Whether you find it at a neighbor’s garage sale or in your grandma’s attic, cast iron cookware is everywhere! It can rust and pit, but with a little care (and sometimes a lot of elbow grease) a good cast iron pan cast last for generations. In this video lesson, we take a pan recovered at a garage sale and see how easy it is to restore!
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Title photo courtesy of David Reber and licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Transcript:
Hi, i’m Chris Tavano for Tundra Restaurant Supply and we’re here in our test kitchen. In today’s episode I’m going to show you how to turn your garage sale treasure finds into something restored and beautiful.
Here we got some nice cast iron rusted-away pans we found at a garage sale. What I’m going to do is show you how to restore these back to some nice beautiful cast iron. Essentially what you really need to do is you need to scrub away all the rusted iron. That way we can start from scratch of reseasoning this pan.
Now we’re actually going to season our cast iron. You could use lard, you could use oil, some sort of fat. We need to cover every piece of surface area of your cast iron with the fat because that’s what’s going to bake in to season our cast iron pan. Use the handles. You can get bits of the outside again. Now that I got a nice coat of fat on that I’m going to turn my burner. Obviously that’s high; we’ll cut it back about half way, about medium high. We’re just going to let that bake in, round one.
Once you got that first layer of shortening or fat seasoned in there, kind of cooked out, give it a wipe, get all that residual stuff out of the there. Let it cool down properly. Then what you’re going to want to do is do that same process one more time. Just because you’ve refurbished the entire surface you’re going to want to put a nice good layer of seasoning in there to protect your food.
That’s how you properly restore your cast iron. I’m Chris Tavano for Tundra Restaurant Supply from our test kitchen. Please comment below, and please subscribe, and call our sales floor directly if you’ve got any further questions. Until next time.