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My wife was anemic (vegetarian) for a long, long time. We use close to 100% cast iron these days, and she hasn't had an iron issue in 2+ years.
And as another commenter said, it lasts forever. My favorite pan has been in my family so long (at least 5 generations) that no one really knows who owned it first.
Most people I know who have had issues with cast iron either buy bad cast iron, or don't know how to season a new pan - an old pan can be re-seasoned in about 30 minutes, but a new pan will take several days, and possibly some sandpaper, to get its first good seasoning.
Good for your wife's anemia, but test from time to time (every 2 to 4 years) your blood iron levels to check if it is not too high. It's problematic too (tiredness, then liver cirrhosis), and iron cookware can cause iron buildup (over several years, but still). Doctors don't often think to check iron levels in patients when doing checkups.
If you are able are so inclined, donating blood includes a check on your iron levels.
High iron levels are almost never caused by exogenous excess iron but rather the cause is always genetic. Iron absorption is very tightly regulated
>High iron levels are almost never caused by exogenous excess iron
One of the exceptions is using steel cookware: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_iron_overload
Iron absorption is tightly regulated, but can't be totally stopped, and the body has no way to excrete excess iron outside of the rather slow cycle of blood formation and destruction
"The probable cause of African iron overload is the combination of excess iron intake and functional changes in ferroportin.[4][5]"
It stops when ferroportin uptake of iron is saturated
Meanwhile, there's me. I discovered cast iron last year and have been loving it for all sorts of things. Of course, my yearly blood test showed high iron levels in my blood so I need to tone it down a little bit.
Cast iron cookware is a fun, low-grade/background hobby for me. Both using and restoring it. You can often find it affordably at garage sales, estate sales, etc - and even if it looks like it's in bad shape it often is quite recoverable. The restoration process is pretty simple - run it through the homemade electrolysis rig for a day or two, test for lead[1], season and it's ready to use. Once restored it can be sold or given away - and the collectors/aficionados will pay a pretty penny for some pieces.
On the cooking side, well seasoned cast iron is nice for a lot of situations, and the maintenance and care is a breeze.[2].
The part I like the most is that it lasts forever. Every day i use cookware that my great-grandparents bought and used when raising my grandmother, and after they passed, my grandmother used them cooking for the family, and now I use them. There's some other family heirlooms, but the cast iron is my favorite because there's that practical daily connection to my roots - and I don't have to be particularly careful or reverent with it. Somehow that makes it feel more real.
[1] This is really important, particularly with old cast iron. People used to be far less cautious about lead, and used it in a lot of settings. A cast iron pan is a pretty good vessel for melting it down. The tests are readily available and you can know for sure if you'll be poisoning yourself or others.
[2] You'll find a lot of nonsense about cast iron. A lot of it is accumulated wisdom that no longer applies, and a lot of it is myth. For example: soap used to be bad for cast iron because it had lye - a caustic agent like that can eat into the seasoning and cause problems (modern dish-soap isn't like that). Generally I find cleaning and maintenance to be equal to or less effort than any other pan, just different - I'm happy to trade an extra 30s of cleaning time over a non-stick pan so that I can use a good metal spatula or tongs instead of some flimsy plastic crap.
On your second note, it's truly wild to have watched the (popular) use of cast-iron pans and cookware grow over the years thanks to the proliferation of their benefits and the early 'niche' character of them online. But it's also hilarious to watch the most online thing ever happen with them: people nerd out over minutiae and get into pointless optimization debates or "best practices" when it's just a big piece of cast iron. It's hard to fuck it up. And yet you see people babying them like crazy online with hyper elaborate seasoning and maintenance routines. 99% of them are overkill, but people are inundated with them and come away with a false idea of their requirement.
All you need to know for long term maintenance is don't let the pan rust. Cooking in the pan will season the pan. (People will act like that's impossible without ultra-refined avocado oil or meticulous reseasoning protocols - they're wrong.) If you wash the pan, dry it on the stovetop; running a little water over the pan won't "ruin" the seasoning. That's it. Otherwise you can beat the ever living shit out of the pan and it will still be perfectly fine.
On the other hand, there is also a lot of poor information in very popular blogs telling people to do things like season your pan with flaxseed oil (which has a very low smoke point). It's hard to sort the good info from the misinfo, so I get why people overdo it after being burned.
In my opinion, after using several different oils (lard, crisco, flaxseed) that flaxseed works fine, i've heard it might be a little more brittle in the long run, but it certainly works. You need to polymerize the oil, my understanding is that to do that you need to exceed the smoke point of the oil during the seasoning process. I know kenji has advised against it but I've got a small little pan I use for eggs most mornings that I initially seasoned with flaxseed several years ago and it's held up just fine and is slick as shit.
