CastIronSeasoning

Hello folks! This was never meant to be a real sub. I made it so I can store my seasoning related stuff here for easy access. I never thought anyone would ever wander in here. So if you happened to join this sub, please note that all this stuff is very experimental. So whatever you see here, please take with a grain of salt. Thanks guys!

I have a Victoria 13" paella-style cast iron.

I won't be using it for a while and I also need to do some physical therapy on my upper body.

That being the case, when I'm stuck in the kitchen at home monitoring things, I'm going to hand sand the piece to a mirror-ish finish. At the most, I'll go up to a 220 grit

From there, I'm going to try things with the excessively smooth surface. I'm curious if baking the raw surface at 500°F (electric oven) will form some sort of oxide layer that is good for seasoning.

I had the time to experiment.

I was curious about what happens when you boil water in a pan where the seasoning:

1. May not have been heated long enough
2. Was definitely heated long enough

1. Weak seasoning will be taken off with no additional damage
2. It will confirm seasoning is officially good.

Going forward, I plan on boiling water to confirm the quality of the seasoning I'm doing with Avocado. Hopefully it'll provide additional details to optimize seasoning methodology.

Avocado seasoning is process intensive.

If you are not going to do all the steps completely, do not bother at all. The seasoning will just fail.

With that out of the way, here are the details as of today.

• Put oil in a pan and slowly heat it until the oil starts to flow faster, almost like water.
• Wipe oil all over the pan as thin as you can.
• Heat the pan slowly up to 350°F. You'll notice it emit an odor when it gets close to this temperature.
• Hold at this temperature until it starts smoking
• Wipe the pan with a clean rag to remove more oil. You'll notice the oil is thicker than before. Wipe it as if you're trying to wipe off all the oil
• Keeping it around 350°F, keep wiping until the smoking slows down.
• Now, heat it up to 400°F.
• Wipe after 15 minutes.
• Now heat it up to 500°F and bake for an hour or two.
• If you're doing this all on a stovetop, keep heating on low or medium and wiping until the oil turns a light brown or golden brown.

I used olive oil to initially season my cast iron pan and have had no problems with it whatsoever, no sticking, nothing. Did I do something wrong?