while waffle irons might be less susceptible to damage from the SCO, I still wouldn’t use it. a lye tank and electrolysis tank are cheap and simple to set up and clean with no chance of damage to any part of any cast iron item (I do a lot of skillets and griddles and dutch ovens and gem pans…) Also, I don’t have any experience with flax, but I’ve heard a lot people complain about flax ‘flaking off’ after a few months of regular use (usually on skillets).
another one of my old timers: https://imgur.com/a/5Uj5t
Love the pattern on this one.
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I use “Earth Balance original buttery spread” which has a lot of flax oil in it and never have flaking problems. Here’s my cookin’ irons… but I mostly just use 'em and don’t worry too much about maintaining a perfect finish.
I think I probably paid $10 for the lot, over the years.
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The temperature of a wood fire is nowhere near the melting point of cast iron. Something like 1000F different.
You don’t have a Bessemer furnace in your house?
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Ask 10 people how to care for cast iron cookwear and you’ll get eleven different answers.
If you don’t want to cook the corrosion off, see if you can find a local sandblaster. Or throw it in a crankin’ camp fire.
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You’d think that, but you would be wrong. A wood fire’s embers get to about 900C. Heating cast Iron to cherry red is about 850-900C. The melting point of cast iron is 1150C. Even getting Iron that hot can change the crystalline structure of the Iron.
https://www.rbcompany.com/files/rb/files/resources/MELTING-POINT-OF-METALS.pdf
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This is an urban legend. The only danger of lead in cast iron, even cheap chinese stuff, is if someone has been melting lead in it. For instance, using a corn bread stick pan to make lead ingots.
The boiling point of lead is close to the melting point of Iron. So any lead in the alloy will be boiled off.
http://drchemical.com.au/do-cast-iron-saucepans-contain-lead
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Does it sell fork handles?
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I’ve burnt out two elements using the SCO function. In my experience, Yes, it’s likely.
I haven’t performed the experiment so I will take your word for it. 
“Cherry red” is a specific heat range; smiths use color to determine what’s going on in ferrous metals, that’s why smithies are dark. Cherry red is typically between 1400 and 1500 degrees in common mild steel, but the carbon content of old cast iron cookware is not consistent. In my experience, ferrous metal will not deform from its own weight until you are out of cherry red and into the orange or brighter, but you start to get surface degradation long before you see slump. Iron is flammable. You could easily burn off the “rind” that cast iron has and expose the more porous interior, and that Would Be Bad.
But what happens to the actual structure of metal upon heating is not so much dependent on the heat, as it is on how you cool it afterwards. In broad terms, rapidly quenching a very hot ferrous object will harden it, and the hardness will be mostly on the surface; slowly cooling it will soften it. The opposite is true of non-ferrous metals. More detail here, it’s a complex and fascinating subject.
If you did wreck a pan from simple overheating, you should be able to restore it by reheating and controlling the cooling process, but if the problem is that you’ve burnt off the casting rind, you’re done, it’s over (the same problem will result from sanding or machining the rind off. I’m sure you know you shouldn’t sand your cast iron!).
All these things being understood, and acknowledging that a wood fire in a very good draft can definitely heat iron to a red glow, a self cleaning oven will never heat an iron skillet to cherry red. The element would burn out first.
You need a new oven, then. My 40ish year old Jenn-Air has run hundreds if not thousands of SCO cycles, and I’ve replaced the stove element exactly once.
EDIT: Before anyone asks… the reason I frequently sterilize my oven is because we welcome visitors that are religiously or ethically vegetarian or have life threatening allergies. The SCO cycle prevents animal fats deposited on the stove walls by meat cooking vapors from flavoring vegetarian dishes, and incinerates similar residues left by cooking foods containing milk, eggs, and other problematic substances. The SCO cycle helps us serve meals suited to our guests’ medical or cultural requirements.
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Not normally,but even 900C is still hundreds of degrees below the melting point of cast iron. The bottom line is that you’re not going to damage a cast iron pan in either a backyard fire or a self-cleaning iron.
Ours too. We’ve never had to replace the element, only the little pin that holds the door closed.
I do agree, but I don’t think melting point has anything to do with it, or microstructure either.
I’d be very surprised to discover it matters if your pan is austenite, martensite, or delta ferrite for cooking purposes. But if you burn (not melt) the cooking surface it’ll never be the same. And I am as sure as I can be (without ruining a pan which I’m not going to do) that you could burn the surface off an iron pan in a wood fire if you purposely tried very hard to do so, heating it in a forced draft for a long time after all the gunk was cooked off, getting it up to a nice bright orange.
Well, people have been prepping their cast iron pans by chucking them in a backyard fire for ages (as well as sanding them, which is practically necessary for modern cast iron). People even season their cast iron over backyard fires. I’ve heard the stories of cases where the iron has cracked or discolored as a result, but they are usually of the “I read somewhere…” or “a friend of a friend…” variety, and even if true I suspect the iron was already flawed, and would probably have similar problems even if just left on the burner too long.
Red is not the color to worry about; orange, or orange-yellow is where the metal is too hot. (FWIW, I am not a metallurgist, but I have spent long stretches in functioning steel mills, and some of the colors you see there are pretty impressive.)
If you shape your backyard fire so it emulates a smith’s forge, then all bets are off.
Exactly! You can do damage to cast iron that way if you’re trying, but if you’re just burning off the gunk you’ll be fine.
Nothing’s going to stop you from sanding cast iron (such as sanding the modern Lodge pans with the rough surface, a pointless and meaningless exercise in my opinion) but you don’t want to break through the “rind” that is formed where the molten metal was up against the mold. The interior is more porous in a well made piece. I suspect the silicon and carbon content are different, too, because of the differential cooling any nontrivial mass of molten metal undergoes. Since you can’t know how thick the rind is until you break through it, it seems unwise to sand. Go to a yard sale and get a pan that doesn’t need sanding for $3 instead.
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I’ll take four, please!
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There’s not much of a difference in the metallurgy of a cast iron exhaust header for an engine and a cast iron cooking vessel. I know those headers get extremely hot, and can fluctuate wildly in temperature without much issue.
I’m going to go on the side of, don’t heat your cast iron cookware above dull cherry red, and you’ll be fine. (except for time spent to re-season them)
I know several folks who have seasoned their cast iron exhaust manifolds to keep the rust down.
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Just in time for “Stranger Things” season 2.
#waffles
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