Restoring Your Dutch Oven

So, you cooked a great peach cobbler and everyone oohed and aahed about how wonderful it tasted. Then there were some great stories around the campfire and then it suddenly started raining - as you zip your tent shut, you remember the dutch oven is still sitting out on the picnic table.
Oh well, we'll just have to take care of it in the morning.

If you've built up a solid seasoning layer, your dutch oven should be just fine in the morning and a normal cleaning will take care of the dried on left-overs. But, if it is still new or the seasoning wasn't thick yet, then you'll most likely have a rusty dutch oven like the photo above. Removing rust isn't too difficult, so don't sweat it. I cleaned up the neglected oven on this page in just an hour and it looks fine now.

To fix up a rusty dutch oven, you really need to scrub all the rust off with coarse steel wool or a metal scouring pad and then re-season it to fix up the protective coating against more rusting.

A worse problem is letting your friend borrow your dutch oven and he doesn't clean out the left-over goulash that he burned to the bottom of the oven for a week while it was sitting in the back of his pickup and now it's covered with fuzzy mold. Now, what are you going to do?

Well, you've got a job ahead of you to clean out all the crud and then re-season. The best way I've found to handle this job is:

Scrape out what you can with whatever utensil works best - butterknife, putty knife, food scraper, whatever.
Once you have the big, hairy chunks out, then you'll need to burn out all the stuff that is stubborn. Use your propane grill to turn the crusty stuff to ash. Place the oven upside down over the propane burner, close the grill, and turn it on. The idea here is to heat up the oven to burn everything on it to ash, including the seasoning coating that you worked so hard to make over the last few years.
Historically, the dutch oven was thrown upside down onto the hot coals of a campfire to burn off residue. I still prefer to do that when I want to redo the seasoning after a cooking disaster. This is because it usually happens on a campout and I want the people (read Boy Scouts) responsible to learn how to fix it. :-)
Once the foodstuff and seasoning has smoked, burned, and dried to ash, you can carefully remove the dutch oven from the heat to cool down.
When you can handle it, scrape off what you can with a metal scraper.
Use coarse steel wool and water to scrub everything off down to metal.

Now, you've got a dutch oven just as it was when shipped from the factory. Follow the steps to season your dutch oven immediately and you're back in business.
You really need to season it right away - waiting even a few hours in humid weather will let rust form all over the bare metal.

Cook Away - Dutch Oven Cooking

Comments:

Nov 23, 2015 - sheldon wright

thank you for this i live in a small town in the country and i love to cook outside and i just recently purchased one and i burned the inside and i used your idea and works great thanks.

Dec 13, 2016 - Nancy D

Ok we put ours in the fire but still has a lot of rust even after we scraped it so do we put it back in the fire again?

Dec 13, 2016 - Dutch Oven Dude

@Nancy - Fire doesn't remove rust. You need to scrub it off with steel wool, or use a sand blaster, or use electrolysis, or soak it in vinegar or oven cleaner - all various ways that people use. I just scrub with steel wool until it's clean.

Mar 27, 2017 - Sian

Oh my god you have saved my regis stone frying pan, it had gathered rust (looked like rust) and I was gutted, but this year I was going to invest in a Dutch oven for camping and as I was doing research I found myself here, and thought if this type of cleaning can be used on a Dutch oven, my frying pan looks the same metal so tried it and the results are phenomenal, just seeing my frying pan being restored i was almost jumping for joy as I paid a pretty penny for it! I'm amazed as I wasn't 100% that the metals wer the same but I was going to throw it out anyway as everything was sticking to it!! Thank you so much!! I'm now very confident about my plans of buying a Dutch oven!!

Mar 27, 2017 - Sian

Update, pan cleaned brilliantly (looking brand new) but the non stick is still atrocious. I seasoned it as best as I could but when I put the oiled pan under the grill it didn't smoke, now there is no lid to this pan so I wonder is that where I'm going wrong, any advice?

Jul 12, 2019 - Jen

My kids used the dutch oven with out asking. They made peach cobbler, burned it, hid the evidence, I found it soaking in soapy water. My seasoned layers are gone. How do I rid it of the soap and begin to reseason it? There is no rust.

Jul 12, 2019 - Dutch Oven Dude

@Jen - Follow the steps described on this page to clean it and then season it.

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