Seasoning your carbon steel pan means giving it a gorgeous coating that prevents rust and keeps food from sticking.
It is believed that carbon steel pans are practically useless without the seasoning. And since the seasoning is “just” cooking oil baked onto the skillet — I use “just” in quotation marks because there is a trick or two to getting it right — how well you do it depends entirely on you.
Why All the Talk About Seasoning?
Some cookware, like cast iron skillets and carbon steel pans, rusts too easily.
That’s because cast iron and carbon steel have a high iron content, which makes them naturally reactive. The iron reacts with the oxygen and moisture in the air to form iron oxides, the nerdy way to say “rust.”
This is caused by oxidation, the same reaction that turns an apple or an avocado brown shortly after it’s cut, but with metals. If you don’t apply a protective coating to the cookware’s surface, it will rust within hours — even minutes.
Then how do you give your cast iron pans a protective coating?
By seasoning them. This is when you rub a smidge of cooking oil into the metal surface with a paper towel or cloth and then heat the pan until its color changes from a metallic gray to a copper orange.
As a result:
- The pan doesn’t rust, since the baked-on oil keeps the steel from reacting with the oxygen and moisture.
- The cooking surface becomes slick and slippery, like non-stick, because that baked-on oil acts as a barrier between sticky foods (eggs, fish fillets, tortillas and pancakes) and the bare metal.
Sounds complicated, but polymerization is what happens when individual molecules called monomers link together to form chains. Those new chains are called polymers, and, as far as the things you do in the kitchen go, they can only be broken down with acid.
Think of it like this: If you and your friends were to link arms, you’d be a whole lot harder to separate — just like the molecules in a polymer. That’s the polymerized oil molecules, a.k.a. your pan’s seasoning.
How I Season My Carbon Steel Pans
Step #1: Remove the old seasoning
To give your pan a new, even coat, you first need to strip off the existing seasoning. This is easier than it might seem, though it does require elbow grease. You’ll also want to go through this step if you have bought a brand-new pan. It will be coated with beeswax or industrial grease, which needs to be removed before the seasoning can be applied.
Pour enough vinegar into the pan to cover the bottom, then scrub the seasoning from the interior surface with steel wool. Technically, you could use any vinegar since they all contain acetic acid. However, distilled white vinegar with a higher concentration of acetic acid (8% or more) will work best.
This whole process typically takes a good 2–3 minutes of vigorous scrubbing. You know the pan’s ready when its interior is light gray. Pat it thoroughly dry with a paper towel or a clean, lint-free cloth before moving on to the step below.
Step #2: Rub a tiny amount of cooking oil on the inside
This is the step where most carbon steel pan owners go wrong. You need only a tiny — I’ll repeat, tiny — amount of cooking oil to season a pan. My rule of thumb is always to use less than I think is necessary. (I’ve been doing this for a while, and so far, it hasn’t failed me.)
What I do is, I take two or three of my wife’s cotton makeup removal pads, dab the top one with cooking oil, and then rub the oil all over the bottom and sides of the pan. Next, I flip the pads over and use the clean side to wipe away the excess oil, leaving the pan slick but not pooling with oil.
“Cooking oil” can mean many things, though: Exactly which oil do I use?
There’s a good amount of debate out there about the best oil for seasoning carbon steel pans. To break it down, there are two main camps among pan owners: those who swear by flaxseed oil because it’s the only edible drying oil, and those who prefer grapeseed oil because it has a low fiber content and a high smoke point.
I’ve tried both and, to be completely honest, they work equally well as far as I’m concerned. However, one of you recently pointed out that flaxseed oil has a much lower smoke point than grapeseed oil, which makes it more likely to burn, turn black, and start peeling off in tar-like flakes.
Since then, I’ve been seasoning my pans with grapeseed oil. As always, I strongly encourage you to do your own due diligence (the links I just gave two paragraphs above are a great starting point) and decide for yourself.
Step #3: Heat the pan over medium heat
You might eagerly crank the heat up to high and watch your pan season. DON’T: If you heat an empty pan on maximum heat, it can overheat and warp. The last thing you want is to have your pan become a “spinner” — a pan that can’t sit flat on the cooktop.
