seasoning French (Lyon) style blue/black skillets

[rosetown]

They should be delivered by Nov 25/09. I'm very familiar with seasoning cast iron and have read some about seasoning woks (carbon steel). Any notions on seasoning blue/black steel skillets?

[Robin Joy]

Thoroughly scrub in hot & soapy to remove manufacturing oil & dirt. Rinse and dry well. Gently heat for about 5 minutes to drive off any residual moisture and then wipe a little corn oil all over. Allow to cool and then repeat the heat/wipe bit two or three times. Pretty much like cast iron really.

I find them lovely to use, but beware hot handles!

[rosetown]

Thanks Robin

I throughly scrubbed,cleaned and dried as recommended by you. The seasoning instructions accompanying the pans were minimal.

By the way, they were made in China and are carbon steel. No surprise - always thought blue/black steel=carbon steel. The handles seem to be enameled?

The interior, prior to seasoning was incredibly smooth.

I decided to season 2 of the 4 skillets (inside and outside) with EVOO and baked in the oven at 450 F. At 45 minutes I peeked and saw a touch of brown in places and then decided to add an additional hour of baking - for 2 hours total. It's in progress as I type. I'll examine and if there is some stickiness I'll bake some more. Fingers crossed. :)

[rosetown]

They're in for another 1 1/2 hour. The bottom interior wasn't black, ( a bit of brown when rotated in good light. Also when I removed them from the oven racks I could feel a pull indicating stickiness. I'll continue to report as all unfolds.

[rosetown]

seasoned again as thinly as possible, and am baking for 3!/2 hours at 500 F.

To be continued,

[Robin Joy]

I should have said that I had stovetop in mind, and browning takes rather more than gentle drying heat, but I'm sure the oven will do perfectly ok. Why not cook sausages in them every day for a week? Your pans will be seasoned and you will only have put on about 10 pounds....A small price to pay, surely?

I actually wash/rinse/dry/heat dry/lightly re-oil mine after each use and tuck them into plastic supermarket bags for storing.

[rosetown]

LOL, I make my own sausage and historically could easily have eaten 5 pounds at a time. Time has tempered my excessive nature. Well, actually that is a lie!

The oven method has worked well. now have 2 well blackened and slick skillets. I'm doing the other 2 on the stovetop, out of curiosity. I've completed the 1st coat. Now cooling awaiting the second coat. It seems to be going OK. What have you done for the outside surface if anything?
Cheers

[rosetown]

Don't follow my recipe. I cooked bacon today on low heat in the 12 3/4 inch. There was a lot of fond on the bottom of the pan. The seasoning is peeling. It was seasoned following manufacturers recommendations.

I have 3 pans that I've yet to use, 2 of which I seasoned in oven at high temperature (500F) for 3 hours. I will do a bacon test as well. This will take some time because I will be using them as needed.

Anyhow, a heads up.

[Robin Joy]

So, one of the stovetop ones? What did the manufacturer suggest?

Persevere, you will overcome!

[rosetown]

I reserved the bacon fat from the failed 1st attempt. Luckily, the 12 3/4 inch pan stripped really well. I then seasoned it with the reserved bacon fat on the stove top. I wiped the pan with the fat, heated until the fat was liquefied, then wiped again, and then heated until smoking was complete. Repeated three times. I then baked in the oven for a couple of hours @ 450F.

Today, I needed that size of pan and decided to use it. I covered the bottom of the pan with minced beef and fried and flipped and stirred. Then added chopped smoked sausage and later diced onion. I stirred periodically. No sticking at all. Superb.

Admittedly, this is early usage and only time will tell.

[pass]

I've always found the seasoning to be pretty weak with CS, it should be fine for cooking non-acidic things - but the second a tomato, lemon juice or vinegar gets thrown in the pan it's back to bare metal. (It's also why I'm rather dubious about the case put for seasoned CI and acidic food over enamelled CI).

I've just used full heat on the stove with dabs of oily kitchen roll, eventually it takes on a dark appearance, but it starts off brown and will take a long time to build up and bake on - it will also produce a lot of smoke.

http://debuyer.fr/video.php?id=44&...

[rosetown]

Thanks for the heads up on things acidic. I haven't yet viewed the debuyer video because it requires silverlight and I'm running linux on a netbook. I do have a XP machine that I power up once or twice a month and I will do that soon to view the video. Odd that they use silverlight instead of Adobe flash which is cross platform and a de facto standard.

[mateo21]

Nice timing. I have two CS skillets (10" and 12" -- I'm looking for the 8", but haven't been able to fine the Carbone Plus, with cast iron handle anywhere yet... ).

Anyways, yesterday I used my 10in skillet to cook a steak and went to clean it afterwards by heating it, rinsing it, then putting on the flame to dry off. It was med-high, as I usually just heat it for a minute and it's hot enough to dry the water and take a thin coat of oil. Well, I forgot about it... and was out of the kitchen for a good 5-10 minutes! Needless to say the smoke alarm went off, and my kitchen was very smoky! The pan, however, once I put a thin coat of oil on it, was jet black... I haven't cooked with it to see if this will peel off (I suspect it might) but if you're after a nice dark coating, I'd suggest that! Which is pretty similar to the DeBuyer method on their website, only slightly more controlled!