. It can mean stuff sticks to the iron and you have to scrub it off - that's all.
Re-seasoning is just wiping a thin layer of high-smoke-temp cooking oil all over it and sticking it in the oven for an hour at around 400F.
I don’t get why it’s so in vogue to make cast iron out to be delicate. Sure, it might get rusty if you mistreat it, you can then fix it.
There is almost always at least one cast iron pan on my stove. That makes choosing it almost automatic unless my needs differ because of size or if I want to toss/flip something with the pan. I do avoid high acid in my old cast iron because if I manage to damage that seasoning layer it’s gone forever.
I use a bamboo wok brush and hot water to clean mine, then wipe it dry. I do wipe both sides dry because I don’t like how rusty pan bottoms look. It’s faster to clean because I usually need to soak my stainless, but I don’t think there’s a ton of effort difference unless my cast iron gets that brown film that needs to be scrubbed off.
I find mine pretty low maintenance. I seasoned it once years ago, it's due for another, but with proper technique it still is pretty non stick and washes fine. I only really use cast iron any more.
I don't use it because it's too heavy for me to use. My sister loved it, though, and made some fantastic meals!
I'm a fairly lazy chef in that I like cooking but hate maintenance, so I've settled on stainless steel. Aluminum with a coating is great, but I'm bad about noticing if the coating is starting to peel (so that knocks Teflon and likely copper out as well.) Cast iron gets in the way of leaving dishes in the sink for a day or more, so I've settled on what works best in the moment. I'd probably use cast iron if I only had to wash dishes I couldn't put in a dishwasher, however.
I'd really love a dishwasher so I could stop hand washing, but space/money concerns interfere. Still, I find stainless steel to work well in lieu of cast iron. I get a nice sear, when I properly lube the pan it doesn't char onto the pan, and I can do braising in the oven with no fuss.