Field Cast Iron Skillet Review

Introduction

The Field skillet is a cast iron pan with a lifetime warranty that combines the best of vintage cast iron and modern manufacturing for a light, performant cooking experience.

Before exploring the features that make this pan extraordinary, let’s recap the unique benefits of cast iron over stainless steel or carbon steel.

The first is that cast iron retains heat incredibly well. When this pan gets hot, it stays hot.

And when you’re searing meat and browning veggies, you depend on that consistent flow of heat. Cast iron can give you the same caramelized crust you might get on a BBQ, which is much harder to get right on a stainless steel pan.

The second is that cast iron is incredibly durable.

Cast iron pans can be passed down for generations with a useful life that is not measured in years, but decades or centuries. While stainless steel and carbon steel can last a long time too, they’re often thinner and have multiple pieces held together with welds or rivets.

However, cast iron isn’t perfect and we’ll get into the downsides later on, but it is worth noting that there are also big differences between cast iron pans. So let’s start with what separates the Field skillet from the rest.

Construction

If you were to pick up a vintage cast iron pan from the 1920s, perhaps a Griswold or a Wagner, you’d immediately notice something strange. It has a smooth interior.

Back then, cast iron pans were grinded to a smooth polish by a machine with a big rotating stone head. This was a laborious process, but it created a wonderful pan.

But for one reason or another - you can blame the Great Depression, World War 2, non-stick cookware, or global trade - somehow these pans fell out of style. Many manufacturers went out of business, and most polished cast iron pans were relegated to antique stores and garage sales.

The surviving manufacturers automated their production, and generally skipped the final polishing step. That saved money, but left behind a pebbled texture from the casting process, making it harder to cook with and clean.

But recently, new manufacturers have taken an interest in making cast iron great again.

In fact, that’s how Field was founded. It was two brothers that came across some vintage cast iron pans and wondered why today’s pans weren’t as smooth as the ones from 100 years ago.

So they brought them back with a couple modern twists.

The first is a subtle detail the Field team noticed about vintage pans.

Not only were their surfaces polished, some of them had small circular grooves left behind from the stone machinery. As it turns out, these actually helped seasoning stick to their pan.

So if you look at Field’s pan from afar, it has a smooth surface. It even feels smooth to the touch. But if you look really close, you’ll see these very tiny, circular grooves Field has added, similar to the rings of a tree.

So there’s some nuance here. A smooth pan is better than a pebbled pan for cooking and cleaning, but if your pan is mirror smooth, it’s harder to form strong layers of seasoning. That’s why Field has this smooth, but not perfectly smooth, texture throughout the pan.

Weight

The second modern touch isn’t what Field added, but what they took away.

This pan weighs in at 1.95kg (4.3lbs), and is one of the lightest cast iron pans around.

I collected all the specs of the world’s best cast iron pans and put them in one sortable table here so you can compare them all for yourself.

Light weight is a great feature for maneuvering a pan, but doesn’t that make it worse at retaining heat? Well, not quite.

The weight and thickness of the pan doesn’t determine how well it retains heat, what really matters is the weight and thickness of the cooking surface.

Field’s pan is 3.5mm (0.135”) thick on the cooking surface, similar to Stargazer and Stur and thicker than most vintage cast iron pans.

The surface diameter is similar to most pans too, so if Field isn’t cutting out weight from the base, how can the pan be so light?

First, they’ve cut a lot of excess weight from the side walls. Some pans use the same thick iron all over, but Field’s side walls start at 0.1” near the base and taper to just 0.06”, less than half the thickness of the base.

Nobody cooks food on the lip of their skillet, so this is a great place to trim weight without hurting performance. Impressively, Field chose to make the walls thinner rather than shorter. It would have been easier to cut weight by just lowering the height of the pan walls, but it would also be easier for food to spill over the top, so this is a really elegant solution.

Second, Field has a cavity under their main handle, as well as a small helper lip instead of a helper handle on the opposite side. These changes cut weight too, and the main handle cavity slows heat transfer to the handle.

