Half of what you will read about cast iron is inherited superstition, and the other half is chemistry. Here is the trail a careful cook walks — the next seven searches, in order, each with the two-sentence answer and the query to run.
The oven method, and the one mistake that makes it sticky instead of slick.
Wipe on a thin layer of neutral oil, then wipe it all back off again so the pan looks dry, and bake upside down at 450–500°F for an hour before letting it cool in the oven. Repeat two or three times for a new or stripped pan.
Any neutral oil with a high smoke point — grapeseed, canola, or plain vegetable oil all work. Flaxseed builds the hardest layer and the most flake-prone one, which is why the internet has been arguing about it for a decade.
Above the oil's smoke point, which is what turns it from a liquid into a bonded film. Under-heating leaves you with a greasy pan rather than a seasoned one.
Rust looks fatal and almost never is.
Scrub the rust off with steel wool down to bare grey metal, wash it, dry it immediately over a low burner, and season from scratch. Cast iron is solid metal throughout — there is nothing to ruin underneath.
Hot water, a stiff brush or chain-mail scrubber, dried straight away on the stove, then a smear of oil. Modern dish soap is fine — it dissolves grease, not the polymerised layer that soap folklore predates by fifty years.
Seasoning improves with cooking, so the maintenance is mostly just cooking.
Preheat the dry pan for several minutes until it is genuinely hot, pat the steak dry, then leave it alone — cast iron holds heat well and recovers slowly, so moving the meat costs you the crust. This is the cooking that builds seasoning fastest.
Yes, in a well-seasoned pan for a short cook. A long acidic simmer will strip seasoning and pick up a metallic taste — that is the real limit, not a blanket ban.
Seasoning is polymerised oil bonded to the metal, not a coating you apply and protect. Once you know that, most of the folklore — never use soap, never cook tomatoes, never scrub — sorts itself into true and false.
You just walked 7 searches for “how to season cast iron”. The extension maps the trail right on your results page — for anything you search, not just the journeys we’ve written.