How to Make a Pan Non-Stick with Salt

Non-stick coatings on pans are awesome. We all know this. However, when a non-stick coating begins to fail, it is the opposite.

We could tell you that a non-stick coating cannot be saved and that you should really be looking through our reviews of the best non-stick pans in the UK. But this isn’t necessarily the case.

There are plenty of ways to make a non-stick coating work perfectly well again. You can season any non-stick pan and bring it back to life.

You can also get non-stick sprays that you can use each time you cook that work brilliantly. Or you can use salt!

Granted, this is probably the weirdest sounding way of making a pan non-stick once more, but it does work!

So, let’s find out how to bring back the non-stick coating of a pan just by using salt, shall we?

How to Make a Pan Non-Stick with Salt

1. Add salt to pan – This salty wizardry starts off simply by adding salt to the pan. Add a good layer of salt to the pan in question and then put it on the hob.
2. Heat up – Set the ring to a medium heat and leave the pan of salt on it until it is nice and hot.
3. Move salt around – You need to move the salt around the pan. Use a paper towel or a kitchen towel to do this as it will be really hot. Make sure you get the sides of the pan too.
4. Wipe salt away and add oil – Once the pan is nice and hot, and you’ve moved the salt around the pan, wipe away all of the salt and then add some oil to the pan. You don’t need too much oil, just enough to cover the interior surface of the pan with a very thin layer of oil.
5. Heat up until smoky – Get the pan back on the heat until the oil is smoky.
6. Cool and wipe – Leave the pan to cool down and wipe away the excess.

There you have it—you’ve just made a non-stick pan with very simple ingredients. To find out the best oils to use for seasoning your pan, check out our article all about it.

Why Salt?

Some keen-eyed people may have noticed this sounds a lot like seasoning with an added step. After all, seasoning is just adding oil to a pan, letting it heat up until smoky and then wiping away the excess when it’s cooled down.

So, why the salt? Well, some methods only use salt, but if the non-stick coating isn’t working great, you will need to season the pan with oil after this.

Other people swear by just using oil and forgetting about the salt altogether. The salt method of seasoning certainly works in some cases, but it seems to just give the non-stick coating a really good clean, rather than offer any further protection.

So, if your pans non-stick coating has really failed, you may want to skip this step and head straight to the oil.

Salt seasoning is certainly magical and can work for some pans. However, we’ve found that a typical seasoning method (like those used for cast iron cookware) typically works the best.

Do check out our articles about seasoning ceramic pans as that has loads more info about using oil for seasoning a non-stick pan and bringing it back to life. Happy cooking!