Seasoning a carbon steel skillet

As a proper cooking geek I have gravitated towards carbon steel skillets. For a long time I was not even aware of that option, and was muscling my cast-iron pans around after ditching teflon, and after never warming up to stainless steel. After experiencing carbon steel, I gave away a number of my excellent-but-heavy cast iron pans, making space for carbon steel. The generated happiness was a nice bonus.

TLDR:

• Remove wax with boiling water, hot water and mild soap
• Dry the pan and heat it up
• Wipe the pan with an oiled rag to create a thin film of oil.
• Wipe the pan with a cleaner rag to remove any excess oil.
• Heat the pan on high heat, with a fan running, until all surfaces turn deep brown.
• If the pan is large, moving it around may speed up the process.
• Alternatively, bake the pan, upside down, in a preheated 500F oven for an hour and let the pan cool in the oven.

What is seasoning?

No, it has nothing to do with spices! It s a process of converting a raw steel or iron surface into a practically non-stick cooking surface that is also rust-proof.

The process of seasoning is what may keep a number of people away from carbon steel, or cast iron. I, too, was at first unsure how all of that will work out. I am happy to report that the feat has long been gone and that seasoning really should not be a reason for avoiding this superb, non-stick, ultra durable, and inexpensive cookware.

Basically, one coats a porous cooking surface with a very thin film of oil, and then applies high heat to essentially burn the oil. The oil dries and polymerizes and sticks onto the surface and in the pores, forming a protective surface that is practically non-stick. The beauty is that this surface is very sturdy, so one doesn't need to worry obsessively about protecting it.

Sheryl Canter's blog post is often referred as an authoritative source of science behind pan seasoning. Having a research background, I read the post, found it interesting, but I will admit that I prefer to keep things in life a bit simpler.

If the seasoning does get damaged or if you didn't season the pan properly, there is nothing to worry about. You simply season the pan again, as many times as you want. And of things go really badly, one can use steel wool to strip the old seasoning away and start again.

It is quite refreshing that these days carbon steel and cast iron are making such a comeback. Rarely does one come across items that are practically indestructible. I wonder what the business model of producers is - once you buy a carbon steel or a cast iron pan, it will last you for your life time, and it will outlive future generations as well.

Which oil to use?

Which oil should one use when seasoning a pan? This is a much debated question, and everyone seems to have their opinion. Sheryl Canter in her blog argues that flax seed oil is the way to achieve the hardest and the slickest seasoning possible. She also acknowledges that one can get a usable pan with other kinds of oil. When one purchases seasoned pans, manufacturers tend to disclose what oil they use - I have seen mentions of canola oil, bran oil, coconut oil and who knows what else.

The one consistent message I have seen is not to use extra virgin olive oil, or any other oil that contains impurities. Even Sheryl Cantor states that for flax seed oil, one needs to read the label and make sure that it contains no additives.

So what should one do? I don't claim deep expertise in chemistry of oil, and I have tried a number of options: canola, grape seed, corn, walnut, coconut, flax seed come to mind. I managed to get a usable seasoning with all of them, and frankly, I find it hard to tell the difference. I think it boils down to what you have at home. For example, flax seed oil is finicky - it is rather pricey, and one needs to store in the fridge. If you don't use it in smoothies or in some other way, do you really want to keep a bottle of oil in an already packed fridge just for occasional seasoning? Likely not.

What do I use? If I use straight oil, I go with either grape seed or walnut, or flax if I have it. But I like to play, and I read that adding beeswax to the seasoning helps with the process - but I have not seen a good explanation why. So I made myself a few seasoning pucks which I have been using lately.

Making a seasoning puck is, of course, trivial. One takes a clean tin can, and adds in there 1 part of beeswax, and two parts of oil. The proportions are by weight. The can goes in a hot water bath to melt the wax, then into silicone molds for the mixture to cool down. In a couple of hours, the pucks slide easily from the molds and are ready to use. 

