About Lodge and Cast-Iron Cookware
(Been to this page before and want to cut the cackle and jump right to the price/buy pages list? Sure: just click here.)
Cast-Iron Cookware
Cast iron is one of the oldest materials for cookware, and remains to this hour one of the best. It is, of course, admirably suited for use on induction-cooking units, but it is valued by good cooks for its general usefulness. Cast-iron cookware is superb for any cooking task whatever that does not require rapid changes in cooking temperature. Iron is a material that has a high "thermal inertia": it is fairly slow to heat, but once at a temperature it tends to hold that temperature solid and steady.
Cast-iron skillets are the original--and, most feel, still clearly the best--"non-stick" cooking vessels ever. A properly seasoned cast-iron skillet (we'll discuss "seasoning" in a moment) is felt by most cooks to be better than any of the modern "non-stick" coated cookware items at allowing, well, "non-stick" cooking.
Cast iron is also as rugged as, yes, iron. With only modest care, cast iron can last for generations; not a few families are still happily cooking with cast-iron cookware bought by an ancestor over a century ago.
The two drawbacks to cast iron are these: first, it is not well suited for those few cooking tasks in which the temperature of cooking must be changed fairly rapidly--slow to heat is also slow to cool. Second, though rather less important, it is fairly heavy.
What makes cast iron so wonderful, almost magical, as a cooking material is the application of "seasoning". Seasoning cast iron has acquired an aura almost of the mystic, as if it were some esoteric technique known only to masters. Nonsense. It is simple, easily begun and easily maintained. Seasoning consists simply in applying and "baking on" some fatty oil applied to the vessel's surfaces. As time goes on, and more oil is more solidly baked in, those surfaces acquire an almost silken smoothness. One begins, with a "raw" new item of cast iron (after giving it a light hand washing) by coating its surfaces, inside and out, with a light covering of cooking oil, then placing the vessel upside down in an oven pre-heated to 350° (spread some aluminum foil on the floor of the over to catch any drips) and letting it bake for about an hour--leave it in the oven after that till the oven and it are thoroughly cooled down. The end. That wasn't so hard, was it?
Moreover, this being the Age of Convenience, you no longer have to do as gramma did and start from scratch with raw, new cast iron: you now buy already pre-seasoned cast iron! Most cooks find the pre-seasoned just fine and ready to use right out of the box, but perfectionists sometimes like to apply yet further seasoning (cast iron can be endlessly seasoned, each application making its surface even silkier-smooth). Also, one likes to refresh or nrnew the seasoning from time to time. Fortunately, none of that is difficult. We have an extensive page here explaining at great length exactly how to season, re-season, and generally care for cast-iron cookware.
Just remember to never wash the vessel (with soap or detergent, that is)--just rinse it with hot water and scrub it a bit with a stiff-bristled brush; after that, while it's still warm, lightly wipe a little more oil over the surfaces and store the item (preferably in a cool, dry place). It helps the process if you repeat, especially when the item is still fairly new, the oven treatment. A new, just-first-seasoned pan will not yet have achieved its final smoothness, so don't expect things like pancakes to at once cook non-stick. But before long, you'll have something much better--and much healthier!--than any whosis-lon pans.
(And whatever you do, do not ever put a still-hot cast-iron item into or under cold water! Sheer common sense ought to preclude such an act--which will almost surely crack the iron--but common sense isn't always common.)
(If not using soap or a detergent seems "unhealthy", just remember that the vessel is automatically sterilized by the cooking heat. In fact, cast iron is a deal "healthier" for you than most or all other cooking materials.)
Another form of cast-iron cookware is enamelled cast iron. Enamelware is all those big, solid, super-brightly colored pots and Dutch ovens--delightful to cook with and delightful just to look at. Enamelware has all the virtues of cast iron itself, plus the permanent surface of baked enamel that never needs any care. Basic cast iron is almost ridiculously inexpensive compared to most other cooking materials; enamelled is a bit pricier, but many people consider one or more enamelled cast-iron pots to be an absolute necessity in every kitchen. And, again, this stuff lasts forever: amortize the cost over a lifetime (though it will outlast you and me), and it's not expensive at all.
We get asked a lot about using cast-iron cooking vessels on the ceramic-glass surface that all induction-cooking units use: does it scratch? Can one cook using "pan-slide" techniques without scratching the surface? Lodge cautions that their non-enamel cast-iron cookware (and this would likely apply to all cast-iron cookware except, of course, enamelled cast iron) might cause scratching, as the bottom of a cast-iron piece is naturally rougher or grittier than, say, stainless steel, and anecdotal evidence strongly supports the realistic possibility of such scratching. But . . . this is induction--no flames! We thus need to think outside the box. If you have a cast-iron skillet and want to cook something using the pan-slide method, just put a sheet of some heat-resistant (and non-metallic) substance under it. The obvious choice would be parchment paper; though one maker (Reynolds) says it can be used "at temperatures up to 420°F", Cook's Illustrated refers to its being "enormously resistant to high temperatures"; many widely published recipes using parchment paper call for baking at 450°F and we've even seen pizza recipes calling for parchment paper in an over at 500°F to 550°F. All in all, it seems unlikely that the temperature of a skillet bottom would be a problem for parchment paper (and its silicon coating makes it slick and so, presumably, easy to slide a pan on). While we haven't yet had opportunity to test it ourselves (we will soon), we feel confident it would work fine in this use. Parchment paper is relatively inexpensive--only a tad more than ordinary waxed paper--and universally available (and is a handy thing to have in a kitchen anyway); Cook's likes the Reynolds brand.
Lodge
About Lodge
With some cookware, there are serious cooks who will debate the relative virtues of this brand over that. With bare cast iron, it's Lodge, by consensus (indeed, it would be hard to even find any by anyone else). With enamelware, while there's that high-priced French line whose name some like to drop (OK, Le Creuset), just about everyone seems to feel that Lodge's enamelware is at least as good, possibly even better--and it's a lot less expensive.
The Lodge company has been in business since 1896, and an awful lot of their products even from the early days are still in active use.
Today, Lodge has four main lines of cookware (having dropped their "Original" unseasoned line, as everyone now wants pre-seasoned items, and having added a "colorware" line enamelled items additional to their existing line): those four are the basic pre-seasoned line (Lodge "Logic"); a new, slightly fancier-looking pre-seasoned line (Lodge "ProLogic"), which has a sub-line, the "Signature" series; enamelware; and "colorware" (really just more enamelware). We offer them all at prices that are as good as we can see.
(We cannot absolutely, positively guarantee that on any given day for any given item our price will be the very lowest on the internet at that moment, but it usually will be, and the differences will never be much. A zillion retailers carry Lodge, and prices shift day to day at many; we use Amazon and the many merchants who go through Amazon, and our price will always be the lowest that can be had through either Amazon or a merchant on Amazon--and our experience is that those prices, with shipping figured in--unduly high "S&H" costs being one way many small retailers clip a profit margin onto "low prices"--are just about always the best around, plus you know Amazon stands behind the deal.)
Residential-Use Products Available in the U.K.:
