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About Salsa Stop

The Two Best Brands to Consider when You Purchase a Cast Iron Skillet

Cast Iron Skillet Benefits:

As a important piece of cookware in the kitchen the benefits of cast iron skillet cooking are many. Who can resist hash browns with that golden brown crisp on he surface? A cast iron pan does a superior char to the surface of the New York Steak that seals in the juices in an ideal way. The cast iron skillet vegetables we prepare are key to making one of he world's finest salsas. You're going to purchase a skillet for the long haul so it's important to purchase quality that can last.

We rejected some highly-rated brands because they didn’t meet our criteria:

When reviewing ratings that users give their products it’s important that there is a large number of reviews to ensure that here is a predictable amount of both positive and negative experiences and opinions to give a realistic assessment of the product’s overall utility. So we excluded all brands that had less than 100 reviews.
Upon examining some popular highly-rated brands we found the cooking surface to be too grainy or rough. Sure, you can’t expect the smoothness of stainless steel in a cast iron pan but from our long experience there are certain standards that we expect for a good cooking surface and we rejected those brands that didn’t measure up.
When we look at the distribution of 1 to 5 star ratings we find that in the review of a trusted product that the distribution of the amount of rating negativity tapers on a generally consistent and predictable manner. This means that with a great brand the 5 star ratings would be the vast majority of reviews with 4 star reviews being considerably less common. Then 3 star reviews would be lesser still and the 1 star reviews would usually be the least number of reviews across a trusted product offerings. What we found was that in many cases that some highly-rated cast iron skillet brands had significantly more 1 star reviews than 2 star reviews. This can be a red flag. It turns out that many times these negative reviews would reveal in a credible way a flaw in material or workmanship that most people overlooked. We rejected any brand that we believed could have issues in this regard. We did not consider the fact that cast iron can rust to be an issue. That is mostly dependent on how he pan is treated [See below on how to solve a rust issue*].

We Recommend Lodge and/or Mueller Cast Iron Skillets

link to Lodge other Lodge skillets on Amazon

Care of Cast Iron Skillets

*Cleaning rust off of skillets:

Immerse in water with roughly ½ cup of vinegar added in. Remove. Shake some baking soda over the wet surface and scour with steel wool. Rinse. Dry with towel or heat to dry to prevent rust returning. You can then coat with cooking oil and heat it for a few minutes to season it or wait to season naturally through your normal cooking habits.