For oil, I have used grape seed and flax seed, or walnut and flax seed. I find these pucks easy to use, the seasoning appears strong, and I find it easier to control how much seasoning I use - a quick touch of a hot surface melts just the right amount of the puck away.

Procedure

Carbon steel pans come coated with beeswax! How retro and how amazing! The wax is applied to protect the pan against rusting. Here is a brand new, still waxed Matfer pajella 14 inch carbon steel pan that I have been eyeing for a while - for the large cooking surface, and for its use as a roaster.

It looks nice and new, does it not? First we have to remove the wax. That is SUPER easy. Simply boil water in a kettle and pour boiling water in the pan, then swirl the hot water around. Then wash the pan with hot water and mild detergent - both the cooking surface and the bottom. If you are still not sure you removed all the wax, pour some water in the pan, bring the water to boil, and swirl it around.

I think it took me under 10 minutes to remove the wax from this large pan. So please, fear not, it really is easy. The washed pan looks like this.

No real visible differences!

The next step is fun. You need two old cotton or linen rags - I use old dish cloths. It really best to use these, but you can get away with paper towels. The lint free variety is best, but I have done this successfully with regular paper towels as well.

Dab some a little bit of cooking oil on one of the rags, or rub a rag with a seasoning puck.

This rag will be used to apply the oil on the pan. I keep such a rag in the kitchen under the sink. Sometimes I use it after cleaning a pan to wipe it with just a bit of oil. That is often recommended and it is really not required. You seasoning will protect the surface, and if you don't use the pan frequently enough, the oil will simply go rancid.

So now we have a rag with a bit of oil or seasoning wax, and a rag that is clean, or at least has much less oil in it.

Put the pan on the stove and heat in on medium for a few minutes. The goal is to open pores in the metal a bit more. Once the pan is nice and warm, or even really hot if you lose track of time, wipe the whole pan with the oily rag. leaving as thin a film on the pan as you can possibly imagine.

Then take the clean rag and wipe the pan some more. This is a most important step - the pan will look practically dry. Excess oil will simply pool in the pan into sticky spots. You can remove those of course, but why give yourself additional work.

Then set the heat to medium high or high and let the pan heat up and smoke of 5-10 minutes. Run your fan and open the windows if the fan cannot handle the smoke. This is what starts to happening:

You see that a part of the pan was starting to turn brown. This is a good thing, that is the oil starting to polymerize.

After a bit longer, the pan continues to transform, and the polymerization is starting to happen on the side walls as well.

Notice that this pan is very large and even though I used a large and powerful burner at full heat, I still had to move the pan around to get the heat distributed enough. If I waited longer, I think I would not need to move the pan, but my approach worked just fine.

At the end, the entire pan got a really deep patina and it looked like it was 100 years old! Well, almost. A well-used pan does darken with time. 

The pan was ready for cooking. I think this patina looks great, and I prefer it over the clean stainless steel look as carbon steel does not nag me to keep the pan shiny and new looking.

Because I am who I am, I did the seasoning twice, even though it was not needed. I pre-heated my oven to 500F and I wiped the cooking surface and walls with the oily rag again. The pan was super hot and started to smoke right away, Then I wiped the pan with the clean(er) rag to remove the excess of oil. I baked the pan in the oven for almost an hour and let it cool. There was no visible difference, but I felt good about being diligent. But I admit that I almost never do the seasoning in the oven as it takes more time, energy, and I don't think it is any better than stove-top seasoning.

The moment of truth

The same day, I used the newly seasoned pan to make pancakes. To my great satisfaction, I needed to use only a little bit of cooking oil - about as much as I would have used anyway on a non-stick pan. Cooking on medium heat, pancakes seared nicely and the pan required only a wipe to be clean and ready to be used again.

Cooking on medium heat is one adjustment one needs to make when switching to carbon steel or cast iron - these materials conduct the heat so much better than teflon of ceramics that one needs to cook at a lower heat.

