Why did they think they had to improve on cast iron? It was perfectly good the way it was! How hard is it to season cast iron? You take some Crisco, smear it all over, bake the pan on low for a while, wipe it out and repeat as many times as necessary to get a nice seasoned finish. I agree, look for cast iron at thrift stores, flea markets and yard sales. If it is in really bad condition, have it sand blasted and season it again yourself. If you clean it up good and heat it in the oven, it will be sanitized. Used pots, pans, bowls, gadgets, etc. can be scrubbed clean and used safely. I collect pottery, china, molds, etc. that are decades old and I use them. Never killed anyone or made them sick, as far as I know. Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now.

I agree, I have cast iron pans that are decades old and they just get better, my favorite is as slick as teflon. The best seasoning I've found is to make french fries, the hot grease just soaks right in, but I normally coat my cast iron with crisco and put it into a hot oven when it needs seasoning. As Colleen mentioned, cast iron can be shattered, I cracked a nice skillet by taking it off a campfire and putting it into a bucket of cold water so that the kids wouldn't touch the hot pan. Sigh. I'm assuming this is not enameled cast iron, which is something different entirely. I wouldn't do something with a sweet sticky marinade right away, if ever. That stuff is going to accumulate into those little ridges and be a bear to get clean, although Colleen's boiling water method works well for me too. I think when you get used to it, and it becomes properly seasoned, you're going to love it, but there is definitely a learning curve with cast iron. Annie

Scratching, chipping, etc of smootop surfaces? Lots of prior discussions of this here including this one which, for anyone interested, has links to many other earlier postings on the subject. http://ths.gardenweb.com/discussions/2346300/causing-scratches-breakages-on-induction-cooktop >>>"the air between the pan and the glass can get very hot . . . accidents and burns when it escapes . . . cracking of the glass"<<< I don't mean the following as an attack on plllog. I, too, have seen some of the alarmist warnings that plllog describes where folks tell you what you are "supposed" to do or not do and what are the risks with induction. First, on the casting rings maybe causing problems with the pan-recognition sensors, that does not seem to be the case with skillets. Those rings are just not thick enough to elevate the pans enough to cause any problems. Where I've seen reports of problems has been with some cooktops and those reversible griddle-grill pans. (You know what I'm talking about -- the pans with smooth pancake griddle on one face and a ridged/rippled grill surface on the other?) Some brands of those reversible pans apparently had or have a very high lip on the "grill" side and the lip was high enough that when the griddle side was up (and the grill side was down) the lift was high enough to have confused the pan sensors on some induction cooktop a number of years ago. Last time I recall seeing a report of this problem was maybe four years ago. (Actually, IIRC, it might have been plllog who found that report.) Anyway, that grill-pan's lips were much taller than the casting rings on the skillets the OP was concerned about. Beyond that, I put the other kinds of warnings in the same category as other earnestly fearful but uninformed posts about induction. Fr'instance, I've seen any number of posters insisting that some European commission has determined that induction actually uses non-ionizing radiation to heat the foods and it is heating the food that heats the pans, destroys nutrients and adversely affects health. Other earnestly fearful posters have insisted that you must only use wooden spoons and such with induction because using steel utensils will somehow electrocute you. As for cracking, you obviously might crack a smoothtop by dropping a 7 quart, cast iron dutch oven full of water/soup/whatever several feet down onto any smoothtop ... well, you get the idea. The other stories about cracking surfaces actually originate in situations that have nothing to do with cast iron skillets, one about vacuum suction and the other about thermal shock. The "vaccum" suction theory might be be extrapolated from reports about folks pulling a large, hot, steamy domed pot lid off a pan, immediately plonking the lid rim-side down on the smooth surface. If the lid is large enough and the rim is perfectly straight, if there is enough steam trapped and the lid cools quickly enough, then a vacuum can develop. Large-enough lids apparently have produced sufficiently strong suction to have cracked a smoothop. There is just not enough room under any cast iron skillet for this to occur and it is unikely you could have enough liquid under it, either, without the burner shutting down and throwing an error code. The idea of cracking caused by "thermal shock" really has nothing to do with cast iron pans, either. Most of the reports that I have seen about thermal shock cracks have been with ultra-cheap portable induction cookers (PICs) that cut costs by using thin, tempered glass tops rather Schott "Ceran," the heavy duty glass-ceramic used on better PICs not to mention all smoothtop/induction ranges and cooktops. Ceran is designed to withstand thermal differentials of at least 750° F. Anybody heating pans that hot on induction has tampered with the control circuits & programming and is engaged in industrial metal smelting, not cooking. Other than that, Schott's products are mass produced and, like all mass produced products, there will be some tops with manufacturing defects that will break under use. That's a manufacturing problem, not a cast iron problem. As for superheated air burning cast iron users, again, there just is not enough air space under a cast iron pan and casting rings are never perfect enough for that to be a real problem, anyway.

We do the majority of our cooking in cast iron. We have 2 pans that were my husband’s grandmother’s. And 2 newer pieces we bought. My husband is a freak about them. The newer ones we seasoned when we first got them. Vegetable oil or canola oil and bake in the oven. Then use a lot! I have the lodge scrapers and use those and super hot water to clean. No soap. Maybe once in a while if I feel like it really needs a cleaning. When I do that I tell my husband because he will dry it and then wipe it down with some oil, his favorite now is coconut. My son and daughter are already making noises about who inherits what pan lol.