We don’t believe in spraying some chemicals on skillets to make them look black, and definitely want to stay transparent about what we’re putting on these. The iron is pure, safe, and natural and seasoned with organic flaxseed.

But how does it get from the foundry to you? We have about 30 days to handle the raw, silver skillets before the microscopic water on them starts to turn into rust spots, which could blossom and grow.

The first step is to get some fires going, which we need at 250 – 300 degrees.  Then we can place skillets over the flame. The skillets themselves need to heat past 250 degrees, which insures that all the invisible water droplets have “boiled” off and the skillet is now dry. To lock in that dryness, we put a light coat of organic flaxseed oil (from North Dakota) on the entire skillet.

The raw-oiled ones are perfect for cast iron gurus who want to season a skillet their own way (but maybe don’t always like having to strip something down first).  But…a lot of people want a fully seasoned skillet. So, we rev that fire up to 500 – 700 degrees and start heating them, pulling them off, doing another coat of the flaxseed oil, and re-heating until those skillets have 6 – 8 coats of organic flaxseed oil on them and have turned a lovely shiny black. That flaxseed polymerizes beautifully with the heat and leaves you with a skillet that looks as though it’s been used a long time.

It’s as pure as it gets. Plain old iron and bit of oil and fire. A lot of what we do has to use fire.