Just got my first carbon steel

[grantgallagher]

Just putting everything in one place. Pre-seasoning, post-seasoning, after a few cooks. Mr. Bones Spinaker

[Mr. Bones]

Man, that CS pan is lookin bee-yoo-ti-ful, Brother
Cain't hardly wait to see alla th Great Food ya make, in it!

[Mudkat]

Love CS. And that's a beaut! I subscribe to the just keep cooking method. Lazy i guess.

[Mudkat]

Didn't realize that's all it took!

[grantgallagher]

This thing is an absolute blast to cook with. Done a couple of bacon and sausage breakfast cooks and i think im in love

[FireMan]

Cook, cook, til the cows come home. It’ll get nice & black.

[grantgallagher]

Got three coats of flax and three of crisbee on there now. Its darker than it looks in the picture and nice and smooth. Will give its maiden voyage later today. Over all, pretty easy after i figured out i was leaving too much oil on there. Just time consuming. Looking forward to cooking with it.

[grantgallagher]

Im pretty confident its too much oil. Scrubbed it down and starting again

[JoeSousa]

I am working on seasoning my first carbon steel pan too. Overall it seems harder to get the seasoning to take as well as it does with cast iron. I have about 3 or 4 layers on so far and the surface is pretty slick but a couple times I have cooked on it the seasoning on the cooking surface seems to have come off. It doesn't necessarily flake off but after cooking it is nowhere near as dark as it was.

I will just keep cooking on it and give it another layer of seasoning as I get the chance.

[Henrik]

I agree 100% with everything. It matches my experience to a T. I too have the De Buyer pan. Tomatoes don't belong in a carbon steel pan :-)

[EdF]

Those chain-mail scrubs are great. We even use it on ceramics without any damage. Great tips! Thanks!

[Phil Averbuck]

Howdy, I started with my first carbon steel pans (DeBuyer) about a year ago. It's been a learning process, but not real painful. I got them to get a nice sear on steaks, chops, etc, and they do a beautiful job! I also wanted to use them for breakfast eggs, esp omelettes, and they have worked out fine for that, too.
Here's what I learned:
1--the more you cook meat, or foods with oils, butter etc, in them, the better the pans will work for you--like they're self-seasoning when you use them. My initial seasoning hardly did anything to them, but as I just used them, they got better. So I wdn't worry about any issues in the initial seasoning.
2--A very handy item for these was a chain-mail steel scrub. If I do a major hot steak-searing, there's going to be some charred pieces stuck to the pan. After cooking, I let the pan cool way down (but it's still hot!), put some warm water in, let the water get hot, then use the chain-mail scrub to get the stuck bits off. I'll sometimes use a steel spatula to scrape them off, too, but by now it hardly ever needs that. So at this point, after the "toughest" use, I just am using water & the scrub to clean the pan. After I scrub it, the pan is still warm, so I dry it, put on a little bit of whatever oil is handy, then re-heat it on the stovetop for a few minutes--voila, ready for next time!
3--A few times I've cooked seafood on it, and I really don't like to leave any remnant of a fishy taste for the next meal. So after a seafood meal, I'll scrub it like above, then [HORRORS] some dish-soap on a sponge, rinse, then scrub some salt into it, then dry it and put the oil on it and heat it for next time.
After a year of use like this, both the big and small ones are pretty close to non-stick, and I love the sears they give us. But here is one big lesson: DON'T MAKE A DISH INVOLVING COOKING/STEWING/SIMMERING TOMATOES in the carbon steel! A significant cook with tomatoes will be more detrimental than the gentle soap cleaning I mentioned. The tomato kind of sets your seasoning back, but only to the extent that it requires another normal use or 2 to get you back on track. Even that's not a big deal.
Another thing I like about these carbon steel pans is the weird-looking handle does NOT heat up on the stovetop like the cast-iron does (though of course it does when you cook inside the stove). Oh, and they cook great inside the stove, or inside the grill.
Hope this helps, amigo! Happy grilling!

[Spinaker]

Yeah, that comes from either two things. Too much oil, or not enough heat. heat the pan, apply the oil, and then wipe it off. Then return to heat. grantgallagher

[grantgallagher]

Spinaker ok ill give that a shot.

I did wipe it down after each application but if anything the surface feels sticky right now

[Henrik]

Yep, you can season it many times, so no worries. I season mine every now and then on the stove. Add oil, turn up the heat, when the oil starts to smoke I let it cool off and wipe off the excess. Repeat 2-3 times. Done.