Known for their premium heat retention and nonstick properties, the best cast-iron skillets are kitchen workhorses. Following months of testing, here are our top picks.
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Welcome to The Esquire Endorsement. Heavily researched. Thoroughly vetted. These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash.
This cast iron skillet comes with a backstory. All cookware should, shouldn t it? So you can use it to make meals that provide the backdrop for more stories? In this case, it s a story of honoring roots. Lodge, the foundry America has trusted with cast iron since the early days of cowboying and sizzled meat, was originally called Blacklock; that s what Joseph Lodge named it when he founded it in Tennessee in 1896. A hundred and twenty-five years later, Blacklock is Lodge, and Lodge is a company to whom heritage means something. So it crafted and released a special line of cast iron called Blacklock a circle made full. The Blacklock line falls in that sweet spot between cheap Lodge classic cast iron and upper-echelon-of-cookware cast iron from the likes of Smithey. It has more character, like the vintage cast iron yo
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Before I took this job, I cooked almost everything I ate in the same Lodge 10.25 inch cast iron skillet that I had purchased at the University District Goodwill in Seattle, WA back in 2011. I had been a young, rambunctious lad at the time, and thought there was no finer thing in life than a home-cooked pile of steak and eggs, slid lovingly from the black iron directly onto my plate. I was right, but I also greatly underestimated how much better skillets could get.
Back in November, I reviewed the Stargazer 10.5 inch skillet, a piece of cookware that replaced my Lodge and hasn’t left my stove-top since (except for on the occasions when I use it to cook something in the oven, or. like if I wash it). Since writing that piece, the pan has lost its gold color and shifted almost entirely into the matte-black you find on pre-seasoned Lodge skillets, but the interior surface hasn’t lost its ice-sheet smoothness. I thought it’d be my pan for life, or at least until the
13of14
14of14
Before I took this job, I cooked almost everything I ate in the same Lodge 10.25 inch cast iron skillet that I had purchased at the University District Goodwill in Seattle, WA back in 2011. I had been a young, rambunctious lad at the time, and thought there was no finer thing in life than a home-cooked pile of steak and eggs, slid lovingly from the black iron directly onto my plate. I was right, but I also greatly underestimated how much better skillets could get.
Back in November, I reviewed the Stargazer 10.5 inch skillet, a piece of cookware that replaced my Lodge and hasn’t left my stove-top since (except for on the occasions when I use it to cook something in the oven, or. like if I wash it). Since writing that piece, the pan has lost its gold color and shifted almost entirely into the matte-black you find on pre-seasoned Lodge skillets, but the interior surface hasn’t lost its ice-sheet smoothness. I thought it’d be my pan for life, or at least until the