Hello! And welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook. This week, I’m reviewing the Smithey 11″ Deep Skillet. In Monday’s post, I introduced the skillet and went over some specs. In Tuesday’s post, I shared what I learned about the skillet after cooking with it for the first time.
Today, I’m going to share what I learned during my second and third cooking experiments with the 11″ Deep Skillet. I roasted a chicken and, seriously–I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I forgot to take a picture of the chicken in the skillet, so…I hope I’m going to paint a good enough word picture that you won’t miss the picture too much. I’ll take pictures the next time I roast a chicken in it because–spoiler alert–this skillet is perhaps the best, most perfect vessel for roasting a chicken I have ever used. I did take pictures of the skillet after the roast which I’ll share later in the post.
I will also be sharing my experience with simmering the chicken carcass to make stock.
So let’s get cooking, shall we?
First, here’s how the skillet looked after making the “leftover meat stew” as the first cook in the new skillet:
As I mentioned, the seasoning got stripped right off because I sauteed pancetta in the skillet the first time I used it. I actually expected for this to happen, as Smithey warns that frying bacon first thing can strip off the seasoning, but assures users that the seasoning is easy to build back up.
Here is how the pan looked after I seasoned it:
The next thing I did was to roast a chicken in it using this recipe: Keri’s Easy Roast Chicken.
My chicken was about 3.5 pounds. The official product details from Smithey state that the cooking surface is 7″. However, the walls of the pan slope up so gently, that I would describe the cooking surface as being more like 8.5″. The 3.5 pound bird I roasted fit perfectly onto the officially described cooking surface. I would say that this pan would roast up to about a 5 pound bird very comfortably. Its deeper, sloping side design, coupled with the even heat distribution of the cast iron make the 11″ Deep the perfect vessel for roasting a chicken. I roast my chickens at 400* and my bird came out deeply golden brown with a crispy skin and meat that was tender, juicy and falling off the bone.
Let me stop here and say that I’ve been roasting chickens for decades. Before I “discovered” cast iron and fell very hard, very fast for it, I roasted my birds in a small, stainless steel roasting pan. It was fine, but the skin always stuck to the bottom of the pan and the meat could come out unevenly roasted, with parts of it being under or over-done.
My conversion to cast iron fixed a lot of those issues, but I gotta tell you–this pan is really the perfect pan for roasting a chicken. This pan gives the advantages of a Dutch oven without the disadvantages of sides that are too high to allow for even browning. If at all possible, I will be roasting all my chickens in this pan from now on.
The skin of the chicken did stick a little to the bottom of the pan, but not too badly. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how minimal the sticking was given that I had just stripped all the seasoning off and only had had a chance to give the pan one cycle of re-seasoning before roasting the bird.
After roasting the bird, I promptly cleaned and re-seasoned the skillet.
The next day, I stripped most of the meat off the bird and put the bones into the 11″ Deep, along with onions, celery, garlic, spices, preserved lemon paste, water and assorted other items I use to make a good chicken stock. I simmered it all day–about 8.5-9 hours. Here’s the recipe I used for Chicken stock.
At the end of the simmering, my stock was very concentrated and somewhat thicker than I am used to. It was fine, but I did have to thin it a bit. This result was different from what I expected. The 11″ Deep has a 3.5 quart capacity, as does this Staub cast iron pumpkin pot that I normally use for making stock:
The difference is the depth of the walls of the pots. The 11″ deep is a shallower pan, and the shallower layer of liquid must have allowed for more evaporation. The 11″ Deep did a fine job, but I would not say that it is my favorite for making stock. I will make stock in a deeper, more traditionally proportioned stock pot from now on.
After completing the job of making the stock, I cleaned and re-seasoned my 11″ Deep. Here is what it looked like:
Overall, I am pretty pleased with how well it appears to be taking the seasoning so far.
Tomorrow I will report on how the pan performed when I used it to sear salmon.
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
