Bacon or other fat works fine IF you get it hot enough, cast iron has been in use, what 1,500 years longer than flax or other seed oils were common. Olive oil? Oh yeah, that's been a major product for longer than that, longer than olives were picked and pickled for food. 

Bacon popcorn ain't bad but you gotta get it out of the Dutch oven soon enough or it burns and burnt popcorn is an opposite flavor profile to yummy.

Frosty The Lucky.

On 11/8/2025 at 12:23 PM, Florida Man Metals said:

What is vegetable oil?

Soybean oil usually. 

Seems that plain old water has worked to clean off the seasoning. Fill pan with water and let soak over night. I say this becuase i have a skillet i have to clean up and reseason becuase the wife decided to soak it and now it looks like an old non-stick pan the coating is coming off of. 

From what i have gathered over the years, in Europe olive oil would have been common in the southern areas while butter was in use in the northern areas. 

I use lard for mine becuase that is how grandma taught me. 

I may be the odd man here but i love burnt popcorn and those little half popped kernels.  

You obviously missed my point completely. I know lodge uses soybean oil.

It is an analogy. Ok so which one of those "vegetable oil"/ soybean oil does  Lodge use?

Do they use cold pressed organic soybean oil, or HOsoy a modified oil used in paint and varnish or something in between? That's the point know one truly knows.

Do both of those things qualify as  "vegetable oil" to you?

 

Oil pressed from vegetation?

Historically, there is positive evidence in Gobekli Tepe of pressed grain oil including structures that show evidence of being the presses. Gobekli Tepe is the oldest known masonry temple structure, kitchens, bakeries, apartments(?) and in fact a pretty large settlements and farms surrounding the temple complex. As far as excavations have determined so far they have reached the 9,500 BCE level. Call it 12,000 years ago and it was actively used to approx. 8,000. BCE. Evidence is that Rye was the chief grain at the time and YES there are lots of vats with beer residue. So far the evidence is Rye is the first cultivated grain, though I don't know about the far east. Paleo archeology from the far east is kind of propagandized so. Who knows.

Anyone familiar with the Black Sea ship wrecks? The one that made BIG news a few years ago was loaded with amphora some containing analyzable content remains. At that depth the Black Sea is anoxic and cold so it preserves organics wonderfully. The ship wreck was almost completely intact and was found because the masts stumps sticking up made an odd return on sonar scans. 

The amphora Among other things, contained rye and wheat, various pickled vegetables, garlic, onions and olive oil, lots of olive oil, more than contained wine. IIRC it is a Mesopotamian vessel that had been dismasted and either swamped or capsized by a storm.

Pressing vegetable oils, preserving fat and rendering lard is as old as humanity. Lard is nearly pure food one of the most dense there is and self preserving so it wasn't wasted. Tallow candles and lamps came after grain agriculture which came after fired pottery. There are some pretty good arguments that domesticating grain was to guarantee a supply for making beer, which predated pottery, Minoan taverns have beer vats carved from stone. From my lay reading I believe beer predates bread. 

Not that this really has anything to do with seasoning cast iron, I just love paleoarcheology.  and humans were pressing vegetable oil for thousands of year before casting iron.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

I went down quite a few rabbit holes earlier today, never got the response where I wanted it. I know bacon grease will work, just some things seem to work a little easier and give a better finish, but I don't argue with them that like it. Might as well argue about the way they part their hair, mow their lawn, and maybe kick their puppies as mess with the way they do their cast iron. More power to them and the smell from bacon grease is fantastic. If they'll still cook me dinner, they can coat it in kitten grease and hydraulic narwahl oil.

As I understand it the difference is the ratio of saturated, polysaturated, and monosaturated fats. Polysaturated goes on the easiest, monosaturated okayish, and saturated not at all - it breaks down in unpleasant ways. Seed oils are about 85 percent poly, bacon is about 10 poly, 50 percent mono, and the remainder is saturated. 

Some of the rabbit holes got weird rabbits - the Chinese had cast iron cookware 8th century BC, but it was a rare luxury item until the Han. During that period the main cooking oils were tallow at first, but over the course of the dynasty there was heavier use of sesame and rapeseed. Flaxseed was around a bit as a medicine and as an ingredient. The academics haven't found any evidence of seasoning, but figured they must have done, if only by accident.

