This definitive guide to the best cast-iron skillets of 2019 explores everything you need to know before buying your next favorite piece of cookware, including important terminology and the best skillets for every budget.
The Short List
Best All-Around Cast-Iron Skillet: Field Company
Field Company’s cast iron is lighter, smoother and simpler than most of the new breed of pan makers. It also manages to keep its prices lower relative to some of its higher minded competition. Plus, the grapeseed oil pre-seasoning it came with out of the box out-performed every other pan we tested.
Available sizes: 10-inch, 12-inch, 13-inch
Best High-End Cast-Iron Skillet: Butter Pat Industries
Where to start? Butter Pat’s skillets were the smoothest and most non-stick out of the box of any we tried. Beyond making flip-easy fried eggs (or flip-easy anything, for that matter), the surface makes cleaning that much easier, as everything cooked in it was a towel wipe away from clean. A proprietary hand-casting method allows the piece to be thin where it can be and heavy where it needs to be, making for a lighter than usual skillet.
Available sizes: 6-inch, 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch
Best Value Cast-Iron Skillet: Lodge
The Lodge of today is not in the business of making a pretty skillet, it’s in the business of making a workhorse skillet. The surface is grainy, rough and coated in a black pre-seasoning. It’s probably not as slim and trim as others on this list. But in terms of value for your money, Lodge’s American-made cast-iron skillets are unrivaled. Starting at $10 for an 8-inch pan (the smallest size you’d want to cook on), its cast iron is made of the same hefty, heat insulating iron that the boutique brands are using and the only serious trade-off is cooking surface and craftsmanship.
Available sizes: 6.5-inch to 15-inch
Butter Pat’s proprietary hand-casting method allows the piece to be thin where it can be and heavy where it needs to be, making for a lighter than usual skillet. Not to mention it has the smoothest cooking surface out of the box that we saw.
Terms You Should Know
Cast-Iron: Iron made with around 1.7 percent carbon, giving it its classic heavy, brittle nature.
Seasoning: The layer of polymerized and carbonized fats between what you’re cooking and raw iron.
Pour Spouts: If present, small areas cast into both sides of the pan meant to easily discard (or save) sauces or excess grease.
Wall Slope: The gradient at which the walls of a cast-iron pan run into the cooking surface; the steeper the wall slope, the less tossing can be accomplished
Front Grip: A protruding area opposite the handle where you grab hold of the pan with your non-dominant hand; meant to make heavier dishes and pans less cumbersome.
As-Cast: The result of skipping the milling and polishing process on the cooking surface; when a skillet’s cooking area is rough and sandpapery, it is as-cast.
Rust: Also known as ferric oxide, a toxic result of the oxidation of bare cast-iron; avoided by a layer of seasoning, but easily fixable.
Smoke Point: The heat at which fats begins to break down and smoke; also the point you need to reach to properly season a pan.
“It doesn’t have a practical purpose anymore,” Isaac Morton of Smithey Ironware says of the ridge along the bottom edge of some skillets. “But if you look at pieces cast before 1900, you typically had this heat ring, which helped the pan fit into the indentations on the top of the stove. It’s just an homage to some of the cool old cast iron designs.”
The 7 Best Cast-Iron Skillets to Buy
Lodge Cast Iron Skillet
Lodge’s pans are the first a would-be cast iron nut gets into. They’re cheap, rough to the touch and you don’t need to treat them preciously. But don’t let low prices imply low performance — Lodge skillets are still heavy, heat-insulating cast iron, and they can certainly cook side-by-side with skillets ten and twenty times their cost. We just wouldn’t cook eggs, fish or anything too delicate before you have a serious base of seasoning.
Available sizes: 6.5-inch to 15-inch (everything in between)
Stargazer Cast Iron Skillet
Though it’s hard to place it as absolute best at any one thing, the Stargazer is a great blend of all buying factors. High-sloping walls with a unique and fairly dramatic lip around the edge mean you can toss veggies and home fries up and back down with little oil splash. The seasoning it shipped with was excellent, but you can order it unseasoned if you prefer. It’s middle of the pack in weight, and it has a large square-angled front grip that is easy to get a hold of when you’re wearing an oven mitt.
Available sizes: 10.5-inch to 12-inch
Smithey Ironware Company Skillet
In most industries, retrospective homages to products past are meant more to trigger nostalgia than perform to the day’s standards. This is not so in cast-iron. Smithey’s skillets are made with heavy gauge iron, a three-finger front grip and an exquisitely milled down, pre-seasoned cooking surface. There’s even a heat ring on the base of the pan, so if you somehow find yourself standing in front of an old indented wood stove, you’ll fit right in.
Available sizes: 8-inch, 10-inch 12-inch (everything in between)
The Field Skillet
There are two attributes requisite to all gear that works indoors and out: durability and packability. Field’s skillet is both of these things. It’s light and skips out on extra features in the name of simplicity. There are no pour spouts, the front grip is very small, and the handle isn’t elevated or elongated in any way. These sound like marks against it until you remember it has to fit in your backpack.
Available sizes: 10-inch, 12-inch, 13-inch
Finex Cast Iron Cookware Company Skillet
The Finex pan sports a similar machine-smoothed cooking surface as others on our list. The corners create many areas to pour out sauces or excess grease, yes, but there isn’t much out there on its proficiency in the oven. This particular skillet’s cooking surface is also just a quarter-inch shy of standard pie size. The base of Finex pieces are thicker than your typical cast-iron base, providing more balanced cooking temperatures. This is useful when dealing with the longer cook times baking often entails. The trademark corners are absolutely ripe to wedge spatulas into to lift your hard work out of the pan. You can even get a lid for the thing.
Available sizes: 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch
Butter Pat Industries Skillet
Idyllic sloped walls, pour spouts, a comfy front grip, an insanely smooth cooking surface and Butter Pat’s surprisingly nimble weight makes it just about as good as it cast-iron gets. Our sole complaint — the handle tends to be a bit short on the largest size, making for an especially difficult time toting it around by the handle alone. This really only affects your ability to toss something your sauteeing in the pan.
Available sizes: 6-inch, 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch
Borough Furnace Skillet
Based in Owego, New York, Borough Furnace has its eye trained on unique skillets. Its pans feature low walls that allow more air flow than any other on this list, an extra-large front grip and a really, really heavy base. But it’s also the most eco-minded skillet maker out there. The whole facility is run off wind off-sets and solar power, and every skillet is made with recyled iron. The only downside? The handle’s unique shape isn’t a very comfortable grip.
Available sizes: 9-inch, 10.5-inch