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Got some very thick baked on oil inside of a Lodge dutch oven with an enamel lining. Avocado oil, baked on in a 500F oven while making bread. Can I save some time by just filling it up with warm water (~175F) and soaking for a while with a lye solution before I scrub off the oil? Will this damage the surface? The surface is not pristine, it's an old DO and saw a lot of use before I got it.

A lot of advice says use baking soda, which is pH 8.5. Lye is 13 but I know it will get rid of those polymerized fats.

I'm aware of all the danger of lye, I've used it to strip cast iron pans with no issue.

edit to clarify: thinking 1 tsp of lye powder to 3 qts of water. The real question is will any concentration of lye destroy enamel?

jcollum
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There are two reasons why I would not do it.

"Enamel" is not a single substance, but a class of substances. They can have different chemical properties, including corrosion resistance. And the enamels used in cookware are calculated to be resistant to what is usually encounterable in a kitchen. This is certainly not lye at pH 13 or above.

The Internet supports this intuition: for example, this site lists the corrosion resistance of enamels for different use cases, and while they don't have pots, pretty much all household items they list are formulated for the pH range of 2 to 10.

A second reason is that you don't only have to worry about the enamel as a substance. You have an enamel-lined pot, and these are very prone to chipping, and sometimes crazing. I would worry about lye "finding" these discontinuities in the enamel layer and attacking them. The iron of the Dutch oven itself shouldn't have any problem with it, but the problem would be the bond between the enamel and the iron. This bond is always weaker than either of the two materials, and anything that attacks there has a chance of destroying it and letting the lining layer peel off.

I will admit that I don't know whether the bond between iron and enamel can withstand lye, but seeing that it is one of the most corrosive substances a person will ever encounter, I wouldn't try it out on a pot I value.

rumtscho
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