How to prevent bread sticking to cast iron pan?

If you are having trouble with honey-wheat bread sticking in your cast iron pan, there are several things worth trying:

• Make sure the pan is well seasoned. There should be a smooth, continuously black surface over the entire food contact area of the pan.

• Spray the pan with oil before adding the bread. This may or may not work but is probably worth a try.

• Do not add the loaf directly to the cast iron pan. Put it in on a parchment sheet, so that it is not in direct contact with the oven. You will have to peel off the parchment afterwards, but it should reduce sticking.

  In fact, in some versions of no-knead bread, this is the recommended method until the loaf is well set, then you remove the parchment for the latter part of the baking to facilitate bottom crust development.

Honey-wheat breads are going to be inherently more sticky than a pure white bread, especially because of the sugar, and because the whole wheat bran in the loaf tends to cut the gluten strands, making it hard to get a tightly stretched gluten network on the outside of your loaf, which is one of the things that makes it less likely to stick.

Another thought would be to try removing the dough from the pan, preheating the pan, and then tossing the dough back in. Adding food to a hot pan will reduce sticking, as will ensuring the food you're adding to the hot pan isn't cold.

It may sound a little weird, but it's pretty standard to get cast iron nice and hot before adding food, for that purpose. Haven't tried it with bread, but it'd be worth a shot.

coat the pan with butter or crisco and heat up to temp first, then let your food get to room temp before adding to pan. should eliminate sticking problems. flax seed oil has been known to flake off in food, it also has a lower smoke point and will not hold up well in seasoning over time with cast iron, use pure lard or crisco and you will have much better results

I’m pretty new to using the cast iron bread pans. I’ve seasoned my pans well prepping them before the first bread baking. On my first attempt, the bread seemed to stick a bit. Upon my second go ‘round I noticed that the bread did not seem to want to flip out after baking. I let the loaves set in the cast iron pans for about 15 minutes. Then they came out easily.
As the pans began to cool, a condensation seemed to form releasing the bread very nicely. The pans at this stage were still warm enough that with bare hands it was still uncomfortable to touch. Next time I think I will exercise a bit more patience and simply wait until I can bare handedly touch the pans. I believe this will be the indicator to extricate my loaves.