Salt is an essential ingredient for daily cooking use. Whether for general seasoning before a dish is served, to make a brine for a chicken, for adding in a pot of water for boiling pasta, or for wiping over a steak just before it is seared to make it juicier and more succulent: every home cook always has a good quantity of salt in the kitchen. However, in addition for use in cooking, general table salt is also very important in the use and care of a Professional Steel pan. In particular, salt has 4 very useful purposes, for before, during and after general usage with a Professional Steel pan, these are:
- Remove the glaze wax coating and prepare the pan’s surface to be seasoned.
- Purify the pan – the salt helps to suppress residues and odors from previous cooking
- Burn off any excess fat on the side of the pan
- Clean the pan (the salt acts as an abrasive)
1. Remove the glaze wax coating and prepare the pan’s surface to be seasoned
To remove the glaze wax coating from the pan, first cover the bottom with table salt. Bring the pan up to heat and then reduce the temperature so as not to create too much smoke. You can either keep moving the salt or just leave it stationary, after a couple of minutes you will find that the salt starts getting darker. The total heating time should not last any longer than for about 5 mins. When finished pour the salt into a heat resistant container, otherwise the heat will melt and scold a material such as a bin liner. Now the pan is ready to be seasoned, as explained here.
2. Purify the pan – the salt helps to suppress residues and odors from previous cooking
The above process can be repeated when necessary to draw out impurities, so as to suppress residues and odors from previous cooking.
3. Burn off any excess fat on the side of the pan
Even after some period of intensive cooking with a Professional Steel pan, with the function of it performing well, some fat or oil may stick and build up a tough layer at the wall of the pan. Quite often this can be rather difficult to remove, even after some tough scrubbing with soap and hot water. One quick and easy way to remove this is to get some salt over this area of the pan, tilt it in the necessary direction, and then heat the pan until the salt has burned off all the scorched fat.
4. Cleaning the pan
On some occasions a consumer may forget or just not have the time to give a pan a hot rinse and clean after cooking. Then later on when the pan does have to be cleaned it has a stuck-on gooey mess all over it which can be quite challenging to remove. In this situation it is preferable not to use soap because it will, in all likelihood, destroy the seasoning of the pan. So instead a light layer of salt can be added to cover the bottom, to act as a general abrasive, and a proper scrub with bunched up paper towels can be used to remove any left-over residue on the pan’s surface.
