I have a problem with my Mauviel carbon steel pan, which was a gift my son purchased via the Food52 e-commerce platform.
We seasoned it as instructed and it worked nicely for a few weeks. Then a guest who is not familiar with carbon steel put some water in the hot pan while some sausages were cooking and covered it to create steam. When we removed the sausages a few minutes later, and poured off the water, quite of few large patches of the seasoning came off. We tried re-seasoning, but have not been successful. The bottom surface of the pan is now covered with irregular splotches of unstable seasoning that comes off when we lightly rub the pan with an oiled paper towel. What should we do?
Thank you.
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9 Comments
Toss the pan into the oven upside down and run a self-cleaning cycle. This should turn the seasoning into a powdery soot that can be easily removed with some steel wool.
Then redo your seasoning.
Note, if you have BBQ grill grates that you want to clean, you can do them in the oven during the same self-cleaning cycle.
Good luck.
In case anyone is interested in more details: To your point, pierino, part of our problem with trying to re-season may be that we have not taken off enough of the "large deposits of crud" (so aptly stated); once those pieces of "crud" cooked on a bit more, they flaked off badly with just a gentle swipe using a walnut scrubber pad - made from walnut shells, not metal. Other small bits of seasoning have come off as well.
I sincerely hope that others will learn from our mistakes. (I have no reason to believe that this is a production defect but rather, just the reality of carbon steel.)