Instead, set the heat to medium and allow your pan to heat up gradually. After 2–3 minutes, you’ll see light smoke (but not heavy smoke) rising from the oil, and the interior of the pan will slowly shift in color from metallic gray to copper orange.
When the color is nicely saturated all over, which typically takes 5–6 minutes more of heating, remove the pan from the heat and let it cool. Your pan is now seasoned and ready to go.
Repeat this process every time you need to redo the seasoning.
Things to Watch Out for When Seasoning Your Pan
If your pan turns blue or purplish, don’t worry.
Heat causes metal to oxidize, including when you season it. If your carbon steel pan turns blue during the seasoning, it’s a sign that you used too much heat and/or left the pan over the flame for too long.
As long as the pan itself didn’t warp, it’s fine and completely safe to cook with. That blue color will fade over time. Next time, though, try using lower heat and avoid leaving the pan on the burner for more than a few minutes. Excessive heat can warp a perfectly good carbon steel pan beyond repair.
But if your pan ends up tacky, you have a problem.
This happens when you’ve used more oil than you really need. The oil pools in the pan and turns into a sticky, gunky residue that results in uneven, tacky seasoning. (That’s why I always recommend using as little oil as possible; the seasoning should be thin and even.)
Try rubbing the dry skillet with fine salt and some steel wool. That should help remove the gunk and smooth out the cooking surface. In some cases, you may need to redo the seasoning from scratch. Go back to step one in my how-to guide: strip off the failed seasoning and start again, this time using less oil.
What to Expect After You Season Your Pan
The more you cook fatty foods with the pan, the more the seasoning builds up.
Every time you cook a fatty food, that fat will help make the seasoning more durable and nonstick. That’s one of the things I love about these pans — they only get better with time.
One thing seasoned carbon steel pan owners (forgive the pun) will advise is to cook fatty foods in the first few uses to help build up the pan’s protective layer. Examples include eggs in plenty of butter, well-marbled steak, or mushrooms sautéed in plenty of extra virgin olive oil.
Highly acidic foods can strip off the pan’s seasoning, especially with prolonged simmering.
Acidic foods, like any recipe that calls for tomatoes, lemon or lime juice, vinegar, or wine, eat away at your pan’s seasoning. Unless you’re okay with re-seasoning your pan afterward, cook highly acidic foods in enameled cast iron or stainless steel, both of which are non-reactive, instead.
Why Not Just Cook With Non-Stick?
True, non-stick pans don’t need to be seasoned. They already have a protective coating — the non-stick film that’s been sprayed onto the metal body, which happens to be super slippery. (Polytetrafluoroethylene, a.k.a. PTFE, the chemical that non-stick coatings are made of, is one of the slickest materials on earth.)
However, the non-stick film wears off after 2 to 3 years of use. And when it wears off, it begins to peel and flake off. Since we’re dealing with man-made forever chemicals — the kind that your body doesn’t know how to get rid of — that’s concerning. (That, and having to replace your cookware every few years, can be pretty tough on your wallet.)
Carbon steel pans are different since they’re bare metal. If you simmer tomatoes, vinegar, or acid a bit too long in your carbon steel pan and the seasoning comes off, you can always renew it. It takes only a dozen minutes, as you saw, to re-season the pan! You buy it once, and cook with it for life.
Dim, Why Is This Different From How You Season Cast Iron?
If you own a cast iron skillet or Dutch oven, you may be wondering why I don’t season my carbon steel pans in the oven. It’s a valid question—cast iron cookware takes a lot longer to season, and the seasoning itself is applied differently.
Cast iron is a lot more porous on the surface than carbon steel. That’s because cast iron cookware is cast in molds, from molten iron, whereas carbon steel pans are made by stamping or spinning flat, machine-smoothed sheets of steel with a high carbon content on a lathe.
That smoother surface makes carbon steel much easier to season than cast iron, which can take hours of baking in the oven. (One of the many reason I love carbon steel pans so much.)
