The Best Carbon Steel Pans for Every Budget

The Lodge Cast Iron company is an American cookware icon. It's been synonymous with cast iron pans since 1896, and still proudly makes all its products and accessories out of two working forges in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, a few miles east of Chattanooga. (The brand’s recent Dolly Parton collaboration completes its unassailable Tennessee cred.) “Cast Iron” may be in its brand name, but the carbon steel offerings from Lodge are no afterthought—at an attractive price and easy to use, there’s lots to love about this pan.

A big 12-inch pan like this means you can cook a couple things at the same time—sear off your steak and sauté some mushrooms, why not?—and the pan holds heat beautifully, staying steady and hot over long periods of time. This to me would be the perfect pan to take camping and cook over a campfire, or use to bake off a nice batch of angel biscuits in your outdoor Gozney oven, but it also made perfect fried eggs on my crummy little home induction burner straight out of the box. The connectivity that Lodge offers as a heritage brand is really attractive to me as well. You can’t fake stuff like that—Lodge’s history is the real deal, and you feel connected to all that when you cook with these pans.

Yes, you’ve noticed the price jump. I’m convinced there’s fantastic value in the previously mentioned brands, but when you move up into the realms of carbon steel geekery, the price per pan increases parabolically. Smithey Forge is a really cool new company based in South Carolina; it is extremely online, and chances are simply reading this post means you will be served social media content by Smithey. (Not every brand has been around for 100 years.) I tried multiple products from Smithey for this piece and came away with two general impressions. The first is that they’re not for everyone—these pans are big, honking heavy things; there’s a learning curve; and they’re not meant for casual cooks. (Do not walk away from the burner when using your Smithey.) The second is that these pans are serious, extraordinary tools, built like grand old guitars or vintage guitars: solid state, extraordinarily solid and thick, and built to last.

The Smithey Deep Farmhouse Skillet confounded me at first. What, exactly, am I supposed to cook in this thing? And then it hit me: This is actually a multi-tool replacement for some of the same style of cooking I’d been doing in my Dutch oven, or a Crock-Pot. Simmer a batch of chicken thighs in this pan—use good homemade chicken stock and add lots of aromatics—and you’ve got this stable, purpose-built canvas for developing flavor. Or make a huge mess of fresh clams, cooked in thick chopped bacon and good cider, to serve with heaps of finely chopped parsley and crusty bread.

When I talk about the multifaceted, multitool in-betweener reality of the carbon steel paradigm, this Smithey Forge deep skillet is kind of exactly what I mean. And when I talk about a learning curve for carbon steel pans in general, please take this from my own personal experience—I had to learn, to cook, to iterate, and figure out what the purpose of this pan was in my life before it made sense. And now that it’s clicked, wow. It’s worth every penny.

As you get deeper into the world of carbon steel pans, you begin to understand that there are people for whom this is really a form of art—true artisan craftspeople expressing themselves in the medium of carbon steel cookware. That’s the story here for Dennis and Kasey Kehoe, blacksmith artists based on California’s Central Coast and founders of Kehoe Carbon Cookware.

Very few carbon steel pans are available with wooden handles. That’s something they’re distinguishing themselves with at Kehoe, and the end result offers a tactile touch point for real hands-on cooking. Use this pan to build your dream sauce—an alfredo, a romesco, a marinara—or cook your way through something intricate, like ratatouille or creole étouffée. The pan’s unique cold hammered texture catches sunlight and oil in the most attractive way, and if you’re someone who loves the Instagram of it all, Kehoe’s pans are catnip. Terms like “heirloom” and “heritage” get overused in writing about cookware—heck, I have used them already a few times in this story—but buying a pan from the Kehoes is like investing in traditional hand-tailored clothing, or purchasing your beef directly from the retired dairy cow farmer. Yes, you pay for it, but this pan will not just be in your will, it’ll be in your kid’s will. At that point the whole thing’s a bargain.