5 pans. 6 weeks of testing.
Before the scores, one thing worth knowing. All five of these pans are cast from the same material. What separates them is what happens to the cooking surface after casting — and that one difference decided almost every test I ran.
Keep that in mind as you read. It's the lens for everything below — starting with the pan that won.
The care kit, in every box
Every other pan in this test arrived alone in cardboard — the iLume arrives as a complete setup, with the four pieces a new cast iron owner ends up buying anyway.
Leather handle cover 
Seasoning conditioner 
Chainmail scrubber 
Recipe book The whole kit, in every box. Not a coupon, not an upcharge — it ships with the pan. Check availability →
Most skillet reviews tell you about "craftsmanship" and "heritage." That's nice. But when a cast iron pan disappoints you, it's never about heritage. It's one of five things:
So instead of admiring these pans, I tested them against those five failures. Every scored test ran on the same gas burner — same oil, same heat, same eggs, same steaks. (The unscored living-with-it photos further down came from wherever the pans and I happened to be cooking that week.)
Below is what happened, test by test — with photos, because you shouldn't have to take my word for it.
The scorecard criteria stayed the same as always: Heat Retention & Searing, Cooking Surface & Ease of Use, Handling & Weight, Design & Versatility, and Overall Value.
| iLume | Field Co. | Smithey | Finex | Lodge | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heat Retention & Searing | 4.9 | 3.4 | 4.8 | 4.4 | 4.2 |
| Cooking Surface & Ease of Use | 4.8 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.3 | 2.7 |
| Handling & Weight | 4.4 | 4.9 | 4.8 | 3.6 | 3.2 |
| Design & Versatility | 4.6 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.3 | 3.4 |
| Overall Value | 4.8 | 4.0 | 2.5 | 3.0 | 4.8 |
| Built to last | Lifetime warranty + kit to maintain it | Lifetime warranty | Lifetime warranty | It's cast iron — decades | It's cast iron — decades |
| What's in the box | Pan + 4-piece kit ($105 value) | Pan only | Pan only | Pan only | Pan only |
| Overall | 4.7 | 4.3 | 4.2 | 3.9 | 3.6 |
| 12" price (June 2026) | $179 (reg. $259) | $265 (No. 12)* | $220 | $200+ | under $30 |
| Heat Retention & Searing | 4.9 |
|---|---|
| Cooking Surface & Ease of Use | 4.8 |
| Handling & Weight | 4.4 |
| Design & Versatility | 4.6 |
| Overall Value | 4.8 |
| Built to last | Lifetime warranty + kit to maintain it |
| What's in the box | Pan + 4-piece kit ($105 value) |
| 12" price (June 2026) | $179 (reg. $259) |
| Heat Retention & Searing | 3.4 |
|---|---|
| Cooking Surface & Ease of Use | 4.6 |
| Handling & Weight | 4.9 |
| Design & Versatility | 4.4 |
| Overall Value | 4.0 |
| Built to last | Lifetime warranty |
| What's in the box | Pan only |
| 12" price (June 2026) | $265 (No. 12)* |
| Heat Retention & Searing | 4.8 |
|---|---|
| Cooking Surface & Ease of Use | 4.6 |
| Handling & Weight | 4.8 |
| Design & Versatility | 4.5 |
| Overall Value | 2.5 |
| Built to last | Lifetime warranty |
| What's in the box | Pan only |
| 12" price (June 2026) | $220 |
| Heat Retention & Searing | 4.4 |
|---|---|
| Cooking Surface & Ease of Use | 4.3 |
| Handling & Weight | 3.6 |
| Design & Versatility | 4.3 |
| Overall Value | 3.0 |
| Built to last | It's cast iron — decades |
| What's in the box | Pan only |
| 12" price (June 2026) | $200+ |
| Heat Retention & Searing | 4.2 |
|---|---|
| Cooking Surface & Ease of Use | 2.7 |
| Handling & Weight | 3.2 |
| Design & Versatility | 3.4 |
| Overall Value | 4.8 |
| Built to last | It's cast iron — decades |
| What's in the box | Pan only |
| 12" price (June 2026) | under $30 |
*Field's smaller No. 10 runs about $185. · Overall scores aren't a straight average — I weight Heat Retention and Cooking Surface heaviest, because that's what you actually cook on.
Test 1 of 5 · Sticking
What goes wrong: You oil the pan, you wait, you crack the egg — and it welds itself to the surface anyway. With a rough-surfaced pan that hasn't built up years of seasoning, this is the most common cast iron disappointment there is.
How I tested it: One egg in each pan, same heat, same teaspoon of oil, fresh out of the box on each pan's factory seasoning. Then I tried to get it out with nothing but a tilt of the wrist.
What happened: the field split along one line — surface texture.
The honest note: a Lodge that's been cooked on for ten years gets slick too. The difference is the iLume, Field, and Smithey are slick on day one, because the surface is machined smooth before the seasoning goes on. You're paying for the years you skip.
Winner: iLume, narrowly, over Field and Smithey. Lodge trails out of the box.
