Hello and thank you for joining me at The Stone Soup Cook!
This week, I am continuing my series on cast iron. I am a devotee of cast iron and love cooking with it daily. Last week, I introduced you to three different cast iron brands. I talked about the features, the things I liked and some differences among the skillets. I also cooked bacon and eggs in all three skillets so we could get a baseline look at how each skillet cooks.
The three skillets are the Lodge Blacklock, Smithey and Finex. [I am not getting compensated for this post–I bought all the skillets with my own money and the opinions are my own.]
Today, I’m going to give you a look at how each skillet handled making biscuits.
The recipe I used for biscuits is here.
First I preheated my oven to 450*
Then I liberally greased all the skillets with butter:
At this point in my research, I have started to suspect that the Blacklock skillet cooks a little faster than the other two skillets. Since I don’t like to handle biscuit dough too much, I decided against rolling out half the dough to a thinner height, and just put the same thickness of biscuits into all three skillets:
I placed all the skillets more or less into the middle of the big oven of my Wolf range:
I usually make biscuits bigger than this and fit a whole batch into my 12″ cast iron skillet. For this test, I made smaller biscuits, probably only about 1.5″ in diameter. I find that bigger biscuits take closer to 20 minutes to cook, but these smaller biscuits started getting brown at only about 12-13 minutes.
I took the Blacklock biscuits out of the oven at about 14 minutes:
They turned out great–golden brown on the top, flakey and chewy inside and golden brown on the bottoms:
I took both the Smithey and Finex skillets out at 15 minutes, and really, I could have taken them all out at the same time–the baking time on the biscuits was identical for all intents and purposes.
Here’re the Smithey biscuits:
The outside of the biscuits were a deep golden brown, the inside was flakey and chewy and the bottoms were crisp and golden brown:
Finally, the Finex also performed admirably and gave me the same gorgeous golden brown tops, flakey interior and crisp, golden brown bottoms:
Overall, I was super happy with the way that all the skillets performed on biscuits. And I found basically no difference in the way the three skillets performed–including the Blacklock, in spite of being a thinner construction than the other two. And in fact, I am finding that I enjoy the lighter construction and how well it cleans up and takes seasoning. I’ll give more information on this in Friday’s post.
But–the most important test of all–how did the biscuits taste?! Mr. Stone Soup and I split one each of the three test biscuits and Mr. Stone Soup declared: “Baby, you make the best biscuits in the world!”
And it doesn’t get much better than that 🙂
Thanks for reading this review–tune back in on Friday when we will see how these skillets fared with searing steaks-
In the meantime,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