Olive oil (about 75 percent monosaturated) goes back roughly forever in the west (imported 9th century into China) and flaxseed has been around since ancient Egypt, but western cast iron cookware becomes common in about the 16th century, and it looks like they (go figure) used whatever the local cooking oil was. Also, you get weird ads and suggestions in your feed after googling academic articles on Han dynasty cast iron cookware; my facebook is drowning in pages obsessing over skillets.

Wanna bet cast iron cookware is not what maybe 90% of the Chinese people cook in?

While searching out the "best" oil to season it with could be a fun rabbit hole to play in, how about using what works for now and adapting to how to use it THEN run with the rabbits?

It wasn't until Thomas joined the thread about cast iron I found out I'd been seasoning it wrong, my cast iron used to go rancid before I found out the fat needed to burn it in. By "fat" I'm referring to whatever fatty stuff you use from Pig haunch to George Jetson space oil.

What's what and how it works is a topic I've never explored at all, I just use what works. Unfortunately I haven't used mine since marrying Deb. <sigh>

I'm following along though. 

Frosty The Lucky.

3 hours ago, Frosty said:

Wanna bet cast iron cookware is not what maybe 90% of the Chinese people cook in?

I’m not going to make a bet I know I’m going to lose!

That said, seasoning a steel wok (or sauté pan etc) works the same as seasoning a cast iron pot.

Now I’m wondering if bronze woks and other pans were ever seasoned the same way we season iron and steel. 

WHEW! I'm glad you didn't take the bet and call me to prove it or pay up! I have a steel Wok I season the same way.

That's a good question, I presume it would but without some food grade bronze or brass I don't know. 

Anybody out there in IFI land want to do a little experimenting? 

Frosty The Lucky.

Now I’m starting to wonder when makers started tinning the insides of their pots. 

Looks like it's been around for a while. Tinned cookware probably had to do with whether a region had copper deposits like India and Wales. I don't know if Wales has a tinned copper cookware but they have some impressive tin deposits. See what a search turned up. 

https://brownhistory.substack.com/p/kalai-the-ancient-art-of-tinning

Frosty The Lucky.

I also found something rather interesting about the metallurgy of tinning. It’s on a commercial website, so I won’t post it here, but the gist was that without actually becoming an alloy, the tin bonds to the copper in what they called the “intermetallic layer“. This is apparently extremely tough and seems to protect the copper rather like the seasoning layer protects a cast-iron pan.

I didn't even think about that aspect, the bond would be the same as with hard solder, electron exchange almost to nuclei sharing electron shells. It's not quite but close to alloying, a molecular rather than atomic bond. Tin is used in hard solders rather than silver for copper alloys because silver and copper tend to make eutectic alloys which tends to lower the melting temp and tensile strength significantly. You basically what to "glue" two different metals together rather than mix them at the boundary. It gets more complicated than that of course but that's the gist in most cases, kind of.

Frosty The Lucky.

Sounds about right. The article made the point that this was why you could wipe on a very thin layer of tin, as that layer would stick to the copper and the excess would simply wipe off.

Yeah, Thomas blew holes in what "everybody" knew about soldering in that long ago thread about soldering. Something about having a degree in material sciences and a focus on metallurgy. The tin to tin bond is weaker than tin to copper. 

If you want a little "light" reading it's a fascinating subject. I blame Thomas for all the time I spent on casual research on the subject. Some hard solder joins verge on welding with alloy joints. I learned enough to know I don't know enough to KNOW much without looking up specifics. "All I know is I KNOW nothing." eh?

Ahh, just knowing Thomas was educational. Absent Companions!

Frosty The Lucky.

19 minutes ago, Frosty said:

The tin to tin bond is weaker than tin to copper. 

Much the same as most waxes, which are (to quote a "Fine Woodworking" article from about forty years ago) "adhesive, but not cohesive".

23 minutes ago, Frosty said:

Ahh, just knowing Thomas was educational. Absent Companions!

Yes, indeed!