Test 2 of 5 · Heat retention
What goes wrong: The whole reason you buy cast iron is that it holds heat — so a cold steak doesn't kill the sear. But not every cast iron pan holds heat equally. Thin, light pans give some of that superpower back.
How I tested it: I brought every pan to the same temperature, pulled it off the burner, waited five minutes, and measured the cooking surface with an infrared thermometer. This is the test where the pans really separated.
What happened: five minutes off the flame, the gap between heavy and light was 125 degrees.
Then I made it edible. Same two pans, same heat, two strip steaks straight from the fridge. The heavy pan shrugged off the cold meat and built a deep mahogany crust. The light pan dropped too much temperature and the steak sweated instead of seared — gray-brown, cooked fine, but no crust to speak of.
Winner: iLume and Smithey, together. Field pays for its lightness right here.
See current price on the iLume skillet →
Test 3 of 5 · Surface texture
What goes wrong: Run your finger across a budget cast iron pan and it feels like fine sandpaper. That pebbled texture is what raw sand-cast iron looks like when nobody grinds it smooth afterward — and it's how Lodge keeps the price under $30. Food grabs onto it, and so does everything else.
How I tested it: The least scientific test in this article and maybe the most telling. I dragged a folded paper towel across each cooking surface, once, with light pressure.
What happened: one pass each told the whole story.
Why it matters beyond eggs: that texture difference is also the cleanup difference, the seasoning-wipe difference, and the spatula-glide difference. It's the single biggest thing separating a $30 pan from a $179 one — and honestly, it's the main reason to upgrade at all.
Winner: iLume, Smithey, and Field in a near tie. This test is really about what the Lodge asks you to live with.
Test 4 of 5 · Cleanup
What goes wrong: You cooked once and now you're standing at the sink scrubbing carbonized bits out of little crevices while the rest of the family watches television.
How I tested it: Cooked the same pan-sauce chicken dinner in each pan, let each one sit for an hour (the realistic version of "after dinner"), then cleaned each with hot water and a brush.
What happened: under a minute versus honest scrubbing.
Fair is fair: every cast iron pan — all five of these — wants to be dried and wiped with a drop of oil after washing. That's thirty seconds, not a hobby, and if that ritual genuinely bothers you, cast iron may not be your material. The difference here is the five minutes of scrubbing before the ritual, not the ritual itself.
Winner: the smooth-surface pans, with the iLume's polish the easiest wipe of the group.
Test 5 of 5 · Hot handles
What goes wrong: Cast iron is one piece of metal. Heat travels. Twenty minutes into cooking, that handle is as hot as the pan, and every cast iron cook has done the bunched-up-towel grab at least once.
How I tested it: Twenty minutes of stovetop cooking in each pan, then the grab test — bare hand hover, towel grab, and mitt grip.
What happened: none of these handles stays cool — anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Winner: Smithey for the bare handle design. iLume for the complete out-of-the-box answer.
Bonus · Not scored
This one wasn't on the test plan, but six weeks of skillet testing leaves you with a lot of leftover bacon fat, so one Sunday I baked my usual cornbread in the iLume — the same recipe I've made for years. What I watch for is browning evenness: a pan that holds heat unevenly gives you pale patches in the middle and scorched edges.
The crust came out an even, deep golden brown from the center wedge to the rim, and the slices lifted out clean. No score — any heavy cast iron pan is a good cornbread pan, and I didn't bake five of them. It's just the kind of job this skillet was bought for, and it did it without an opinion.
$139 / $159 / $179 for the 8", 10", and 12" (regularly $199 / $229 / $259) · polished cooking surface · pre-seasoned, no chemical coatings · pour spouts both sides · lifetime warranty · four-piece kit included ($105 value)
This one hit a sweet spot between performance, usability, and value that nothing else in the test matched. If you want a cast iron skillet that works just as well for Tuesday dinners as it does for the serious cooking moments, this was easily my top pick.
How it did, test by test:
A few things worth knowing before you buy:
It's also the value play, oddly enough, despite being a premium pan: at $179 it runs about $40 less than the Smithey and well under Field's larger sizes, with a lifetime warranty behind it. And that's comparing pans alone — the iLume is the only skillet in this test whose box holds more than a pan:
It's the difference between buying a pan and buying the whole setup. From a chef dad perspective, it feels like the kind of skillet you keep for years — which is the entire point of buying cast iron once instead of replacing cookware every few years.
~$185 (No. 10) to $265 (No. 12) · smooth matte surface · lightest premium cast iron made
Field set out to bring back the light, smooth vintage cast iron your grandmother might have owned, and they genuinely did it — the No. 10 is the lightest pan in this test by a wide margin. One-handed pouring, comfortable flipping, no wrist fatigue.
For anyone who finds cast iron physically tiring — and that's a real, fair concern — Field is the best answer the premium category has, and it earned the runner-up spot honestly.
The smooth machined surface also put it right alongside the iLume and Smithey in the cooking tests: the egg released, the towel glided, cleanup was easy.
