Should You Polish Your Cast Iron Into A Mirror Finish?

In today's video we are going to see if it is possible to turn a

cast

iron

skillet into a working

mirror

. I love good

cast

iron

skillets like this one. Turns out this one is Lodge brand, but that's only because they're nice. Of the most common and cheap cast iron pans to get they used to be much smoother, they actually sanded them, it is called cast iron because they are cast in iron and the casting method is with sand casting, they take the shape of In the cast iron skillet, they press it into the sand and then they pour the cast iron into it and the texture that we have all over it comes from that sand.

The sand itself leaves this type of sand pattern everywhere and well, I've had great results using it. cast iron pans with that, in theory, work best when they're soft and I don't just want to soften this. I want to see how smooth I can get it. I want to take it to the point where it's so shiny. we can use it as a

mirror

, this is the basic idea: we have a classic cast iron frying pan, we will see if it is possible with sandpaper and

polish

er to give it a true and shiny shine and if we can get a mirror

finish

.

How well will it cook? I'm not going to make the whole pan. I'll only try to do it on the flat bottom surface, but that's the goal. I want it to be so reflective that I can see myself in it and see myself. on it quite well, so it's going to require a lot of

polish

ing. I'm going to remove it with this grinder. I have a lot of these grinding wheels. Then I'll move on to a rotary sander and then even some polishing. After that the sander goes down to 3000 grit sandpaper and I think at that point if I start hitting with buffer it

should

work pretty well so it will probably be a long time with some updates in between. very loud and throwing iron dust everywhere so I will wear dust masks, I will wear glasses and for noise I will wear earplugs, all the safety equipment because it is not going to go fast and it will throw a lot. of metal dust in the air.

I don't want to inhale it or get it in my eyes or listen to my noisy machines, so here goes, it looks like it

should

be a pretty good angle to work with and start with a 36 grit flap wheel. Even with this, I think I'll probably go Going through several of these before getting this fluent enough to move on to the next level. Let's try. This is going to require a lot of effort. Okay, quick update. I switched to these lenses because I think they have better coverage and form a better seal against my face. I felt like I was getting some dust in my eyes.

There's also a lot of dust all over the table, so what are we doing? What I'm going to do is leave the vacuum on right here to try to catch more of that. Hopefully it will help get back on the ground making good progress. However, I probably have lines on my face from the amount of dust, even with the lenses that fit closer. I take them off on my face and there's still dust on the inside and I feel like it's getting in my eyes, so we're going to take this one step further and I'm actually going to try using masking tape to seal the edges around my goggles you should use like swimming goggles for this.

I don't have any of those here. So if you ever look at Alex Steel and he likes to do things, then he's got room to grind, he's got that whole helmet mask with a backpack on the back. he is pumping filtered air in and through but nothing can get in from the sides like it is for me so it should. I don't have one of those, so I'm just going to wear the dust mask on my Face Bowl pretty tight and I'm literally going to seal the sides of my glasses off the tape to see how it goes.

Although I could go back to these larger to have more light visibility and that way the tape isn't like that. On my eyebrows, my lenses are now glued to my face covering most, if not all, of the stamps. I'm hoping that will do a better job of keeping some of the dust out of my eyes, so I just hit this with the sixty grit. I started with a thirty grit, now I did the 60 and now I'm going to move up to I think I got a 120 grit and after that I'll move on to my little rotary sander instead of this thing as an upgrade that I have. now sanded with 3000 grit sandpaper and it feels smooth, that's what you would expect stainless steel to feel, not cast iron, it's not a mirror, but if I stand back that far I can see very well, I know it's really close, but I can see a lot of details.

I once had a friend in the military and he told me that when I shined his boots, they knew it was acceptable when you could smile and see the lines on

your

teeth, it's kind of a guide for what I do. I'm looking in terms of brightness now at this point. With the right lighting I can see it from about a foot away, so I'm really happy that it's very soft. Now I'm about to move on to polishing, so this is a cotton wheel that I have on the grinder. I'm going to go from polishing in cycles to the softest polish and of course there will be some residue left, so it's not a perfect system.

I really should have six. different wheels for this, but overall I'm not really worried. I think it will work decently well. It's probably already the smoothest cast iron skillet ever made, but we can make it softer, so here we go, there's a shiny skillet, it's not. Perfect, this is not a perfect mirror like a glass mirror, but it is to see the lines of my teeth, yes, that is working quite well. There are sandpaper swirl marks, probably from 1000 to 1500 grit sandpaper, still visible there. I didn't do a good job. When removing them when I went up to the highest grit, it can be difficult to know how to get a real mirror polish on something, you often have to go back and say, okay, I take it to a gloss level, oh, and now I can see where .

I had problems before and I have to get back down to that level and do it again, so for the two and a half hours I've spent on this so far I'm pretty happy with it. I think this is probably the most brilliant thing. cast iron skillet ever made. I'm going to take this one home and try to season it. Seasoning is the process of using oil to bake it in cast iron. Cast iron has small micropores that absorb. You heat the oil up to a certain temperature, it passes its smoke point and it actually hardens, so what we have is a little bit of linseed oil and that's supposed to give it the harder shell.

The problem usually is that the surface you're applying that oil to isn't as shiny as this one, so it will probably have a tendency to chip and peel off and not adhere very well to the cast iron. I'm going to do the best I can. In fact, I'm going to hit this. with a pretty strong detergent try to get rid of all the extra glaze and things that may be embedded in it try to soak all that and then I'm going to go through the process, you heat the pan a little bit, take oil, spread it all over the parts of the pan. skillet, not just the shiny part, you put it in the oven at about 450 degrees for about an hour, you take it out and it should have baked a little bit of oil on the griddle, you can do a few layers of that and you often want to do several when you you remove so there's no seasoning left in the pan like I just did and I already passed so I'll try it now we're doing the inaugural test kitchen.

It's seasoned with three coats of linseed oil and sticks to the bottom of the pan, actually much better than I thought. I was worried that because it was so soft it would just be beaten up and we wouldn't get an even layer, but by heating it up and then spreading it out it seems to have been absorbed quite well, we have what looks like a decent shell, it's not 100% even if You will get very close to see many small specks, but everything is coated at least a little and you can see that it is still very nice and reflective, although it is now more of a bronze color than before it was silver, you can still make out the reflection of that Windex bottle, the color blue even outside of the brown. very nice shiny orange surface very slippery and we are going to try the classic cast iron test of a fried egg, we will see if it slides and moves very easily or if something went terribly wrong and it just sticks on worse things. that nothing, yeah, look, that wasn't supposed to happen, I wasn't supposed to run that sloppy, Nate, sloppy, you know, because this is my spatula and it's like 1/8 of a third to a quarter of an inch thick. thickness, these could end up like scrambled eggs hmm, that doesn't seem like it's working very well.

I'm going to try one more egg next to this one and this time I'll try to put some cooking spray on it and hopefully not break the yolk, there are no guarantees on that. the yolk is intact I still don't have a really good tool for turning fried eggs, wow this first one I'm giving myself a D rating, it could be worse but I'd have to try pretty hard for a second, a little bit of it seemed like it was sliding around very good. I'm going to let it cook. I know that sometimes the egg protein can lose its bonds as it cooks against the surface a bit, but that's the closest it sticks to a pan that I've ever seen. egg wash, oh that actually came out pretty well, not quite, but it could be poor oil distribution as I'm proud of the problem.

Oh yeah, I'm losing some of the seasoning right here as I try to scrape the egg off. Look how it's turning silver there. I think the oil may not adhere to the pan very well just because of how soft it turned out. Can you bring a cast iron skillet to a mirror

finish

pretty well? It is not a perfect mirror. Well, I think I did a good job and it turned out pretty shiny. I even managed to season it, but in terms of it being good for cooking, one egg managed to damage the seasoning so much that it just came off and part of that was because I started using it.

I had a pretty aggressive sponge, but some of it came up before I even used my nails and just chewed through it, so maybe if I was better at always greasing the pan while using it, it might last. I'm not saying it's impossible to make this work, but the method I've done it with obviously still has some issues, it's probably not worth the amount of effort it takes to get to that point, maybe we'll just go down a bit the surface. You'll get something softer that will cook better, but really the goal was to see if we could get a reflective surface and we did.

I'm just not saying it's worth doing in terms of cooking, guys, that's not it. All you know is that we always have more for you to see. Click the box at the top to watch our latest video and I'll see you in the next one.