Anyone else obsessed with finding the perfect cast iron seasoning method?

I've been experimenting for about six months and I think I've finally nailed a regimen that works. Start by cleaning thoroughly (no soap!), coat liberally with grapeseed oil, bake at 450F for an hour, repeat 3-4 times until you get that dark satin finish. The key is thin layers — too much oil just creates a sticky surface instead of a nonstick one. Also, never soak them in the sink! Always hand wash and dry immediately on the stove top before storing. What's your routine? Any tricks for preventing rust from tomato sauce or acidic foods?

I'm still figuring it out, but what everyone says about flaxseed oil seems to work

I've tried everything and honestly I think you just need to keep it clean and cook fat in it constantly which is basically what everyone says anyway but there's this one thing about seasoning that reminds me of my grandmother's kitchen where she had a cast iron skillet that must have been at least eighty years old because the surface was like black glass — completely smooth, no flakes, nothing. She used to make cornbread in it and I remember watching her rub oil into the pan after every use while she told these stories about when she learned to cook from her own mother who taught her everything on a similar skillet that had been passed down through three generations of women. My grandmother would say the secret wasn't any specific method but just consistency over time which makes sense because seasoning is literally building up layers of polymerized oil and you can't rush chemistry no matter how many YouTube tutorials you watch about oven-seasoning at five hundred degrees or flaxseed oil methods that seem to work for some people but not others. I tried the oven method once with a brand new Lodge pan and it came out patchy which was frustrating because I had read that it should be uniform but apparently you have to coat every square millimeter evenly which is harder than it sounds when you're actually doing it, and then I ended up throwing a piece of bacon in there just to see if the seasoning would bond and it worked fine. The thing about old pans like my grandmother's is that they already had years of cooking history baked into them so the base was already perfect — new pans need time.

I went through that phase of like, baking five loaves of bread just to season one pan and honestly it was overkill lol. The oil-and-bake method works but you can skip half the steps if you're consistent with regular use — just make sure you never leave food on it overnight and always wipe it dry before storing.

I have tried everything and I am convinced that high-heat oven oiling is the correct answer but let me tell you something about cast iron that nobody talks about which is that it becomes an extension of your identity over time because my grandmother had a skillet that was so seasoned it basically looked like polished onyx and she used to say that every meal cooked in this pan carried her blessings forward to whoever ate next which is actually a beautiful concept if you think about the physics of carbonization as a form of temporal inheritance but then I started doing these vegan recipes with lots of acidic tomato bases and my pan was literally disintegrating by week three because acid eats iron for breakfast and that taught me more about chemistry than any high school lab ever did because watching your favorite cooking vessel develop rust spots in real time is like a tiny personal apocalypse and now I carry two pans around the kitchen just in case one gets compromised which defeats the purpose of minimalism but whatever it's fine.

The "oven at 450F for one hour" method is what got me started and it's fine for a new pan but I switched to cooking fat-heavy meals on it immediately after seasoning because that builds character faster than baking