Well, we would like to award Tyler and Melissa Spaid with the Astonishingly Brilliant Award. We thought none of you would guess in a million years what we were doing, and they figured it out. Reading their comment, Greg and I were SHOCKED that they guessed right.
What we were doing with the Frankenstein machine (that's what Niki called it) was reconditioning the antique skillet we brought back from Phoenix. Now, based on the reaction of some of our friends here (who think we're totally nuts), we're guessing an explanation might help.
The skillet we were given in Phoenix was from Greg's Grandpa's farm in Pennsylvania. It was at least 50 years old, and had been in his parents garage for awhile, so we weren't comfortable cooking in it as it was. But we did think it would be neat to have a family antique around for cooking... soooo.....
Here is a glimpse at some of the stuff on the outside of the pan.
We scraped and chisled and quickly realized it wasn't coming off, so Greg did some internet research.
We learned you can restore an antique pan like this one of three ways:
#1 You can bake it in your self-cleaning oven. Well, we don't have one, and the instructions online warned that it is VERY stinky for a long time. So we didn't want to use someone else's oven and stink up their house.
#2 You can treat it with lye. This didn't really make us comforatble either. Plus, lye doesn't treat rust, and the pan had some rust to go with the grime.
That left us with #3- Electrolysis.
So Greg learned how to make an electrolysis machine (so to speak) that would cook that grime right off.
Here is a shot of the bottom of the pan before....
And after!
It took almost 2 days of simmering in our garage, but it worked!
The pan looks brownish in the pictures, but black when you see it in person. All the grime is gone, and it looks fantastic. We are planning to cook with it tonight!
By the way, we do not plan on posting about cast iron skillets again after this for a long time. I know some of you are wondering if we've lost it about the skillets! We'll try to go back to more "normal" subjects like cute children, holidays, and the like.
2 comments:
It was the frothing picture that helped me figure it out - you can see all the rust coming off. And, knowing something about Alton Brown helps, too. Although I only recently saw the episode on fried chicken, not on anything else. Congrats on the fixed pan. I think I'll be asking for a cast iron skillet for Christmas. =)
My dad used to bury a grimy skillet in the fire place ashes and build a fire over it. It worked for him.
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