Basically all the “seasoning” of the pan is doing, is turning the oils into a coat of varnish.

It’s a form of speed oxidising beyond that of air drying over time.

And varnish is a type of “plastic”.

The worlds first “teflon” style coating in a cooking vessel.

That is about all there is too it.

That’s just crud – baked on carbon. If it’s beautifully seasoned on the inside, you probably don’t want to strip it. As long as the crud is on the outside and not getting in your food, you’re okay.

Also, I had no idea my favorite cast iron skillet – a Griswold – had any particular appeal to collectors. Like you, I have my cast iron to cook in it, not to show it off, and I hope it lasts many lifetimes over.

I have one old skillet from my husband’s grandmother that has kind of an interesting surface. It’s smooth as glass on the inside. On the outside, it’s rough, almost scaly. I thought that was just how the skillet was, but a couple of big ole flakes came off the bottom yesterday to reveal smooth metal underneath. I slapped a quick coat of oil on the spot to arrest the oxidation, but I was wondering what the scaly stuff might be, and whether I should remove it.

Here are my observations. The flax oil became easier to apply over the course of the seasonings. This made sense to me since the surface was getting slicker with each layer. It was also easier to apply onto a warm surface than a cold surface. I noticed the surface of the cast iron went from a dark charcoal grey (as on the unseasoned lid) to a dark hazy brown/black/purple mottled color. It isn’t uniformly black everywhere. At certain angles it’s more noticeable than others. It feels much, much slicker than when I got it originally. Awesome.

As others have noted, your house (or my studio) starts to smell like a deep-fryer, in a bad way. Although I didn’t see any smoke, I had to disable the smoke alarms because they did go off. We had the hood fan going, a window fan sucking air out, and a fan blowing towards the kitchen. Despite all that, we still smelled oil from the adjacent room.

Tomorrow morning we make our first meal with the double dutch oven. Fried eggs (appropriate, as it is on the Lodge logo) and home fries.

Hopefully this helps some people out. And another hand for Sheryl, the sultan of seasoning.

Thank you so much for your help – it worked for me! I was just about to return the mouse to the store when I found your article. I’m running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit on Acer 1810T.

Once I made the service auto-start mouse started working without loosing connectivity. Prior to that, it would work fine, but go to sleep after just 1 min of inactivity. It would reconnect automatically, but only after couple of seconds of moving it around. It was unusable.

Making the service auto-start, made the other option available for unchecking – “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”. Prior to that it was disabled. Go figure.

Option “Allow Bluetooth devices to find this computer” is left unchecked on my machine. Hope this helps.

This mouse is almost perfect for my notebook, except for a noisy scroll wheel – especially when scrolling up. Is that something all of you guys experience or I got a lemon?

Now, does anyone know how to configure thumb button to be something else other than back. I usually set it Ctrl-F4 on my other mice. This mouse is not configurable through IntelliPoint 7.1 – it’s not even listed there so there’s no way to do it. I tried a lot of stuff to no avail. I’m looking for some registry entry. I know that are 3rd party software packages, but would like to solve this cleanly. Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the great advice. I’ve been following this thread since the previous post on the chemistry of seasoning cast iron. Being a student of science myself, I found it fascinating and quite useful since I recently purchased a Lodge double dutch oven (preseasoned, ::shudders::). Strange thing was, while the dutch oven did come seasoned, the lid (which doubles as the skillet) didn’t have any seasoning at all! Considering I was planning to use the lid, I had to season anyway, so I figured why not go ahead and do the whole thing.

Before seasoning, I baked at 500 degrees for an hour. Had there been any factory wax on the thing, I’m confident it’s been melted off. Turning off the oven, I allowed it to cool off while I ran some errands. What errands you may ask? Flaxseed oil! I ran down to the local VitaminShoppe and upon asking where said oil was, I was lead to the a fridge (good sign) with all kinds of oils. The smallest bottle, which happened also to be one made of glass sufficed. Cold-pressed organic.

When I got home, the oven was cooled off but the cast iron was still a tad too hot to handle barehanded. I busted open the flaxseed and began applying with a small paper towel. It left little towel bits everywhere unfortunately (not a machined surface) but it didn’t matter because I was wiping it “dry” with an old cotton shirt anyway. The oil went on the preseasoned dutch oven easily but the lid was thirsty and sopped up a lot of the oil (yay!)

It’s now in the oven for its first seasoning (450 for 1.5 hours, 1.5 rest, repeat). I’m probably going to get 2 more in tonight and 3 more tomorrow and another 3 for good luck.

As for your frustrations about “misinformation”. You’re the one in charge here. Everybody who’s commenting otherwise probably just isn’t as well-versed as you are. Closing the comment section is no way to deal with it. In fact, you don’t have to deal with it at all. Either ignore it or correct them. I don’t think anybody else coming to your blog is going to think “Oh well, based on other comments, sheryl must be wrong, I’m just gonna go ahead and listen to what xxxxx said instead.” 1 – you’re probably right and they’re probably wrong, so don’t waste your energy or emotions. 2 – if somebody’s going to take the advice based on one comment of this entire thread, that person doesn’t deserve properly seasoned castiron. That being said, I think you should keep the comments open.

Thanks again, Sheryl, for all the hard work (the science that is). I’ll update as soon as I get all 9 (or 11, haven’t decided yet) coats on.