What's your tried and true method of reviving a rusty cast-iron pan?

CLR and steel wool and hot water. I haven’t owned used a cast iron pan in 22 years.

Use a drill with wire brush wheel. After rust is gone put it in oven at 350* F for two or three hours after coated it with Crisco.

Scrub off the rust, coat the cast iron with oil and heat it to 500F. This will start seasoning the metal again.

Ooh I love this question. Get yourself an electric drill and a wire brush attachment. Go to town on it until all the rust/crud is gone. Wash it off and then dry it quickly. Get some bacon grease or lard and give it a thin coat and then wipe it off. Bake it in the oven at about 400 degrees for an hour or so. Remove it and let it air dry. Wipe off the crust from the grease. Apply a slightly thicker coat of grease and bake it again. Should be good to go after that especially if you fry some chicken in it almost right away.

water, vinegar, and baking soda. IT WORKS

NO, NO, NO! You don’t want to use any chemicals like CLR!

Remove the rust with an abrasive, like salt, or a wire brush wheel. Then clean with water only, then coat all surfaces with Crisco, or something similar, bake all day as recommended above.

Cool.

I’m a soapmaker, so I have a glorious selection of oils to choose from. Do I need to worry about staying below the smoke point of the oil, or is the goal to basically burn it in?

(I need a southern grandmother to teach me these things)

Well… you run the risk of setting off your smoke alarms. This is why I use thin coats and bake it a couple times. This helps keep smoke down. If you use too much grease and burn the crap out of it then it will flake off and get into your first few meals. Go thin on the seasoning grease when baking the pan. Just give it a quick thin wipe of grease when cooking after the reseason for a few meals and it will continue to get better, especially if it is old cast iron like a griswold or a wagoner where it was cast and then machined to be smooth. Lodge basically sucks IMO.

You want it to get as hot as possible during the seasoning process, so it’s best to use any oil with a very high smoke temperature. I’m a similar q some time ago, it was suggested that you place the utensil in the oven and set the oven to “self-clean”.

If you use “self clean” then use a high temp oil like safflower or soybean.

Well, I’m impatient and I don’t own a drill at the moment, so I’ve hit it with my wire brush on my Dremel and blasted it with 60 grit paper with my palm sander, and it is looking pretty ok so far.

Imma grab some Brillo tomorrow to finish it up and start curing it. Thanks, guys!

I would not recommend the Brillo because of the soap. Soap is not cast iron’s friend. If you want to do something like that, just use plain steel wool.

Immerse in white vinegar for a week, then scrub with soap and water.

When my old axe heads would rust, we would throw them into a camp fire. Had to be hot enough to make it glow bright orange. That seemed to work well. But axe heads are pretty hardy. I’m not sure if a grate would be ok…

^^That makes me wonder if you can put it through a cleaning cycle in a self clean oven and maybe it would work?

@Muad I know nothing about iron cast pans, but I’ve always wanted one, so this was a great Q to read. I would avoid the CLR if you can.

Damn, I just burned a bunch of old wooden furniture last night. Why didn’t I read that earlier?

@MrGrimm The campfire method would work. fact, a Dutch oven made of the same material (cast iron) is designed to be used directly over the hottest coals of a fire, or even to be buried in the foreseeable itself.

^^“buried in the foreseeable itself” should read “buried in the fire itself”.

Can confirm: Dutch oven is a great way to bake bread

@Strauss . Yeah. We put the axe heads on the coals…

CPR (Clean the Pan Rigorously)