Because these pans are so much more substantial than teflon or ceramic coated pans, one needs to preheat them for a bit longer. My carbon steel pans need about a minute or two on medium heat to preheat. It is much better to preheat on medium, because this gives the heat an opportunity to distribute more evenly and one avoids possible hot spots. 

Gluten free pizza

For the last two years we have been advised to avoid gluten. We found gluten-free life surprisingly easy to adjust to. We do miss the sourdough bread that we used to make regularly we I have no idea how to replicate, convincingly, the magic crust. We replace the bread with gluten-free muffins, which are equally amazing, so there is no looking back now that our restrictions are less strict.

Another dish that is impossible to replicate is pizza. Good dough requires gluten, it is as simple as that, I do not know how to replicate the texture. I did discover, however, that one can make a very tasty pizza from chickpea flour. No, the dough will not look the same, but the flavor will defeat wheat-based dough any day.

The trick is to make a pancake-like thick batter from chickpea flour. Fry the pancake at a medium heat on the stove, on both sides. A carbon steel skillet, or a cast iron skillet work very well. This is what the done base looks like.

Once the pancake is cooked but not burned, I add the toppings, and stick the pan into a preheated 400F oven for about 10 minutes for the toppings to heat through and for the cheese to melt. Here is a recent result  - I used our home-made tomato sauce, sauteed peppers and shiitake mushrooms, goat cheese, and a touch of red pepper flakes. Along with a salad, this was a fabulous meal for two.

Procedure:

• I make make chickpea flour with a grain mill. It goes much faster if I break down the beans in a coffee grinder and then transfer them to the grain mill. 
• About a cup or so of beans yields two pizza's made in a 10-inch carbon steel skillet with the cooking surface of 8-9 inches.
• To prepare the batter:
• Add a good pinch of salt to the flour
• Add 1 tsp of baking powder.
• Optionally, add some dry oregano and marjoram. 
• Mix the four and the seasonings well.
• Add a few TBS of olive oil
• Start adding water slowly, maybe 1/4 cup first, and stir well. The batter will be too dense to even mix.
• Keep adding water in small quantities and mix the batter until you reach a consistency of a thick pancake batter. One can still pour it, but it is pretty thick.
• To cook:
• Preheat a carbon steel skillet on medium to medium low.
• When the skillet is hot, add a TBS or two of cooking oil
• Add in enough batter to form a thick pancake - the thickness is your choice.
• Cook slowly until cooked on one side, about 4-5 minutes, but keep checking to avoid burning the base. It's important to keep the heat low enough.
• Flip with a large spatula, and cook on the other side.
• Flip again, top with the toppings, and cook for another 8-10 minutes in a preheated 400F oven.

Kitchen knives, a refreshed opinon

Many people ask about kitchen knives. Knives have a reputation of being expensive, there are  so many different kinds and brands that one can easily gets confused. Some years ago I hastily wrote a post on kitchen knives, and now is the time for a follow-up. The goal is to make the decision process easier, and a non-goal is to go anywhere close to debating which knives are the best of the best value.

TLDR

• All you need: a chef's knife, a paring knife, and a serrated knife if you cut bread. 
• Optional: kitchen shears and vegetable peeler
• Good kitchen knives do not need to be very expensive. 
• Sharp knives are safer than dull ones. Keeping them sharp can be easy if the steel is not too hard.

Steel

It is very easy to make a big deal out of what steel is used for the blade. I suggest not to waste much time on this. My preferences:

• I prefer stain resistant knives, otherwise the maintenance is more than what I would be willing to do.
• For a home cook, ease of maintenance and resistance to chipping trumps steel hardness. HRC 58 seems to be the sweet spot for steel hardness. 
• Steels that are not at the extreme end of hardness tend to be more cost effective.

Note that requirements for a home cook are fairly trivial: Any knife, even if one cooks every day, is rarely if ever used for more than 15 minutes per day. That means that it takes at least a month of home use to come close to the amount of use a knife can see in a commercial setting in a single day. That is at home use, any reasonable knife will stay sufficiently sharp for long enough.

