Flutterby—January 13, 2024
Having only had non-stick and stainless steel pots and pans it took some time to learn the best way to cook with carbon steel and cast iron pans but I love them now. I got rid of all our non-stick cookware even though they were expensive top brands and non-PFOA. Some were scratched and I read scratched non-stick pans are unhealthy to use. It seems like the non-stick pans keep evolving to some other chemically made coating because the previous one turned out to be toxic. Now I cook only with carbon steel, cast iron and high quality stainless steel. I use stainless steel for boiling soups, pasta and acidic food like marinara sauce but carbon steel and cast iron for pretty much everything else. Using the care and cooking information from Lodge on their site has helped immensely and we keep noticing that what I cook just tastes better! I love that you can heat the carbon steel pan and seer the outsides of foods without drying out the interiors. You can scrape whatever sticks and use stainless steel utensils without worrying about damaging the pan. It took a while to develop a non-stick quality that is possible in carbon steel cooking with oil seasoning. We have a whole food plant based diet (except for the occasional eggs our pet hen gifts us) and the vegetables taste amazing! The WFPBD gurus often recommend don’t cook with oil but I personally would rather take my chances with oil than non-PFOA coatings. Also, carbon steel and cast iron is better for the environment. I don’t know how to keep my discarded non-PFOA pans that are damaged out of a land fill! I also got a cast iron cleaning kit on Amazon that has a mesh metal tool that helps scrape off anything that sticks. I had given up on a small cast iron pan I bought years ago when it rusted after I washed it and it sat in my cabinet unused. I read the directions again on how to care for it and now it is one of my favorite pans. The rust cleans up and you just season it again. I wanted to try carbon steel after reading it was lighter weight than cast iron and French chefs prefer it. The care is pretty much the same for both carbon steel and cast iron but carbon steel is lighter weight. One benefit of cast iron that carbon steel doesn’t have is that I can build up muscles just lifting it. LOL. This pan is a good size for many recipes and has become one of my go to favorites. Read more
D. White—June 13, 2015
This is the best frying pan I have ever owned, period. My wife was very skeptical when I ordered this, but she is now in love w/this pan as well. It is so easy to season, to use and maintain, and we now have zero concerns about non-stick chemicals and the environment. This pan just works as we expect every time. We've tried various non-stick types, including ceramic, and they all provided inconsistent results, were easy to damage, can release dangerous fumes/chemicals if you overheat them, etc. In contrast, this little pan that could (I have the 10") is so reliable and flexible, you can use any cooking tool you want with it w/out worrying about scratching it, takes high heat w/out any issues and won't release chemicals, and clean-up is quick and simple. One reason I love this pan - just today I started up our gas cook top to make an easy-over egg and got distracted by my dogs and a phone call...a few minutes later I smelled something and noticed smoke billowing off the pan. If it was one of my non-stick pans I would panic about dangerous fumes, about ruining the non-stick finish, decreasing the pan's useful life, etc. In this case, no worries! I simply turned off the burner, waited a few minutes for the pan to cool a bit, put in a little canola oil and wiped the pan interior w/a folded paper towel (careful not to burn myself). A moment later I fired up the burner again and cooked my egg w/out incident or concern! Carbon steel victory! Clean-up is usually wipe it down w/a paper towel and some canola oil. If it needs a little more, we scrape it a bit w/one of the Lodge pan scrapers for sale here on Amazon (or you could use a stiff spatula), wipe the scraped bits out, add a little canola oil and wipe with a paper towel to finish. You can also use some salt to provide some grist to help with clean up if you want to, but we've only done that once, and only had to put the pan in the sink once to clean it up w/some hot water. This pan is more consistently non-stick than our ceramic pans have been - eggs, a great test of a pan, don't stick. I slide our spatula under them and they release and flip without issue. My wife has even made fried rice in the pan w/out problems! The only thing we avoid is high-acid foods (tomato sauce, dishes with high lemon content, etc.) as we have read that that can cause a metallic tang to the food. We do cook food that we season w/lemon juice or have tomatoes in them, but I wouldn't try lemon chicken in it, maybe. So far we've never tasted anything but the food we cook, it's been perfect. The pan puts the best "crust" on anything you want it to, and carmelizes onions way better than any non-stick I've ever used. It's light enough to "toss" (where you tilt the pan up in the front and shake backwards/forwards to make the food slide to the back jump up and back into the pan), but is heavier than an average non-stick pan, with a nice heft which we actually prefer, now that we have this pan. It's much lighter than a cast-iron pan. Obviously, I just can't say enough about how much we love this pan. Get one, understand and enjoy the use/maintenance differences, and you won't regret it. Read more
