Should You Season Nonstick Pans?

You must season certain types of pans to help render them more nonstick and to increase their lifespan while preventing rust. Among these types are cast iron pans and carbon steel. Certain manufacturers of coated nonstick cookware also recommend seasoning their nonstick pans. This would seem to make little sense as what is the point of seasoning a surface that is meant to prevent food from sticking? Do you really need to season nonstick pans?

See also: Teflon versus PFOA

You Do Not Need to Season a Nonstick Pan: It’s Nonsense

The idea behind seasoning nonstick pans regards the use, or non-use, of oil in cooking. If you season the pans, say these sources, you will not need to use any oil and your pan will still be nonstick. Notwithstanding the fact that the pan is already supposed to be nonstick, the error here is in the supposition that we only use oil in cooking to keep foods from sticking to the pan.

I remember a passage in a book about cooking that was full of the same old dogma about kitchen equipment. The author said something about Julia Child that presented a misconception about nonstick pans. She said that Julia Child favored an old nonstick pan because it was just the size she needed and the sides sloped the way she liked. But since Julia used it with butter and oil, she wasn’t using it “as a nonstick pan.”

First of all, while oil helps to keep food from sticking, it is far from a guarantee. Depending on the cooking surface, the amount of oil, and the heat used, certain foods will stick, regardless. You can usually avoid foods sticking by using the right amount of oil, the right heat, etc. The idea that as long as you use butter and oil, a nonstick pan has no purpose, is a major misconception brought about by how nonstick pans are advertized, not how they are meant to be used.

We do not only use oil prevent sticking. We use it to make heat transfer more efficient while causing more favorable reactions in the surface of the food, such as the Maillard reaction that causes caramelization and browning, along with the desirable flavors this brings. This is why Julia Child was using butter and oil in her nonstick pan.

If the only purpose of using oil is to prevent sticking, then we could just use a layer of water in our pans to achieve the same effect. Now imagine searing and browning a duck breast in a layer of water or in a nonstick pan without any water, knowing that it will not stick. This would fail utterly as you would have a non-rendered soggy, and quite disgusting, duck breast. The oil helps sear the surface and properly render the fat under the skin, both of which are essential for a proper duck dish.

Purpose of Seasoning Pans

One primary misconception about seasoning pans is that it is meant to make them nonstick. The reason you need to season cast iron and carbon steel pans is to provide a protective barrier against rust and corrosion. While the seasoning does help to keep food from sticking, this is a side effect more than a primary reason for doing so.

You Should Still Use Oil in Nonstick Pans

Nonstick pans, then, allow you to use less oil but you should still use some oil in them. Frying an egg in a dry nonstick pan, something you frequently see on television renders the egg rubbery and bland. There is a reason we use butter or another tasty fat to fry eggs.

Can You Season a Stainless Steel Pan?

Instructions to Season Nonstick Pans

The manufacturers who advise us to season nonstick cookware claim that this causes oil to become lodged in the imperfections of the coating, making it smoother and thus allowing you to cook without oil while prolonging the life of the pan.

As I’ve pointed out, there are many good reasons for cooking with oil and the chief among these is not keeping your food from sticking. However, the instructions given for seasoning these pans show a complete misunderstanding of the seasoning process and just what it entails. Keep in mind that any company that can stamp sheet metal can make pans. They may not be knowledgeable about cooking or cookware, in general. Here, paraphrased, are some typical instructions. All of the instructions on various sites seem to be similar, making me believe that the companies have copied it over from the web and it all stems from one ultimate and erroneous, source:

To season your nonstick pan, wase it in hot soapy water and dry. Add one tablespoon of oil and rub it in with a paper towel. Heat the pan on medium heat for 30 seconds.

Even America’s Test Kitchen parrots these same instructions, further leading me to believe that they ultimately derive from one source and are being passed around with no attempt to verify or even think logically about the practice.

In one of many books published by America’s Test Kitchen titled “Kitchen Gear: The Ultimate Owner’s Manual” instructions are given for seasnong an older nonstick pan that has started to stick. The explanation reveals the common misconception about seasoning that I’ve already discussed:

You can extend the life of a nonstick skillet that’s starting to become a little less nonstick by seasoning it. Unlike seasoning cast iron or carbon steel, here the oil doesn’t get hot enough to polymerize into a natural nonstick barrier. Instead, the oil fills in microscopic holes and cracks in the skillet’s surface, which can quickly improve the performance of a skillet that’s bcome slighly sticky over time. 1

If the seasoning oil doesn’t polymerize, then the pan is not “seasoned.” Such oil would wash away fairly easily. And, once you add oil to the pan and heat it up, the non-polymerized oil coating the pan, should it still be there, will heat up and liquefy along with the oil you’re cooking with, serving no purpose. Again, if you followed the instructions given in the book, the seasoning process is essentially the same as regular cooking with oil, meaning that everyday use should “season” your nonstick pan.