If you are willing to develop knife sharpening skills - it really is not that hard - and if you are willing to put in enough elbow grease, then by all means, go with as hard a knife as you want. For example, my kitchen knives are on a harder end, but not extreme, HRC 60- 62. I got them because of their size, blade shape, and manageable weight. The price I pay is that it takes about 5 times longer to sharpen a 12-inch chef's knife at HRC 62 than a 10-inch chef's knife at HRC 58. I am willing to pay that price, but chances are you are not.

Technique

It is easy use a knife properly. It does not take all that much practice either. A small investment is worth making as the experience will be much more satisfying. You will be much faster, and your use of a knife will be much safer. In the days of YouTube, your free lesson is one click away. Here are a few for your amusement.

Chef's knives

These two chef's knives are the ones I reach for. Both are large 12 inch knives, and I use them for both large jobs, e.g. cutting a squash or a head of cabbage, and small jobs, e.g. mincing a garlic clove.

The Zhen is made in Taiwan. It cost me about $75. The knife has a nice curve to its blade allowing for easy chopping. It has been my goto knife for the last 5 years and I still like it very much. It is light, the weight is 9.9 oz, but it is not strong enough for chopping bones. Not an issue for me. The cutting core is VG10 steel at 60-62 HRC. I need to sharpen it twice a year and we use it daily. The finish is not perfect - one rivet was not perfectly flush, and after 5 years I still find the handle very comfortable.

The Dalstrong is manufactured in China, it cost me about $85. It is a recent addition as we wanted two large knives with curved blades so that Jasna and I both have similar tools available. The blade curve is quite pronounced, which makes chopping very easy. At 11.2 oz it is a bit heavier than the Zhen, but it is still surprisingly nimble. The steel is AUS10, reportedly very similar to VG10, with the similar Rockwell hardness of 62. The finish is perfect, and the Damascus pattern is quite pretty.

Dalstrong is a pretty new company with superb marketing and with reasonable prices. I gave it a shot recently: All the knives I got perform very well and appear well designed and well made. They are a bit heavier than many of the Japanese knives I have been using, but not too heavy at all.

The size of my chef knives seems to intimidate many people, they resemble small swords. Once my friends give it a try, everyone agrees that the size makes cutting so much easier. And safer: One can keep the tip of the blade on the board, which adds greatly to the stability and control of the blade. One does need a large cutting board, otherwise there is no way to keep the tip of the blade on the board. The picture below shows that mincing a garlic clove can be done really easily with a giant knife.

The large size makes sharpening these knives a bit more work because one has a long blade to work on. Having a large sharpening stone helps. If one uses a cheap pull through sharpener, then the sharpening effort is much lesser, but it has to be done more often.

Important points: Neither knife required me to take a loan, yet they are very well designed, easy to maintain, and are a pleasure to use. Note that cooking just a few meals at home pays easily for a good knife. If the large size is too much for you, there are shorter versions.

If you are on a super tight budget, or if you barely ever cook, consider stamped knives - the best known company there may be Victorinox.

Paring knives

I find myself paying way more attention to ergonomics of paring knives than any other knife. I think this is because they are intended for small jobs, one needs to be able to hold them in many different ways.

The two paring knives I reach for all the time are made by Global, a 3.5-inch one and a 4-inch one. If I had to pick only one, I would probably go with the smaller one - it's much more nimble.

The Global knives are made of a bit of a softer steel than my favorite chef's knives, the hardness number is reportedly 56-58, and that shows. They lose sharpness sooner, but I still sharpen them only when I sharpen the much harder chef's knives.

Shape wise, I like my paring knives to have a rather narrow and pointy blade - that seems to suit most applications best. The handle should be small and light, otherwise one needs to be too careful how to hold them.

