Welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook!
This week and next, I am featuring cast iron cookware. I am a huge devotee of cast iron and cook with it almost every day. This week, I am featuring a comparison of small skillets from Lodge, Finex and Smithey.
Today, I’m going to focus on the Lodge Blacklock skillet. **I have not been compensated for this review and all the opinions are my own.**
Lodge has several different kinds of cast iron in their lineup–the classic Lodge cast iron, the Blacklock and their enamel on cast iron line, are but a few. I recently acquired the 7″ skillet from the Blacklock line.
Let’s start by getting to know this skillet a little better:
Lodge, of course, has been making cast iron for more than a century. It’s made in Pittsburg, TN, it’s inexpensive, reliable and lasts a lifetime or more.
Lodge came out with the Blacklock line within the last five years and it has a couple of notable differences from the classic. First off, the walls of the skillet are a good deal thinner than those on the Lodge classic, so it’s lighter, weighing in at 1.82 pounds, versus the smaller (6.5″) skillet, which weighs in at 1.92 pounds . One of the features widely touted by devotees of cast iron is its ability to retain heat, thereby providing a slower, more even cooking performance. This slower more even cooking is perfect for baked goods, promoting even baking and crispy crusts without burning. Naturally, there’s pilot error when using cast iron, but in general, lighter-weight cooking vessels must be watched carefully to avoid scorching. Needless to say, my first question about the Blacklock is how will the lighter weight of the skillet affect the way it performs.
Next, the handle has been re-designed to include a cut-out at the base, which is supposed to keep the handle cooler when cooking. The 7″ skillet does not have a helper handle, but the rest of the line does have them. The Blacklock line also has the “pebble” finish on the bottom of the skillet standard in classic Lodge cast iron.
The Blacklock is triple-seasoned right out of the box and has an overall length of a little over 11″. Blacklock cast iron is also a good deal more expensive than the Lodge classic cast iron. A Lodge classic 6.5″ skillet will set you back about twelve bucks, where a Lodge Blacklock 7″ skillet will cost you more like $40, which is still a bargain compared to other brands.
Right out of the box, the Blacklock is very attractive. All of the skillets have pour spouts on both sides, which I like, and heat rings on the bottoms, allowing the skillet to sit slightly away from a flame. The handle is fine, but on the short side and seems a little sharp on the edges, but nothing that I would consider to be uncomfortable–at least not for the 7″ skillet.
At under two pounds, this skillet still feels substantial, but is much lighter than comparable cast iron skillets from other brands. For example, the Finex 8″ skillet weighs in at closer to 4 pounds and the Smithey 6″ skillet weighs in the neighborhood of 2.5 pounds.
So let’s get cooking.
The first thing I did was to go ahead and steam clean the skillet and then season it. I always use the method recommended by Kent Rollins, the undisputed king of cast iron cooking. He recommends scraping the skillet clean with a wooden spatula and then heating the pan to smoking hot before rinsing under very hot water. [Be sure to use oven mitts on both hands for this process, as the skillet is very hot and the steam from the cleaning can cause burns!] I then poured a small amount of pecan oil into the skillet and rubbed it in well. I let the skillet cool before cooking with it.
I decided to cook bacon and eggs in my new skillet:
I used medium-high heat and the bacon cooked pretty quickly. I turned the bacon after about a minute and the edges were already browning. I flipped the bacon every 60-90 seconds in order to avoid it getting too crisp too quickly.
The final bacon picture was taken after about 5 minutes of cook time.
While I found that the skillet cooked the bacon a little quickly compared to other cast iron, I had no issues with sticking. I cleaned most of the bacon grease out of the pan and cracked an egg into the skillet:
Again, the egg cooked pretty quickly and I went to flip it:
Now…I do think this mishap was partially pilot error, but there was a little sticking, as you can see from the final picture:
But–I have to say that clean-up was not hard. The egg residue came off with a few scrapes of a wooden spatula and steam-cleaning took care of the rest very quickly.
Overall, I thought that the Blacklock cooked a little more quickly than other, heavier cast iron I’ve cooked with. I don’t see this as necessarily a bad thing–just something that you need to know–but I am now curious to see how the Blacklock performs for baking tasks, such as biscuits and for more delicate tasks, such as searing fish.
I found that the handle got hot very quickly–after only about 2 minutes of cooking on medium-high heat, I was reaching for my pot holder. And while clean-up was pretty easy, I did find myself wishing that even the 7″ skillet had a helper handle, which makes handling the hot skillet easier when cleaning.
Overall, I was happy with the performance of this skillet and am looking forward to using for more tasks, which you’ll see next week!
Tomorrow, I will feature the adorably tiny Smithey skillet, which featured prominently in last week’s cooking for one posts.
As always, when I finished my cooking task, I promptly cleaned and seasoned the skillet.
See you tomorrow and in the meantime–
Peace, love and good food!
Keri
