Just don’t. Much nastiness will ensue, with smoke detector wailing and baby screaming … or perhaps the other way around … and amazing billows of smoke billowing up from the shiny and slick seasoned surface. This will be followed by every window and door in the home being opened, despite the fact that it’s a slightly chilly -6C out doors, and eyes will burn for ever so long.
However, should you happen to do something so foolish as, oh, let’s say, intend to boil down the chicken/ham broth (to make potato soup next week) and accidentally turn the wrong burner to high … Oh, I know, you’d never do something like that, and you’d never be sitting at a computer feeling like you were downwind of a campfire, but let’s just pretend, shall we? Should you happen to do that, you would find that the seasoning that you had worked so hard to create in your pan was a blackened, bubbly, nasty sludge. If you pour a lot of salt in there, it will soak up this nasty sludge and turn very black.
Once the baby has calmed down and you’ve waved your oven mitt at the smoke alarm to convince it that the house is not in fact burning down, and you’ve scraped the black salt out of then pan, it’s time to start seasoning the darn thing again.
Do you know how to do that? People make it sound so hard. Really, it’s simple – clean the pan very, very well, scrubbing with steel wool or whatever you have. Or salt. I hate steel wool, so I use salt. Then, when it’s very, very clean, coat it with oil and heat it in the oven at about 350F. Let it cool. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
Some people say to oil/heat just once and then use it, but when you do that, everything will stick to the pan. That will make you growl, assume that the seasoning didn’t work, and will force you to spend half an hour scrubbing burnt, stuck food out of the pan. (Don’t do that. Scrape out everything you can. Use metal utensils. Then add water to your pan, bring it to a boil, and dump out the yucky water. Wash it out immediately and rub all over with oil.) It takes many, many times to get a good non-stick coating. So I repeat the cycle every time I think to turn on the oven. And if I heat the kettle to boil water, I stick my oiled pan on the hot burner while it’s cooling off. And I try to cook only oily things for the first few months.
Do you know not to use soap on cast iron? (Not on stoneware, either, but that’s another post.) And don’t boil acidic things in it, either. Yes, of course you already knew that.
And don’t burn it.
