Cast iron does not need to be babied. You might have been led to believe that your precious skillet’s seasoning—that carbonized layer of oil that creates a glossy nonstick sheen—is under continuous threat. All it takes is one absent-minded, dish-doing significant other going at it with soap and a sponge and in an instant, the patina on your grandma’s heirloom Griswold, which she cultivated through decades of love-filled cooking, is scrubbed away. Your cast-iron pan is as good as ruined, and now, so is your marriage.
But this is cast iron, not a sickly Victorian child. It’s tough stuff. Some people pull mangled, rusted cast iron pans from the actual dump, restore them, and then use them to cook food. People like this regularly gather online in the forums of castironcollector.com, a throwback to the good old days of the internet when fans and experts would gather and share their collective wisdom. The site is a bonafide treasure trove of cast iron care tips from the people who love these pans the most. Even before I began testing and reviewing cast-iron pans, I learned plenty of valuable lessons there about cooking and caring for cast iron, and lost the fear of accidentally ruining my pan when I cleaned it. That forum is also where I learned that the best tool for cleaning a cruddy cast-iron pan is the same tool you use to cook with it—a plain old flat top spatula.
While any flat top spatula could conceivably work for this job, I will point you to this solidly built, but still fairly budget-friendly model from Dexter Russell. This spatula has rounded corners and an edge that isn’t terribly sharp, allowing you to file away gunk on the surface of the pan with minimal to no collateral damage to the seasoning surface of the pan. The rounded corners can get into the contours of the pan without gouging the sides. And because it’s sturdier than a random $6 Amazon turner (Dexter Russell has a long history of making quality, inexpensive kitchen tools) the spatula works just as well to cook with as it does to clean it up.
Let’s say you fried up a batch of breakfast sausage which left some bits stuck on the surface of the skillet. You would take out your flat top spatula and scrape back and forth over the cooked-on crust until the pan feels smooth again. You don’t have to go too hard at it, but don’t get too caught up holding back either. Many cast iron enthusiasts argue that consistent scraping will gradually refine the surface of the pan over time, making it smoother and more nonstick. Eventually, even the roughest, cheapest cast iron pan can develop the glassy sheen of a bespoke Butter Pat or Smithey.
And if you screw up the seasoning a little, it’s actually not that big of a deal. I spent my early days of cast iron ownership fretting that I’d scratch away the seasoning or that the pH of a sauce would dissolve it. I always dreaded cleaning the pan because I couldn’t always tell the difference between the seasoning and dirty old grease. That all got better when I adopted a simple adage I’d read from cast iron enthusiasts like the guy who pulled his pan from the dump: Just cook with it. Seasoning builds up organically through frequent cooking, and is a gradual, enduring process. And when you clean it, use soap if you want to, and don’t worry about a few scratches. Just get out that spatula and go to town. Your pan can handle it.