The Simple Potato Trick For Eliminating Rust On Your Cast Iron
If you find yourself reaching for your cast iron skillet for most — if not all — of your cooking needs in the kitchen, then you're already ahead of the curve. According to Healthline, cast iron cookware is a good investment and among the best tools you can cook with due to its high durability and long-lasting quality. Additionally, once it's properly seasoned and set, it naturally develops a nonstick layer, blowing artificial nonstick pans made with Teflon and chemicals in the dust.
But just like everything else, a cast iron pan does need to be properly cared for in order to keep its high quality. If you allow your cast iron skillet to sit for a long period of time with food on it, of course, it will eventually be harder than heck to get the food off. Even worse, a cast iron skillet left in water can easily get rusty, taking your high-quality pan to an unusable tool gone bad.
Those stressful days of scrubbing until your arm falls off can be a thing of the past though. If you find yourself in a tough situation (literally) with your cast iron pan, there's an easy trick that will help you scrub off that tough food or rust. All you'll need is a potato and some salt.
Potato and salt take on a cast iron skillet
The tricky part about cleaning a cast iron skillet is that you're not really supposed to use dish soap on it. While using a little soap is okay, using a traditional heaping amount of soap with a sponge can negatively affect the seasoning if used often (via America's Test Kitchen). Because of this, if your cast iron has some tough and harden food on it or some rust, it can be a huge challenge to get that off.
It doesn't have to be, though! According to Southern Living, using a cut potato and some coarse salt can make your life a whole lot easier when it comes to cleaning your cast iron. Potatoes naturally contain an oxalic acid, which helps to dissolve and clean off tough materials and rust. To use this to your advantage, all you need to do is pour a decent amount of coarse salt into your cast iron skillet and cut a potato in half. Then get to work! Using the cut and exposed side of the potato, use that as your "brush" and start scrubbing the pan in a circular motion up against the salt on the pan (via PureWow).
Keeping it seasoned
While this method is all-natural and you're not needing to use any soap or chemicals to get off your rust or any hardened food, it's still good to ensure that your cast iron remains properly seasoned after. Once you took some salt and a cut potato to your cast iron, consider popping it back in the oven with some oil to keep it properly seasoned.
According to PureWow, simply preheat your oven to 400 degrees, pour and spread some oil of your choice into the skillet, and place it in your oven for around one hour. This will ensure your cast iron remains properly seasoned and ready-to-use with all of its best nonstick features for all your future cooking plans.
If you find that the rust on your cast iron is really bad, you can also add some baking soda with the potato method to even better results. According to Food Hacks, you can swap out the salt for baking soda, and when used with the oxalic acid potato, it helps makes this even more effective for those harder-than-usual rust spots.