I don’t remember now what the recipe was, but my wife and I were making something that called for a skillet to go from stove top to oven. At the time, we only had non-stick skillets, so I bought a Lodge without knowing a single thing about cast iron. We made the recipe, I’m sure it was great…and then came time to clean that skillet. It was a nightmare! Baked on food, stuck like concrete, scrubbing, soaking, and more scrubbing…it was terrible.

I figured there had to be a better way, if this was how it was for everyone, nobody would use these pans. So I started looking around, reading articles, and learned about modern skillets with they’re pebbled surface vs. antique skillets with stone ground surfaces…and I was off and running.

I fell down the rabbit hole with Cast Iron Collector, picked up a few rusty pieces of junk at an antique fair, and set up an electrolysis tank in my driveway. Those first few pieces I restored are still ones I use today. I’ve since set up a bigger and better electrolysis tank in my basement, and restored probably 40-50 pieces…and I’ve got piles in cabinets of to be restored stuff too. Some of it I give away to family and friends, occasionally I’ll sell a piece or two, though that’s not my focus, and the rest goes into use in my kitchen.

My daily driver, as I like to call it, is a Wapak 10 that’s 100 or more years old as best as I can tell. The funny thing about that skillet is that I thought it was a Wagner 10 when I bought it because all I could read on the back side was “WA” followed by a bunch of rust. That Wapak has been a real workhorse, I’ve put it through so many meals, and it keeps coming back for more. Wapak was known for casting with thinner walls than most, so it’s pretty light weight for cast iron, and I love it…it’s a joy to cook with.

I’ve slowed down on buying new pieces in recent years, and slowed down on restoring them too…life and other priorities, ya know. But I still keep an eye out for any pile of rust when we’re out antiquing, and will pick up new pieces occasionally. I love finding a five dollar rust bucket, and then cooking dinner with it once it’s restored.

I’m more of a carbon steel person but there’s no community for it yet from what I’ve seen.

I first heard about CI/CS through cooking youtubers advocating for them and was pretty much immediately convinced. Our first teflon pan got scratched because we weren’t careful enough. Our second one died because of high heat, which was frustrating because those were the best snow peas we’d ever stir-fried, so we refused to buy yet another shitty, shortlived pan. There was a time where we used mostly stainless but that was ultra-sticky. So when I heard about CI/CS, I did the research, decided on CS for completely subjective reasons and haven’t looked back on teflon.

We do keep a shitty teflon in our home in case guests come to cook and we don’t trust them with our pans.

More recently, we got two enameled CI dutch ovens and they’re absolutely lovely.