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Grilling 24x7 » Recipes » Seasoning a Cast Iron Skillet with Bacon Grease

Seasoning a Cast Iron Skillet with Bacon Grease

by Frank Campanella 11 Comments

Seasoning a cast iron skillet with bacon grease

How To Seasoning a cast iron skillet with bacon grease

I love using my cast iron skillet. It's amazing for frying eggs, bacon or peppers and onions on the grill and it's also quite awesome for searing steaks.

Certainly grilling steak over the coals is incredible but sometimes (maybe it's raining?) you want to use the indoor stove top for your steaks.

I find my main use of my cast iron skillet for weeknight steaks or burgers where my goal is to create that high end steak house experience or the greasy burger from a griddle.

The problem that I have always had is how to clean the cast iron skillet.  It can be a pain. Rules such as no soap and don't scrub too hard are always in my mind.

Cast iron skillet seasoned with vegetable oil

Cooking with Bacon Grease Naturally Seasons Your Cast Iron

It turns out that a cast iron skillet is only annoying to clean if it isn't seasoned well. By no means am I an expert with cast iron skillet cleaning and restoration but I will say this: I got my pan to look amazing and it was simple.

 Just use bacon grease to cook a few times and lightly rub the grease on it before storage.

If only someone told me that seasoning a cast iron skillet with bacon grease was the easy way to have a shiny and usable cast iron skillet.

Here's what my skillet looked like a few months ago.

Chipped cast iron skillet with using vegetable oil.

I tried seasoning that thing, per these cast iron skillet seasoning instructions and I had no luck. Certainly I didn't try the Lye or the battery charger hook up.

I think if I was that down and out I would just buy a new pan. I was looking for something simple. If these skillets were fully in use back in the day, why in the world is it so hard to season this thing now!?

Here's my guess. Back in the day, a hundred or so years ago, people cooked with real fat. None of the processed industrial seed oils were around back then.

So when I was told to use vegetable oil I thought nothing of it. I coated my pan, baked it for a while in the oven, it smoked, set off the smoke alarms, then repeated the process over and over.

It didn't work. It was also really annoying.

Incorporating My Cooking with Low Carb

After doing some of my own weight loss research (i.,e, I have been enjoying a low carb high fat ketogenic diet) I learned not only about saturated fats but also about the benefits of various oils, I learned that vegetable oils aren't very good for you in terms of inflammation.

The replacement for these vegetable oils is natural animal fats.  

HEY SOUNDS GOOD TO ME. So in my kitchen there is a little cup of bacon grease that I have been cooking with (frying eggs, etc.).

Bacon grease collecting on tin foil during cooking

Save your Bacon Grease (Liquid Gold)

Have you ever baked bacon in an oven (375F for 15 min)? It's easier and results in less mess and better bacon, in my opinion.  

Regardless, after you pull your bacon off, just pour the grease into a cup. It can sit on the counter for a long time without going bad. It's amazing how natural fats last long.

Seasoning a cast iron skillet with bacon grease.

A light bulb went off:  try lightly coating my pan with this and see what happens. So I grabbed a glove and put two fingers into the grease and lightly rubbed it around.

Seasoning a cast iron skillet with bacon grease.

Basic Cast Iron Care

It immediately looked so different. I cooked burgers and steaks a few times. After each cook I would lightly coat the pan with grease. It totally worked.

Those chips in the above photo appear to be gone and now the skillet is really easy to clean. Hot water and a plastic spatula will get melted cheese and fried bits of fat right off.

Burgers cooked in a cast iron skillet for seasoning.
Cooking steaks in a greasy cast iron skillet.

Wow look at those burgers and ribeye steaks. After each cook these pans were rather easy to clean.

A light coating of bacon grease and it's ready to sit for my next meal.


Need Some Bacon Recipes??

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Comments

  1. Mike

    May 11, 2020 at 3:41 pm

    I totally agree. I'd read all the ways to season a skillet. "10 Steps To A Perfectly Seasoned Pan" and so forth. And then it occurred to me that people 150 years ago weren't going online to try and find ways to get the perfect skillet. No, they were cooking. With grease. Bacon, meats of all kinds. Jeez, maybe I should try that? Lo and behold it works. 🙂 Enjoy your skillet.

    Reply
    • Culinary Lion

      May 14, 2020 at 5:01 pm

      Bacon fat or Beef Tallow, the original essential oils!!

      Reply
  2. Ric Richmond

    August 14, 2020 at 8:45 pm

    This works

    Reply
  3. Ric Richmond

    August 14, 2020 at 8:55 pm

    I tried Grapeseed, Cono canola oil, Soy oil, vegetables oil but it would never stick and get to the level of a good seasoning as my old 12 inch. When I read this article I went out and tried it. After 6 thick coats using my propane turkey fryer it run out to look like it has been used 4 40 years. Thx!

    Reply
    • Culinary Lion

      August 17, 2020 at 3:21 pm

      Awesome!! so glad this worked for you!!

      Reply
  4. steve

    May 27, 2021 at 11:22 am

    I found that the best way to clean a cast iron skillet, to get it ready to season, is to stick it in a self-cleaning oven and do the self-clean. This removes all of the pre-seasoning junk that the factory often puts on it, all oils and it comes out looking like it just cam out of the forge. You can also take a small sander and sand it really well.

    Reply
  5. steve

    May 27, 2021 at 11:29 am

    One other thing, if your seasoning won't stick it's possibly because of whatever the factory put on it to pre-season it. I had a skillet I worked on and tried to season several times and nothing worked till I took a sander to the inside and sanded it down to bear metal. As I posted before, a self-cleaning oven works even better.

    Reply
    • Culinary Lion

      May 27, 2021 at 11:33 am

      Both of those sound like great tips. Love the self cleaning oven trick!!

      Reply
  6. Chappy

    July 08, 2021 at 3:28 am

    I've been following recipes for years that prescribed olive oil, other vegetable oils, or butter; then, remembered that my grandma always had a can of bacon grease next to the stove and fried with that. So, I started saving the grease from our Sunday breakfasts. I found the skillet and spatula remarkably more slippery when I used the bacon grease to fry eggs. So, I'm also trying bacon grease to clean and coat our carbon steel skillet. We'll see.

    Reply
    • Culinary Lion

      July 08, 2021 at 12:37 pm

      Bacon is magical stuff. I keep all my grease as well!!! fried eggs in bacon fat is epic!!

      Reply
  7. Joan

    May 29, 2023 at 11:58 am

    I have always saved bacon grease, when saving the grease be sure you strain it through a sieve.

    Reply

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