$220 (No. 12) · pan only in the box · ~8.7 lb listed · polished smooth surface · made in Charleston, South Carolina
Let me be straight about this pan: the Smithey did not lose a single cooking test in my kitchen. It held heat right alongside the iLume, and its smooth machined surface released eggs and wiped clean beautifully. It's a nice pan, made in the USA.
Its bare-iron interior is in the same bronze family as the iLume's, just duller and flatter — six weeks side by side, the iLume's brighter polish was the one my eye kept going to. That's taste, not testing.
So why is it third? The receipt — and what isn't on it. After six weeks I could not find $40 of cooking difference between these two pans: the eggs released the same, the steaks crusted the same, the cleanup took the same minute. The boxes are a different story:
That empty box matters most in the hand. At about 8.7 pounds listed, the Smithey is the heaviest pan in this test, and the handle is bare iron — twenty minutes into dinner it's as hot as the pan, with nothing in the box to hold it with. You'll do the bunched-up-towel grab or buy something separately, where the iLume's leather cover came included.
What the extra money buys is real, but it's provenance and polish, not performance: the Charleston foundry story, the hammered finish, the name.
If money is no object and the story matters to you, you will not regret a Smithey. If you're buying a pan to cook with — and hold, and season, and scrub — the iLume hands you the complete setup for less, and that's the whole reason it's ranked above this one.
$200+ · octagonal design · Portland, Oregon
Finex is one of those skillets that makes an impression the second you pick it up — the octagonal shape, the coiled stainless handle, the machined surface. It cooked well in my tests: good retention, good release, and the eight corners pour from anywhere.
But the design-first choices cut both ways — it's awkward to store, the spiral handle still gets hot, and you're paying north of $200 largely for the sculpture. For cooks who value visual appeal as much as cooking performance it's a fun pan; it's just not the most practical one in this group, and at this price practical matters.
Under $30 · pebbled surface · South Pittsburg, Tennessee
Lodge feels like the classic starting point for cast iron, and there's a good reason for that: it's honest iron at an honest price, made in Tennessee the same way for over a century, and it delivers the core benefits people want — real heat retention, oven-safe, lasts forever.
If your budget is $30, buy the Lodge and don't look back; it remains one of the smartest value picks in all of cookware.
What my tests showed is simply what the $150 gap buys. The pebbled, unground surface grabbed the egg, shredded the paper towel, and held onto the burnt bits at cleanup; the short handle heated up fast.
None of that is a defect — it's what raw sand-cast iron is, and a decade of cooking will smooth its manners. The premium pans just sell you that decade up front.
If you already own a Lodge and it frustrates you, the rough surface is almost certainly why — and that's the one thing an upgrade genuinely fixes.
Fair question — I'd ask it too about a cookware brand you haven't seen at Williams Sonoma. iLume is a newer, direct-to-consumer brand, which is how it sells a machined-smooth pan for $179 instead of $220+: no retail middleman. What I can tell you from six weeks with it:
If the product page shows stock, that's current.
Two reasons, and I'll give them to you straight:
What I can tell you from the tests is that the iron doesn't know where it was poured: the iLume matched or beat the US-cast pans in every cooking test I ran. If American manufacturing is a priority for you, buy the Smithey — it's a wonderful pan, and you now know exactly what the extra $40 is for.
Yes, and this is most people's reason for switching to cast iron in the first place. The iLume (like all five pans here) is seasoned with plain oil baked into the iron at high heat — that's the entire "coating." There is no PTFE, no PFOA, no PFAS, no synthetic nonstick layer on any pan in this review.
The difference between these five is not chemistry, it's smoothness: the polished pans (iLume, Smithey, Field) give you the closest thing to nonstick behavior you can get from bare iron and oil.
No — and I'd rather tell you than have you find out. The bronze color is freshly polished iron under a thin factory seasoning. As you cook, the seasoning builds and the surface darkens toward brown, then a deep glossy black. Every polished pan does this, the Smithey and Field included.
It's the pan improving. If you want the day-one look forever, cast iron is the wrong material; if you want the pan cooking better at year five than day one, that's exactly what the darkening means.
It depends on whether your Lodge bothers you. If it doesn't — if your eggs slide and cleanup is quick — keep it, genuinely. If you're fighting it (food grabbing the rough surface, long scrubbing sessions, the sticky patchy seasoning), then yes:
If you're buying one pan, buy the 12" — you won't wish it were smaller.
Heavy. A 12" premium cast iron pan in this class runs seven to eight pounds empty, and the iLume is no exception — only the Field meaningfully undercuts that, and Test 2 shows what the missing iron costs you.
Use two hands when it's full, keep it on the stove rather than the high shelf, and the weight stops being a daily issue. If wrist strain is your deciding factor, the Field is the honest recommendation — that's why it's my runner-up.
Thanks for sticking with me through six weeks of eggs, steaks, and scrubbing — that's more patience than most of my dinner guests have. If you take one line away from this whole page, take this one: the others went back in their boxes, and the iLume is the pan still sitting on my stove. No pressure from me — whenever your old pan finally annoys you enough, you can check availability on the iLume and take it from there. Happy cooking.
— David