If this pan was 6 or 7 pounds, the helper lip might need to be a full-blown handle for better support, you might even want a thicker main handle too. But because the side walls have been trimmed down, and the rest of the pan is light, all the other touchpoints can be trimmed down too, making it even lighter.

So all these changes work nicely together.

Design

From a design standpoint, there are a few interesting features.

Spouts

Most cast iron pans have little spouts on the side for pouring sauces or liquids without spills. Field does not.

They found that most pour spouts don’t work that well, so they designed a rolled rim instead. It’s not as aggressive as something like Made In’s stainless steel pan, which rolls all the way to a horizontal position, but it’s noticeable, and it works.

This also has a nice aesthetic side effect. The interior is a perfect circle without any bulges.

Helper Lip

Second, the helper lip has a little notch at the end which creates a nice groove the width of an index finger to make sure your supporting hand doesn’t slip.

Branding

Finally, there is no Field logo on the top of the pan. Their handle hole is shaped like the outline of their shield, but that’s it. The minimal branding gives the pan a refined look.

If you flip the pan over, you can see the Field logo, all the details about your pan, and even when it was made, but all of that is hidden when you’re cooking.

Cooking Experience

I have to admit, the sear I get on meat and veggies in this pan is incredible. Once this thing gets hot, it throws off a consistent flow of heat for that perfect, caramelized crust.

This pan can be used on all cooktops, the oven, and even grills or campfires. And the matte black look feels like a natural fit for the outdoors.

Field pre-seasons their pans with organic grapeseed oil, so it’s close to non-stick right out of the gates. During testing, we have not had any stuck-on food, but some sauces and crumbs did stick to the pan.

However, since this is cast iron, you can use metal to scrape off any stuck-on food. Field sells chain mail scrubbers as part of a care kit to clear off debris, something you would never be able to do on stainless steel.

The biggest downsides are more of a commentary on cast iron as a material.

Cast iron takes longer to heat up, you’ll need an oven mitt or a leather cover to touch the handle when it heats up, and it took a dozen meals or so before I had a solid base of seasoning. You’ll also need to remember not to put cast iron in the dishwasher.

Maintenance

Cast iron maintenance is famous for confusing and intimidating people.

Some people put their pan in the oven to build up seasoning layers, some swear by never using soap on their pans, and some people just treat every meal they cook as a maintenance operation.

Field recommends you rinse your pan with water (soap is optional), use their scrubber to remove any stuck-on bits, dry the pan by putting it back on a burner for a moment, and then rub a very tiny, 1/4 tsp of oil around the pan after you cook.

I tried that for a while, and it seems to have helped build my seasoning, but it also takes time.

So Field’s final note in their care instructions is one I’ve taken to heart.

It says “Most importantly, cook often!”

10 days into testing, I stopped intentionally seasoning the pan, but found that just by cooking every day with olive oil or butter, my seasoning keeps improving.

One final note on maintenance is that this pan is really resilient. It has a lifetime warranty, and it’s probably going to outlive you. So this pan can handle a few mistakes, and even if you mess up your seasoning, each meal you cook will cover up your past mistakes to create a smooth, non-stick surface.

It’s pretty amazing that this pan gets better over time. Almost all products we buy start to get worse the moment we buy it, so this is a rare exception. Maybe you could say the same for leather and carbon steel, but not many other materials behave this way.

The Intangibles

There is one more thing I noticed in testing this pan that I need to bring up.

Cast iron changes you as a person. I can’t fully explain it, but this pan makes me want to cook more, I’ve become really invested in taking care of it, and I have this urge to tell people all about it. And this isn’t just me. The proof is on Reddit.

Take a look at the size of the stainless steel, cast iron, and carbon steel subreddits.

These are all perfectly good options for cookware, and between these, stainless steel is definitely the most popular, but cast iron has the largest community by a mile. 600,000 people all over the world share photos of their cornbread, steak, eggs, or their seasoning tricks for everyone to see.

It’s a bit like a religion, it’s really remarkable. For some reason, people just love talking about cast iron way more than stainless steel.

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