I think I killed my cast iron!

[~Robyn~]

I went to re-season it the other night and forgot it in the oven. Now the bottom of my skillet is very gummy. How can I fix this?

[katie in the UP]

Hi Robyn!
I was always told not to use soap on cast iron.
Hot water and if the 'gummy' part doesn't come out....use a paste of kosher salt and water as a scrub.

HTH

Katie

[PaulO in MA]

Just strip it and reseason. Pretty hard to ruin cast iron cookware.

[kseiverd]

I'm in agreement with PaulO... just strip it and start over. CI is almost impossible to kill. When I first got reunited with it a few years ago, was 3 different sized skillets at a yard sale for $1 each... Lodge, Griswold, etc. Bought them cuz of the name. They weren't GROSS, but definitely had a lot of unknown "seasoning" on them?? Know it's probably HERESY, but I went at them with cheap-o dollar store spray oven/grill cleaner!?! BUT the unknown crud pretty much rolled off, with little elbow grease required. Once reseasoned (my Grandmother always used bacon grease??), good as new.

One of keys to great CI is USE!! For a while, I stored first finds in oven... and left them in while I was roasting/baking stuff. Eventually had MINOR rust showing up... steam from whatever was in oven with them?? Scrubbed out with cheap salt and HOT water, got HOT on stove top and another dab of BG.

Think only times I've ever used oven self-clean cycle was when I made a new find of CI to add to my collection!?! Not something you wanna doin the dead of summer... LOTS of heat for several hours.

When I was a kid, we had a little CI skillet that was perfect for 1-2 eggs. Seem to remember we always washed it?? Back them, gas stove had a perpetual pilot light... wet pan was rested over it to totally dry out.

[Jacqueline in KY]

If the gummy stuff is on the inside, heat your skillet to about 450 degrees F. then let it stay in the oven for a bit and scrub down with salt. It has yet to fail me. I do not season mine with grease, oil or anything other than scrubbing with salt. I use either Koser or regular table salt, both work fine. Every so often, being, I live alone they are not used a lot, I make cornbread, when I pop the cornbread out, I pour a little salt in and take a paper towel and scub the CI with it. Good as new, I also do this if I have something that stuff a little, so next time it won't. I have so many cast iron skillets that there is no way I could season them all like this but I have two that I use and they are almost always stick free.