Vollrath carbon steel pan seasoning gone wrong

I dont care what they tell you     1. do not use brillo/ steel wool/or stainless steel scrubber.   2. Never heat a pan on the stove to that temp without anything in it

   . I can see by looking at the picture the inside is all scratched up.  Whenever you season do it the way we did it years ago . Wash pan dry pan well  fill pan with about 1/4 inch salt  put on the burner till salt turns a bit grey  put salt in something as you can use for next pan. Rub pan out with oil and then paper towl  DO not wash   Thats it all seasoned  in fact if you cook an egg in it it wont stick. This was the way we made the original non stick, seasoned way before teflon.

A couple of things I can see from the picture.

• You didn't heat the pan evenly. Likely, the burner was too small for the size of pan.
  
• You had an uneven coating of oil, and too much oil in some places.

For where it is now, assuming it has an all metal handle, I'd put the pan in the oven upside down on one of the oven racks and run an oven cleaning cycle. This will burn off all the oil. And create some smoke while doing so. So open some windows and run a fan. Tape some plastic over your smoke detector.

Wipe it out when cool, Rub lightly with a high smoke point oil inside and out.

Put it back in the oven upside down at 500 for an hour. Let cool. Again, this will create some smoke. See the cleaning instructions above for how to handle this. Repeat as needed until you've developed a patina you like.

Seasoning it upside down prevents the oil from pooling in the pan and causing those sticky lumps.

Uh, a timely post... the brown truck will be dropping off three De Buyer Carbone pans in a couple of hours. My feeling is that your pan will be ok--- let us know how it goes.

I received 3 Carbone pans a few hours ago. I love'em already. Really heavy duty stuff, non-stick on first use. I boiled potato peelings for 15 min. per instructions, then heated some oil in the pan and wiped it out with paper towel. I let it cool, rinsed with water, heated some olive oil and fried the potatoes. The potatoes slid right out. I wiped with a paper towel, melted some butter and fried two eggs on medium low heat. Completely non-stick, more so even than teflon coated.

 

After seasoning per instructions I diced the potatoes I peeled to get the skins and fried them with an onion, first on high and then reduced heat to medium and covered the pan to let them cook through. The lid from my old Calphalon saute fits perfectly. This is the 32cm size pan with helper handle. It's heavy. Maybe too heavy for some folks but I like it.

 

 

After frying potatoes I melted some butter and fried two eggs over medium, medium low heat.

 

 

Eggs slid right out onto plate with no help at all.

 

 

Wiped it clean and added a light coating of oil when finished. May have to do a steak tonight!

 

 

This may end up being the best money I've spent on kitchen tools--- probably as good as the $50 for my Wusthof 8" knife.

Edited by salparadise - 5/30/12 at 12:09pm

 

Sorry to hear it's not recoverable for you ST.

 

I think you'd like the De Buyer. Less than 50 bucks for the 12 1/2" size. Also got the 9 1/2" and 8" sizes. Not sure if I'll ever use the 8" but it put me over the threshold for free shipping for about the same money that I would have paid for shipping, so in that sense it was a freebie. Perhaps it will be good for sauteing garlic and onion to add to a recipe. Realistically, the 12 1/2" seems like it will be the go-to about 99% of the time. There are few instances when a very small pan is actually required.