In case you didn't inherit one from grandma.
I nearly drove myself nuts before initiating testing for this review just trying to decide what qualities a"good" cast iron pan should have. Cast iron itself is not a good conductor of heat, but it retains heat well. Those two characteristics are interlinked: the better a metal conducts heat, the worse it holds onto it.
To find out, I set a stovetop gas burner to what I would describe as a medium flame, then set each pan on top. From the moment each pan was set down, I used an infrared thermometer to record the temperature every 10 seconds for 20 intervals . I allowed all the pans to cool back to room temperature and then repeated the test while measuring each skillet at its edge .
One exception to this observation was the Butter Pat skillet, which is one of the newcomers to the cast iron market. It was the second slowest to heat, but solidly middle-of-the-pack in terms of weight. In its case, the distribution of metal may help explain why it heated so much slower than the other pans of similar weight: The Butter Pat has much thinner walls and more of its mass in its base. Eggs stuck in nearly every skillet; over time as seasoning builds up, this will no longer happen.
In every single pan , the eggs fused to the metal. The Butter Pat and Smithey skillets had some of the most severe sticking, and they also had appeared to the eye to be the least seasoned out of the box, but none of the other skillets performed well enough to declare an obvious winner. The clear lesson here is that almost no cast iron pan arrives with its potential nonstick surface fully realized: You will need to build up the seasoning at home no matter what.
What I saw instead were nearly identical loaves of cornbread coming out of every single skillet. Each one browned the bread evenly and deeply on both the bottom and sides, indicating that they all have enough stored heat all over, certainly more than the room-temp batter could counteract when it was ladled in. Each one also rose similarly, indicating they each delivered similar heat into the batter, causing similar levels of oven spring.
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