so today's video is about cast iron pans and i'm also going to do a quick little recipe one that i often make in the frying pan when i want a quick easy and very tasty and healthy meal so hang in there we'll try this out so one of the things that kept me from buying cast iron pans is the seasoning process just seems like it takes a long time to get that non-stick coating on a cast iron pan to where you can just use it like your normal non-stick pans cooking healthy food is already time consuming enough going through the process of seasoning a new pan just did not appeal to me in researching pans i decided to buy some large pans and just bought them off amazon because they were pretty good deal on there i went to their youtube channel and they pretty much said to cook an egg on one of their pans you peel the sticker off put some oil in and cook an egg i'm like no way nobody online that i've seen is like oh just buy a brand new pan put some oil in it cooking it everybody's like it takes weeks months decades who knows to build up that non-stick layer so today i tested it and on one pan i did exactly what lodge said i could do put oil in it on the other one i decided to just season it once through a traditional method and try it and you're gonna see the results in just a minute i have two of them here one of them is what is this like a six and a half inch and the other one here is a 13 and a half inch so it's a pretty big one uh on the lodge uh youtube channel they have a video that shows a brand new pan with a sticker on it they peel it off put oil in and cook an egg so a lot of people on other videos are kind of freaking out that it takes a month weeks uh or a lot of you know seasoning effort to get these ready to cook an egg so i thought you know what i'm gonna give that a try and then on the big pan if i can pick this one up see how big that is next to my head uh on this pan i am going to season it kind of using uh the method that uh a lot of people recommend using a high heat oil and in this case i'm going to use avocado oil another oil that a lot of people use is canola oil the other oil that is probably the most popular is flaxseed oil i just don't have any and i think avocado oil should do the trick so and avocado oil of all the a lot of the healthy oils this one has a high smoke temperature of like 400 degrees if i remember right which is why i chose to use the avocado oil over olive oil which has a much lower smoke temperature so i'm gonna test it for you to see if you really can pull the sticker off and cook an egg in it okay so the first step take the tags off okay making sure to dry it really good seems to be the key some people say to heat it but on this larger video that i'm following they did not say that was necessary at this point so we're just trying to get it really dry by hand drying it i think you know in the future using it heating it after you oil it is probably not a bad idea okay so the next step is to let it heat for five minutes on a medium-low heat all right so it's been heating for five minutes so we're about 250 five degrees so let's try the water test at that and see where we are it still seems pretty hot but i think we're pretty close so let's put some oil in there we go [Applause] all right let's do the egg maybe there we go about this small pan just because it's about the right size for an egg and it's pretty common for me even when i am cooking an egg sometimes i'll just lift it off the heat if i think it's cooking too fast if i don't have the temperature just right that's how i like to do it and people online seem to think this is a near impossibility to cook an egg this soon i think one side i was looking at said you know it may take a couple of months now of course if you're not cooking every day on it that may be true but i did see that you know a lot of the manufacturers and people who don't lost studying said that using some sort of animal lard is not the best way to season a pan it seems like canola oil or flax seed oil were some of the most popular or just crisco shortening seems to be popular as well but um i'm excited to try the avocado oil because it's got such a high heat tolerance so let's go ahead and flip it let's see here's the test well not terribly sticking and gotta be honest for the first time cooking i'm fairly impressed so far wow look at that it's a tiny pan so it's a little hard to flip but look at that wow and i did see that on their website they said seeing some of these little black is fine it's just some of the seasoning that comes preseason so don't let that freak you out it is not like a non-stick pan where that would be a very bad sign so um lodge actually uses canola oil it said at least the spray that you can buy is canola oil i can't remember what their manufacturing process uses canola oil or flaxseed oil for pre-seasoning but i gotta say that's pretty impressive no no pre-seasoning needed so now i'm starting to think if it's worth the trouble to go through that seasoning process with the avocado oil but i'll do it anyway and let's see if we're sticking here not sticking look at that wow all right grab my plate wow look at that you can see that it is clean i mean it pretty much had no stick impressive no wonder people like lodge so much okay so for this pan we're gonna do the other bake it for an hour and see what happens trick so i'm gonna put a little avocado oil on there rub it all over the pan inside and out and then wipe it off make sure you got a nice thin layer and then we will cook it for one hour at 350 degrees and then we'll try cooking an egg now i'm taking a dry piece here i'm just gonna wipe off any excess so it's not on there super thick and gooey and then they say to put it in the oven upside down at 350 degrees and by putting it in upside down it supposedly not only helps drop the heat in but keeps the oil from pulling up around in this edge right there so let's give that a try cookie sheet down there to catch any oil that may drip i doubt there will be any but you never know and then we'll go ahead and put the pan in there upside down i don't know if i can lift this pan with one hand so heavy all right we'll check on that in an hour okay so it is the next day because last night i uh put the bigger pan in the oven let it go for an hour and then you're supposed to let it just cool down naturally so i just shut the oven off and i thought today i would use the pan to make my i'll call it brunch um so the pan is in there there's the pan just got it out of the oven and now i will heat it up yeah so it's coming up a little bit in degrees so for my one of my favorite brunch meals i like to make is um and i've put this in other videos but i like to grill up some mushrooms have some eggs over easy and then i'll slice up some avocado and put some pesto on the whole thing and that's one of my favorite brunch meals when i'm doing sort of intermittent fasting and i don't eat until about noon or a little or early afternoon um because it's nice filling meal i don't get a gut bomb from it and it tastes amazing yeah so we're getting to the point now where it's about ready to to cook so first thing i'm going to do is add a little bit of olive oil and then use my spatula spread it around whoa kind of slashed it that's quite a bit of oil i probably didn't need that much oil so i might dab some of that out of there all right now we'll crack some eggs i'm going gonna pause the camera while i do this well i guess i can try a one-handed crack there we go ah got a shell in there hey that was better than last night with my other one gotta get that shell out though come on open egg open i can do it i'm so bad at this you think with how often i do this i'd be able to do it a little better all right let me get my spatula and clean that up a little bit but i'm saying so far i mean almost immediately able to move those eggs around i mean it doesn't feel super sticky it's not super smooth you can probably see the surface there is a little rough and i know that the more i cook with it the more smooth that will become but a little more sticky than the uh than the small one was i can tell right away but not sticking super bad that one could probably still stand to cook a little bit longer so could this one but so far i can tell that i'm getting that under there and it's not really sticking at all look at that so wow not as nonstick as a non-stick at this point but it's a brand new pan so wow that's impressive for my first time cooking anything in this pan you can see that seasoning coming off a little bit from the uh factory seasoning all right there you have it that is my brunch that i like some sliced avocado a couple of eggs some mushrooms and the basil pestle from costco and then usually what i do is i just kind of chop it all up and mix it into one big ugly looking mess but man is it good tastes really good so here's what the pan looks like after my first cooked meal in it so i gotta say i was expecting a big mess and scraping and all sorts of uh fighting this pan uh but i gotta say i'm pretty impressed with this lodgepan with how well pre-seasoned it already is uh if you haven't made the switch to cast iron yet because you were kinda like me like hesitant with all the care and maintenance and everything it's really not that big a deal uh it really is not that big a deal so uh anyway thanks for watching this video today hopefully it was helpful and you've not only learned a little bit about using your brand new cast iron pans but also a tasty recipe that you can make that's healthy filling and tastes great all right thanks everyone you