Still another book source, The Household Survival Manual by Reader’s Digest, says to heat the pan in a 350 oven for ten minutes (if oven-proof), making sure that the oil does not reach its smoking point. Again, we have seasoning instructions that seek to prevent the oil from polymerizing, thus negating the point of seasoning.

How Does Seasoning Work?

If you actually followed the instructions given above, absolutely nothing special would happen to your pan. In fact, if these instructions were valid, simply cooking with normal amounts of oil would ‘season’ your nonstick pan. However, all you would really accomplish would be to dirty up your pan and this slightly heated oil would wash away easily without bonding to the surface. Indeed, these surfaces, such as Teflon or Silverstone, are supposed to prevent things from bonding to them.

But, in order for oil to season a pan, it must be polymerized and then carbonized. This basically turns the oil into a tough plastic-like and carbonized surface that bonds to the iron or other material, preventing corrosion and creating a slick surface that helps prevent sticking. As layers of seasoning build up (provided you do it more than once), the polymerized oil will fill in the nooks and crannies of the surface, making it smoother and smoother. Properly seasoned cookware will last for a lifetime and more.

This process of polymerization does not happen via normal cooking temperatures. While some oils can polymerize or ‘cure’ very easily at room temperature, making them great for woodworking, cooking oils need to reach their smoking point to polymerize.

This makes many folks think that an oil with a low smoke point, like flax oil or olive oil, is great for seasoning. However, trusted makers of cast iron cookware, such as Lodge, recommend oils with high smoke points such as canola oil. They also recommend melted shortening or vegetable oil (this is usually soy oil), as well as grapeseed and sunflower oil. These are oils with smoke points in the mid-range as well as a neutral flavor. Flaxseed oil certainly does not have a neutral flavor, and neither does olive oil. Here are some smoke points of various cooking oils 2 Note that these are average approximations and the smoke point of individual samples will vary:

Avacado (Virgin): 520°F/271°C
Safflower: 500°F/260°C
Light or Refined Olive: 465°F/240°C
Extra-Virgin Olive Oil: 375°F/190°C
Olive Oil Average: 410/210°C
Soy: 450°F/232°C
Peanut: 450°F/232°C
Corn: 410°F/210°C°
Sesame: 410°F/210°C
Sunflower: 390°F/199°C
Canola: 435°F/224°C
Grapeseed: 445°F/229°C
Vegetable: 400°F/204°C
Vegetable Shortening: 360°F/182°C
Coconut: 350°F/176°C
Flaxseed: 225°F/107°C

Generally, it is recommended to choose an oil with a higher smoke point and heat it in the oven at 450 to 500°F for an hour.

The nonstick sources I consulted recommend canola oil heated on medium heat for 30 seconds. The smoke point of canola oil is 435°F/224°C. Once it reaches this temperature it must remain there for a sufficient time to allow polymerization. If the coating is at all sticky or tacky, it hasn’t worked (or you used too much oil).

Clearly, heating a nonstick pan coated with canola oil for 30 seconds on medium heat will do absolutely nothing special to the pan. If you never wash the pan and only wipe it down with a clean cloth, you could pretend it was seasoned since it would continue to be oily, not to mention coated with the flavors of whatever you last cooked. But fantasy aside, there would be no permanent, or semi-permanent bonding of the oil with the surface and the oil would have not polymerized in the first place.

If you did heat up your nonstick pan with oil in the way you would a cast iron pan, you would probably do more harm to the pan than good. The best nonstick pans are oven-proof up to 450 or 500°F, but should your pan survive the process of normal seasoning, it is not clear that it would actually be seasoned in the way cast iron or carbon steel becomes seasoned.

Regardless, this is all moot if you realize that a good nonstick pan will actually be nonstick, even without oil and that you cook with oil anyway. If a nonstick pan maker tells you that you have to do an extra step to actually make the pan nonstick, find another nonstick pan maker.