Seasoning New Cast Iron and a Review of Lodge's Pizza Pan

Steve and I have been making pizzas at home for a long time, and we’re pretty good at it, but we still hadn’t nailed down the crust yet.  We’ve been using a pizza stone for a long time and have tried it in all the positions in the oven; from the bottom to the top and everything in between.  We’ve tried different temperatures, different baking duration, different recipes, different amounts of water in the recipe we like, topping the pizza with cheese before putting it in the oven, baking the crust with the sauce for a few minutes, and then topping it with cheese, etc.  The crust would come out either too underdone for the bottom to be crunchy, or it would come out like hard tack- it was never just right. Until last Friday.

I read about pizza steels on SeriousEats.com, but they are really spendy.  Then somehow, and I can’t remember how, I wound up on Amazon looking at Lodge cast iron, and found they make a pizza pan. And their pizza pan had great reviews.  Out of 764 reviews, 694 were five stars. I found the ones by A. Stribling and S. Peterson (their reviews are near the top) were the most fun and useful, and didn’t read much more.   That, and the high number of five star reviews was enough for me, so I went ahead and ordered one.

However, when it showed up, it had the same problem all new cast iron has anymore, enameled cast iron excepted; it has a really pebbly cooking surface.  I have a really old Wagner pan that I’ve had since my late teens that has a very smooth cooking surface, which is really non-stick.  When Steve and I got our wood stove, his sister gave us a small cast iron frying pan for Christmas that would fit on the wood stove.  I haven’t really used it because it too, had a pebbly surface.  Then I found out that you can sand cast iron and smooth some of that out.  Who knew?

So I attacked both pans with sandpaper- first 80 grit, then 150, and then 220.  I also did this on the stove with the hood fan running full blast, because inhaling that stuff would give a new meaning to iron lung.

This is the small frying pan:

You can see what I mean about pebbly; in this picture I only took off the top of the surface on the sides of the pan because I didn’t feel like wasting time on a surface that will only occasionally get food on it.  All the action really occurs on the bottom of the pan:

Even after sanding most of the high spots off the pizza pan, you can still see the low spots that were left. That’s okay, because it would really take a long time and a lot of iron off the pan, and besides I know the best way to season cast iron, because after all this sanding, I was going to need to do that anyway: