Aspies For Freedom

Allot of you may think of cast iron and cringe, if only on the inside.
I know what you're thinking, the rust, the sticking, the slowly bleaching and splitting wood handles.
First off, don't ever get a pece of cast iron cookware with wood handles. That's just asking for it be ruined long before its time. And believe, it's not that hard to wear an oven mit or grab and oven pad to burning from grabing a hot iron handle.

But as for the sticking and rusting. This is something people not intimately familar with cast iron have complained about for over a hundred years, and the reason why people shied away from them ever since your cookware became available in aluminum.
Well, for people who are intimately familiar with cast iron cookware, they'll all tell you, "You just need to season it, and then all your problems with rust and sticking will vanish."

Now if you don't know what seasoning cast iron is... well that's the reason people hate it so much.

Seasoning cast iron is akin to glazing a clay pot.
What you do is this.

Take a piece of cast iron cookware, no wooden handles I'll tell you why later, and then take a block of lard. That's right, purified pig fat.
You take a piece of lard in your hand and rub it on every surface, and inside every nook and cranny of the cast iron that you can find. You might want to wear latex or nitrile gloves for this, unless you have a kink for being coated in lard or something.
Then, you put your oven on four hundred and twenty five degrees. When it's hot, you stick the cast iron inside the oven and let the whole thing bake for six hours. This is why you never want a wooden handle, the oven will har it right off.

Now this will produce a hell of a lot of smoke, but nothing's going wrong when it does. Just be sure to have some way of venting the air in the kitchen outside. I just put a big box fan in the window above the sink.

While the whole thing is baking, something excellent will happen. The heat will cause the lard to react to the iron, forming a brand new chemical that's neither. The baking lard, iron mix will crystalize into a kind of ceramic that will coat the cast iron.
This ceramic will be, once cool enough to touch, smooth like glass, but incredibly strong. It will protect the iron beneath from rusting, and it will act as a stick resistant surface.

In my house, almost half of our cookware is cast iron.

could someone send their pan out to have it seasoned like that?  I am sure my apartment management would not appreciate the smoke.  

I once considered buying a cast iron pan but it was very expensive.  $50 at Walmart.

Some cast iron brands come pre-seasoned. Lodge Logic is pre-seasoned, but that's kind of expensive and you said you didn't want that.

Cast iron cookware can be found at places like Good Will and Salvation Army all the time. However, these are usually older pieces, given up because their previous owners never knew about seasoning cast iron, so there goes your second need.

As for sending away for seasoning... I'm sure if you did some research you could find someone who'll do it but I don't know of any.
Especially since we figure that sending away for seasoning will cost $20 bucks at minimum, while doing it ourselves is all of 99¢ for a block of lard, and about 2¢ for the oven's electricity use.

So better to just disconnect the smoke detector and open the window then?

You should wedge a fairly powerful window fan or box fan inside it as well.

The most important thing to is dry it immediately after washing and oil it with vegetable oil, keep a paper towel between it an other pans. You a need a good quality one that is weighty, low quality will be pig iron and will be brittle and not strong. Make sure it doesn't have a rough surface on the inside.