I love my cast iron pans, I have a dutch oven, large skillet and a grill pan, also a small saucepan. They are great for camp cooking. The only drawback is you need good arm strength to lift them and my biceps are a little weak. I was told by my grandmother to never use soap on them, but for scrubbing to use coarse salt.

I have a 12" skillet & Dutch Oven I bought over 25 years ago. My wife is always throwing 'em in the dishwasher (I've told her, but ...) and I have to reaseason.

Sometimes, food still sticks and I have to scrub the burnt crud. Somewhere I heard about skipping the steel wool in favor of Kosher salt and hot oil with a big wad of paper towels. It works great!!! Just dump a Tbs of your seasoning oil, reheat it somewhat and put a Tbs salt in there and give it a good dose of elbow grease and it's clean as a whistle.

I have never heard the Kosher salt idea. I will have to tell my mom that. She has a really nice cast iron skillet but she has a hard time getting it clean without scrubbing it to death.

I have a 30 year old cast iron skillet with flavorizing bars and it's always a pain to clean. Do you think the salt and oil method would make it easy to clean. The bars are about 3/4" apart, and it makes it really a lot of work to clean because of all of the corners -- in fact it's like the skillet is nothing but corners (and they're the hardest part of the cast iron pans to clean).

Old Bay - I have one of those as well - and I have resorted to using a brush to clean my pan. It makes it much easier - then I can season the pan when it's clean. The brush I use is just one with a plastic handle - in the housewares section in just about any store - just a cheapy - but it works.