A mouse may probably took a shit in my well-seasoned wok. How thoroughly must I clean it?
The wok is
this carbon steel model. It's a couple of years old, well-used and well-seasoned. I have cooked all kinds of things in it, mostly veggies and tofu, but sometimes meat.
Over the past year, a few mice showed up in my apartment, and could sometimes be heard (or seen) scampering across the kitchen counter, leaving droppings. At one point, one night, I heard what sounded like a mouse scrabbling against the curved surface of the wok. I later found that a section of the "seasoning" was missing, as if it had been eaten or clawed away.
Since then, the mice have gone (I humanely trapped and freed three of them, and the apparent fourth seems to have died or gone away), and the kitchen is much cleaner than it used to be, I have my food mostly in sealed containers now, etc.
However, I haven't used my wok in quite a while, because I'm concerned that it's not really clean, and that there may not be a way to clean it without scraping or burning off every particle of the "seasoning" and starting from scratch. In fact, if that's necessary, I may prefer to just get a new wok. I've also considered sticking it in the oven or the broiler at maximum heat and trying to cook the coating off that way.
All that said, I had come to like the idea of my wok, seasoned with the grease of hundreds of meals, and it seems such a shame to discard it or scrape it clean because it didn't manage to stay sterile all the time. I'm puzzled whenever I read someone talking about their wok that has been seasoned for generations. And I think, really? Nobody ever sneezed into it? A child never threw a dirty toy into it? Nobody ever touched the inside of it without washing their hands first? I realize that these things are not the same as mouse shit, but wok/seasoned cookware people, I ask you as a sub-question, where do you draw the line in terms of telling yourself that you need to let go of your "seasoning" situation and actually clean the thing down to the way it was when you first got it?
Needless to say (perhaps), I have since rinsed my wok thoroughly with hot water, wiped it with paper towels, and heated it up on the stove. It has been sitting face-down in a cabinet for months.
I'm not looking for pointers to the most conservative course of action here, which is obvious. I'm really just hoping to get advice from other people who used seasoned cookware, and/or have a well-grounded scientific (or tradition-based) understanding of what it's really necessary (or just typical) to do in a situation like this one.
And, even if the mouse had not shat in it, it still would not be sterile because bacteria and spores and viruses and possibly flies and other insects have touched it.
So...
If you want to sterilize it heat is your answer.
posted by dfriedman at 8:54 AM on August 24, 2010