 

Adhesive not cohesive is a fair descriptive analogy I suppose,  even if it's entirely different in reality. I'd be reluctant to use the analogy here, hard solder "mechanics" is confusing enough without crossing the genre line. Enameling crosses metallurgy and ceramics though and we've talked about that pretty extensively in the past. Drats another really complex and finicky subject that is roughly analogous to hard soldering if WAY different!

Frosty The Lucky.

I know part of this one from cooking. It's mostly claimed that bronze and brass cookware wasn't seasoned in antiquity because it tends not to be as sticky as iron, doesn't patina, and doesn't react as badly to acids. That said, I know at least some modern cookware makers still make them without a coating and recommend seasoning. Since copper salts are toxic, I would tend to think you'd almost have to have them seasoned or tinned. I like a copper bowl for egg whites, but I scrub the living dog snot out of it first to remove oxidation.

How about oiling or wiping it the bowl with Crisco after using it so you don't have to scrub it before use, just wash it?

Frosty The Lucky.

I don't think they had Crisco in the Bronze Age....

Not by brand name but lard/tallow has been around since humans learned to cook meat. The modern vegetable oil version of Crisco is really recent.

Submersion in lard was also a reliable method of medium term food preservation, meat especially but it was effective for most solid food stuffs. Hence the term "Larder."

Frosty The Lucky.

16 hours ago, Nobody Special said:

I like a copper bowl for egg whites, but I scrub the living dog snot out of it first to remove oxidation.

Why? The egg whites form more stable foams when whipped in a copper bowl because the copper reacts with the conalbumin protein, and I don't believe that oxidation interferes with that process. As long as your bowl is clean, you should be fine.

Now verdigris, on the other hand, is mildly toxic, so if you see any of that blue-green color so beloved of sculptors and other metalworkers, you definitely want to scrub that off. Verdigris isn't oxidation, though; it's copper acetate that forms over time with exposure to the elements.

Apologies, the toxic copper salts, although I thought copper acetate was formed from further oxidation of copper oxides when exposed to acids, particularly aceitic acid. It's been a very, very long time since college chemistry though, although I was reading an etymology book today that brought up "gen" or gyn, i.e., giving birth to, in elemental names. Oxy is Greek for pointed or acid, so oxygen was used to refer to its tendency to help in the formation of acids. Nitrogen produces nitre, and argon produces diddly-squat being inert, so it was named "lazy".

So Gen X is giving birth to the unknown? What about Gen Z? Criminy the more I think about it the happier I am I'm a Boomer!

Frosty The Lucky.

Oh, now this brings back memories. One of my Ancient Greek professors in college (Jim Helm of blessed memory, who looked exactly like Demosthenes) could be diverted into almost endless discussions of the minutiae of Greek grammar and vocabulary, which was very useful if you hadn’t finished your translation in time for class. We once spent almost an hour on the γν- root and on the role it played in words like Genesis, engender, and so on. Much of this discussion centered on the two different verbs “to be”: “εἰμί“, which simply means “to exist”, and “γίγνομαι“, which has a range of meanings relating to being born, coming into being, becoming, and so on. 

The fact that I remember all of this so well more than thirty-five years later (when so much else is long-forgotten) tells me that Mr. Helm was wiser than I knew. 

About my sole exploration of ancient Greek and Latin is because I'm a lifelong paleophile and some paleontologists actually try to name new species with "appropriate" terminology. Soooo if I wanted to know what the identifying features were I had to know what the words mean. I still have a few thousands of dollars worth of dictionaries and encyclopedia though internet age out of date, they still provide valuable clues and leads. The pre-marketing age internet was a terrific tool, now it's mostly an electronic marketing rag. <sigh>

Though I don't study paleontology like I used to I retain certain ways of thinking, looking at things, etc. Sort of the flow of things buried and it's turned out to be valuable. I see, compare, and associate things most folk don't. One revelation came when I realized that no matter what scholars or scientists say, "science" isn't about "understanding" things, it is about "describing" them to the best of our perception. To paraphrase, "All I can know is that can I KNOW nothing," suddenly made sense.

Don't think I want to study Greek or Latin though.

Frosty The Lucky.