Serrated knives

The standard application for a serrated knife is slicing bread, especially the crusty one. We don't bake much bread these days, but I still find a good use for serrated knives: Cutting up a pineapple - it's fibrous enough that a serrated knife helps. Quartering a bucket of tomatoes when I make tomato sauce would dull almost any knife, so I use a serrated one. When I need to cut hot food, I reach for an inexpensive Victorinox serrated knife and not worry whether the heat will alter the steel of fancier knives. That knife is one of the most used in our kitchen because of its thin blade. It works well on cheese, boiled eggs, pastry and so on. 

For slicing bread, my favorite shape is an offset serrated knive as it allows nice slices without my hand hitting the cutting board. For all other application, I use a a chef's/utility knife shape.

It can matter how rough the serrated blade is. For example, my Global serrated knife is amazing when it comes to slicing bread. Side remark: After discovering offset serrated knives, I am not the biggest fan of the shape of that knife, but the blade has no competition. However, the "teeth" are so rough that they seem to really tear more delicate food, so I use that knife only for bread. The Victorinox knives are better for general applications, but they have a harder time dealing with European style bread crust. I recently acquired a Dalstrong serrated knife which strikes a decent balance, though it is still on a rougher side.

Honing steel

The sole job of a honing steel is to align the edge of your blade. The blade appears sharper - because it is, but no metal is removed, so one can hone and hone and hone and will not damage the blade.

I use a honing steel every time when I store the knife, frequently when I pick the knife up, and occasionally during cooking, when I am doing a long prep. The technique is easy - simply pull the blade over the steel at a shallow angle. I pull the blade towards me - many videos of YouTube show that, here is a good one.

I treated myself with F. Dick Multicut steel that is considered the king of honing steels - the honing is faster, because you drag the blade over several mini steels. I do admit that almost any honing steel I have used has done the job.

Some honing steels really are sharpeners: The ones made from ceramics or those covered with diamond dust remove metal and they will reshape the edge. For home use that likely does not matter at all. I do use a diamond sharpening steel for sharpening my serrated knives. This is why all of them have a scalloped serration.

Sharpening tools

YouTube is packed with videos that tell one how to use whetstones to sharpen knives - here is a pretty informative one. At the end of the video, there is obligatory paper slicing, and often an arm gets a bit of a shave, illustrating the sharpness. The videos are correct - making your knife razor sharp is not that hard.

I believe that someone who uses their knife once a week or so can get away with a handy pull-through sharpener. The knife may not stay sharp very long but that hardly matters - a few pulls and the blade is OK.  You can also have you knives "professionally sharpened" - there are many services that do that, one can usually find one on a decent size farmer's market. 

If you are a bit more serious, get whetstones. I use the ones by Shapton, but there are many good ones, and YouTube can quickly provide more information than one may be able to digest. 

Two stones, or one combination stone is all one needs. To shape the edge, one needs a 1000 grit stone, unless the blade is damaged so badly that it requires a rough stone to literally reshape the blade - I would probably get a new affordable knife in such a situation. After restoring the edge, one needs to polish it. That increases how long the blade stays sharp, and it also make the cut smoother. A 4000 to 6000 grit stone is great for that. You can also polish in several steps - 2000 grit, 5000 grit, 8000 grit and even higher if you so desire. Practically, that is not needed, but if it makes you happy, there is nothing wrong with going above and beyond. Here is a video with an overview of the grits.

Other cutting tools

I find kitchen shears a highly underrated piece of kitchen equipment in the West. They are great for everything from opening packages to snipping herbs to cutting through chicken bones. I have a small one and a large one - either one would suffice on its own.

I also use my vegetable peelers quite a lot, and i especially take pleasure in using it for peeling butternut squash. Not sure why I find this so satisfying, but I do and that is OK.

Beyond that, it is easy to go crazy and get a special tool for any single thing. I would recommend to step back and see how often any such tool would be used. For example, I like buying a whole salmon when Copper River salmon is in season. For this reason I have a fillet knife, but I only got a $20 KastKing - a  knife that I have been beyond happy with and for which I do not feel bad when it does not see any action for a while.