The Power of...
Vinegar!
I'm often surprised when I hear someone doesn't have vinegar in their house. I'm not really sure how a household survives without three ingredients: coconut oil, baking soda, and vinegar. We use copious amounts of all three around here. I could spend all day extolling the uses of white vinegar, but today I'll just talk about one: restoring cast iron.
I found a cast iron pan outside a friend's house recently that was left by the previous renters. It was in terrible shape - covered in rust and dirt. I did some trolling on Pinterest to see the best way to restore it, and was saddened by the frequency with which I was reading "oven cleaner." I won't even use that stuff on my oven, so I'm certainly not going to use it on a pan that will be in direct contact with my food. I finally ran across a blog which suggested soaking the pan in white vinegar. I put it in and let it sit, and suddenly it started fizzing. A few hours later, I could see sheets of black yuck lifting off. When I took the pan out of the vinegar, the rust came right off with a wire brush. The following pictures show my progress over the past week or two. Most of the information I gathered from a blog called www.biscuitsandsuch.com.
I'm often surprised when I hear someone doesn't have vinegar in their house. I'm not really sure how a household survives without three ingredients: coconut oil, baking soda, and vinegar. We use copious amounts of all three around here. I could spend all day extolling the uses of white vinegar, but today I'll just talk about one: restoring cast iron.
I found a cast iron pan outside a friend's house recently that was left by the previous renters. It was in terrible shape - covered in rust and dirt. I did some trolling on Pinterest to see the best way to restore it, and was saddened by the frequency with which I was reading "oven cleaner." I won't even use that stuff on my oven, so I'm certainly not going to use it on a pan that will be in direct contact with my food. I finally ran across a blog which suggested soaking the pan in white vinegar. I put it in and let it sit, and suddenly it started fizzing. A few hours later, I could see sheets of black yuck lifting off. When I took the pan out of the vinegar, the rust came right off with a wire brush. The following pictures show my progress over the past week or two. Most of the information I gathered from a blog called www.biscuitsandsuch.com.
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| The pan after letting the first area soak. The top is how it looked after I scrubbed the loose, flaky rust off. |
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| Wow. |
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| Still needs a little work, but it's pretty amazing for a $3 gallon of white vinegar and very little elbow grease. |
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| After all the scrubbing and soaking. |
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| I put some oil in it on the grill to help remove the last of the rust in the corners. |
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| Sitting next to her new buddy, just after the first seasoning. |
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| Happy re-birth day, cast iron! |
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