I've seen some methods that use beeswax as well, both alone and in combination with an oil.
All this to say it's not 'poor information', it might not be the absolute best oil to use, but it does certainly work. If for some reason the only oil you have in the house is flaxseed, it will season your pan.
A pan doesn't need to be well-seasoned prior to cooking eggs in it. People cook eggs in stainless pans, for example. Likely, that flaxseed oil flaked down the drain when you washed your pan or onto your eggs the first time you cooked with it and you've been able to give your pan proper seasoning with the fat you normally cook with over the past several years.
That flaxseed oil certainly did not go 'down the drain', I'm not an idiot. This was not my frist seasoned pan and it wasn't my last I just decided to try flaxseed oil as I had some in the house. Certainly oils and fats from subsequent uses help reinforce the initial seasoning. However, I challenge you to strip a cast iron pan and try to cook eggs in it and tell me how you got them not to stick. It may be that I treat my cast iron gently when washing that kept this initial season on, I'm not sure, but if you are scrubbing your cast iron with large amount or strong soaps it's going to have a bad effect on ANY seasoning.
On the beeswax tip, a little searching found me this: https://crisbee.org/ which is apparently basically crisco mixed with some bees wax.
However, I challenge you to strip a cast iron pan and try to cook eggs in it and tell me how you got them not to stick.
The same way you cook on stainless. If you heat the pan and oil properly, you can let the Leidenfrost effect take it from there.
I'm not sure, but if you are scrubbing your cast iron with large amount or strong soaps it's going to have a bad effect on ANY seasoning.
No. If it flakes off, it is not seasoning. At that point, it is just burnt oil. But that's OK, because you can build up seasoning the next time you cook.
Crisco alone is a lot cheaper than some highly marketed brand of crisco + beeswax and will do just as good a job at seasoning your pan. Plus, you'll have crisco left over for other stuff. There's no need to buy these "boutique" products just for your pan.
A few years back, I switched entirely to cast iron pans and never looked back. The only disadvantage I've found to them is that they're heavy. In every other respect, I find them much better than other sorts of pans.
> You'll find a lot of nonsense about cast iron.
Isn't that the truth! The best advice I got from an old hand at the care and feeding of cast iron was very simple:
1) Use it. The more you use it, the better it gets.
2) Don't be afraid of hurting it. Don't be afraid to experiment with various cleaning methods and see what works for you. The worst you can do is mess up the seasoning, and that's easy to fix so the stakes are low.
Small plug of company I love (not paid or anything). Field skillet is literally the best cast iron I’ve ever used. Their skillet size is truly sublime for breakfast stuff and smash burgers
They look nice (and it's good to see important design tweaks like having a second handle opposite the main one even on smaller skillets like the 10in), but they are spendy. I got a Finex from their original Kickstarter (I liked the idea of them being made here in Portland), but they're also not cheap. My instinct is that some quality time sanding the cooking surface smooth would produce similar results in a cheaper pan...
Hmm i very strongly disagree. It was immediately apparent to me even on the first cook how vastly superior the surface was to any standard Lodge or whatever. Nothing wrong with Lodge, I have those too, but I was very surprised. TBH i wasnt really expecting much, my expectations were very low when I got it on a whim as I kept hearing people rave about it.
The seasoning over time is also vastly superior because of these tiny grooves. I buy the skillet one as a gift for people and its pretty much unanimous that it's their favorite.
Not trying to hype, its just legitimately one of my favorite pans
I forgot to mention if you get the griddle (Sorry, i kept calling it a skillet before, i meant this one: https://fieldcompany.com/collections/cast-iron-griddles/prod...)
If anyone gets that.... cook some smash burgers in it and it gets the best seasoning ive ever seen, very quickly.
$185? WTF? Mine was like $10. It's a sheet of iron, FFS, not gold laminated.
> It was immediately apparent to me even on the first cook how vastly superior the surface was to any standard Lodge or whatever.
Can you expand on this? What was different on the first use that made its superiority so obvious so quickly? I have only a rudimentary understanding of cookware, so the difference between a $10 cast iron pan and a $200 cast iron pan isn't immediately apparent.
> sanding the cooking surface smooth would produce similar results
Your instinct is a good one - I tried this with a 12" Lodge skillet, working my way up to 220 grit with an orbital sander, and it instantly became my favorite pan.