Cam

The mistake I made for two years was topping up the cooker with stock because it looked dry at hour two. It was not dry, it was about to release a load of liquid from the meat and vegetables, and I was diluting the thing I would later complain was thin. Now I put in barely enough to come a third of the way up the meat and I have not had a watery braise since.

Six weeks is early but you should be doing better than that, and the most likely culprit is heat management rather than seasoning. Two things almost everyone gets wrong with eggs on cast iron:

First, preheat properly and slowly. Five minutes on medium-low, not two minutes on medium. Cast iron is slow to heat and has hot and cold spots until it's fully saturated, a pan that's 200C in the middle and 120C at the edge will grab anything you put in it.

Second, the pan is probably too hot when the egg goes in, not too cold. Butter should foam gently, not brown instantly. If it browns the moment it lands, pull the pan off the heat for thirty seconds.

Also: don't touch the egg for the first 45 seconds. Egg protein bonds to metal and then releases as it sets. Poking it early breaks the release.

Very common mix-up. Hot equals no stick for steak, where you want a crust. For eggs you want the pan barely hot enough to set them, or you cook the underside to the metal before the protein has released.

Agreed. We used a gate for two years and the habits stuck anyway, so we ended up with both.

Bump the superfat to 7% if you're mainly making hand soap. It's the simplest single lever for a gentler bar and it costs you a small amount of lather. Above about 8% you start getting a slightly greasy bar and shorter shelf life.

Building it wrong, almost certainly too thick per coat. Flaking in sheets is what happens when a layer of polymerised oil is thick enough to have its own structure: it becomes a film sitting on the pan rather than bonded into it, and thermal shock from a hard sear cracks it off.

The fix for coats: after you wipe oil on, wipe it back off. Properly off, until the pan looks dry and you'd swear there's nothing there. There is: a molecular film's worth, which is all you want. Eight coats done that way is beautiful. Eight coats where the oil pooled anywhere is exactly what you've got.

To recover, you don't need to strip the whole thing. Scrub the flaking areas back to metal with steel wool or coarse salt and oil, then re-season just those areas. It'll be patchy for a while and even out with cooking.

It feels completely wrong the first time. The rule I use: if you can see the oil, there's too much. If you tilt it under a light and it looks matte, that's right.

One other contributor: 25% palm and 30% coconut is a fairly hard, fast-tracing base to start with. On a known accelerator I'd drop the palm a little and lean on the olive for a batch where you want working time.

Counterpoint: you can sand a modern pan smooth in about twenty minutes with an orbital sander and 80 then 120 grit, then season it. Costs nothing if you own the tool and you end up with a smooth pan for £30. Plenty of people do this and the results are indistinguishable in the pan.

A week of squash and carrots it is. It sharpened so easily that your soft steel warning is now nagging at me.

I have been scouring it back to bright after every wash, which explains a lot. Letting it go dark from now on.

I did this with a frozen whole chicken years ago and threw the whole thing away at hour five when I finally bought a thermometer and saw what the middle was doing. That was about twelve pounds of food and a very late dinner. Frozen and diced is one thing, frozen and solid is a different appliance problem.

That's the whole trick on a hob. Smoke means the oil is breaking down and cross-linking. Stop early and you get exactly what you've got.

Too much oil that never fully polymerised. Tacky means the oil got hot enough to thicken and go sticky but not hot enough for long enough to turn into a hard film. It's essentially half-cured varnish, which is why soap does nothing.

To fix: scrub the tacky areas hard with steel wool or the rough side of a scourer plus coarse salt until the gummy feel is gone. You don't need to go all the way to bare metal, just past the sticky layer. Then re-season with a genuinely wiped-off coat and heat until the pan stops smoking, not just until it looks different.

If you want to eliminate it entirely, a slightly higher water discount and gelling in a warm oven at the lowest setting for an hour then off overnight will do it. Slightly more advanced, works reliably.

Overnight advice is how people turn a lightly rusted pan into a rough one. If it's really heavy rust do multiple short soaks rather than one long one.

Pits are cosmetic in almost every case that isn't severe. A dozen fingernail-catching spots on a 10 inch pan is nothing - they fill with seasoning over a few months of cooking and the surface levels out functionally, even if you can still see the marks. Flat and crack-free are the two things that actually matter and you've got both.

Process: get the rust off with a vinegar soak at 1:1 with water, but check it every 15-30 minutes. Vinegar keeps eating iron after the rust is gone and will make the pitting genuinely worse if you leave it overnight. Scrub with steel wool between soaks, wash with soap, dry on the hob immediately, then season.

How are they stacked on the rack? Bars need air on all sides and space between them. If they're touching or lying flat on a solid shelf the underside stays damp and the whole thing cures unevenly. Stand them on edge with a couple of centimetres between.

The partial gel ring is exactly what I got in a test batch in a plastic tub. Good to know it's an insulation thing rather than a recipe thing.