How to Clean a Dutch Oven

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Leah Schaefer on behalf of Expert Village and today I’m going to show you how to cook with a Dutch oven. So now that the cinnamon roll is done I’m going to go ahead and show you how you care for your Dutch oven; how you clean it, you want to make sure it’s cleaned out really well so that we can do our main course the potatoes and the ham. So the most important rule about using a Dutch oven is you never ever want to use soap in it. The very first time you use your Dutch oven, you’re going to clean it with soap, and season it, we’re not going to go through that today, because it’s already done, this is an old Dutch oven, but we do want to make sure we never, ever, ever use soap. The soap will completely strip off the good finish. So the first thing we’re going to do is use hot water, run it in there and I got a brass pot brush, using hot water, I’ll just take my pot brush and rub it around the side, around the bottom, be careful if you just pulled this out of the oven it might still be just a little bit hot, we didn’t do that right now. Continue to brush it and dump it out and see how it’s doing and there’s still a little bit of water so I’m just going to use some towels to dump it out. Okay and you’ll see there’s just a little bit left over so once again we’re going to take that brush and rub it around and these come clean really, really easy compared to like stainless steel or aluminum. Rinse it out one more time and it’ll be good. Okay, it looks great. Now I know I said not to put soap in it, that’s the most important thing, the second most important thing is to never let it stay wet longer than it has to so right after you clean it, we’re going to dry it out. Now if you let any water set in this we risk it rusting and if it rusts, we have to strip it and completely season it again and we don’t want that. With just a little bit of caution and care this cast iron pot will last for, I can’t even tell you how long, I can say that this is my great grandmother’s pot so this is several generations old. Okay, I’m just going to run, make sure you dry it on the sides. Now since we are going to be using it for another dish we don’t have to worry about seasoning any of the sides again with the oil but we are going to go ahead and wipe it down with oil inside the pot. "