Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–happy Friday!
This week, I am continuing my exploration of carbon steel skillets and today, I’m comparing and contrasting the Smithey carbon steel 9″ Farmhouse Skillet to its Smithey cast iron skillet cousins. I am putting each skillet through some tasks and I’ll be sharing how each pan performs under the same conditions. In addition to the 9″ Farmhouse Skillet, I’ll be sharing my findings for the Smithey 6″ cast iron skillet as well as the Smithey 11″ deep skillet. And just as a note–I own all these pans and paid for them with my own money. The opinions stated are my own.
First, let’s take a look at each of the contestants:
Smithey 6″ skillet:
Smithey 11″ Deep Skillet:
And finally, here’s a look at the Smithey 9″ carbon steel pan:
One reason professional chefs favor carbon steel is because it is very responsive to the heat source, or lack thereof. In theory, carbon steel should heat up and cool down quickly. So, the first metric I tested was to heat the cold pan on a cold stove grate to 400* on high heat. For all of my temperature measurements, I used the “MicroTemp” Pro laser temperature gun pointed at more or less the middle of the bottom cooking surface of each pan.
Earlier in the week, I reported that the cooking surface of the Smithey carbon steel pan took almost five minutes to heat up to 400*, where the 8″ Lodge carbon steel skillet cooking surface reached 400* in a little under two minutes.
For today’s measurements, I heated the two cast iron skillets on high heat to 400*. Here’s what I learned:
The Smithey 6″ cast iron skillet took 3 minutes and 8 seconds to heat to 400* and the Smithey 11″ Deep Skillet took 3 minutes and 33 seconds to heat to 400*.
In order to test heat retention, I removed each pan from the heat source to a cold stove grate and tested the temperature after 1 minute, after 2 minutes, 3 minutes and finally after 5 minutes. Here’s what I found for each skillet:
Smithey 9″ Farmhouse Skillet: after 1 minute: 324*; 2 minutes: 279*; 3 minutes: 244*; 5 minutes: 197*.
Smithey 6″ cast iron skillet: after 1 minute: 369*; 2 minutes: 350*; 3 minutes: 311*; 5 minutes: 259*.
Smithey 11″ Deep Skillet: after 1 minutes: 372*; 2 minutes: 340*; 3 minutes: 310*; 5 minutes: 260*.
Clearly, the carbon steel pan cooled down more quickly than did the cast iron pans. However, I was surprised at how long the cooking surface of the carbon steel pan took to heat up to 400* compared to its cast iron cousins.
Next, I heated each skillet on medium heat for 4 minutes and then took a temperature reading. Here’s what I found:
After 4 minutes, the cooking surface of the Smithey carbon steel 9″ Farmhouse skillet had reached 274*. The Smithey 6″ skillet was at 307*, and the Smithey 11″ Deep Skillet was at 297*.
Again, the Smithey cast iron pans reached a higher temperature than did the Smithey carbon steel under similar conditions. I am thinking of reaching out to Smithey to ask about this…I will keep you posted.
In my next post, I will share what I learned about heat retention and dissipation in my Finex and Blacklock cast iron and I’ll wrap up my observations about carbon steel vs. cast iron cookware.
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
