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- [Liz] A piece of cookware,
I feel like is a very tactile,
intimate product.
I mean,
it's something that someone who has at home
is using every day.
Their food is touching it every day.
So we're very specific about how we treat that surface.
We're only trying to make products that will last forever,
that are useful.
The process informs its value.
- We start everything off with a digital file
and we machine all of our own patterns.
So that helps us with the design process,
'cause we get to live with things for a while.
This side would make the mold for the interior
of the Dutch oven,
and that's the outside.
- Among the cast iron devotees,
there are two camps of people
who really prefer vintage cast iron
from the 30s and 40s,
which has very thin walls and is polished super smooth.
And then modern cast iron is generally very thick and heavy.
So our skillet is sort of a combination of the two camps.
It is on the heavier side because that is
what cast iron is good at.
But then we spend a lot of time smoothing it down.
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- With the mold-making,
it's kind of just an attention to detail
and the level of practice.
We use a new sand for the very face of the mold.
Just a mixture of sand with a little bit
of resin binder in it to hold it together.
New sand is really angular.
All those angles kind of mesh with each other
and form a really smooth surface.
But then the bulk of what we're putting
in the mold is reclaimed sand.
It basically takes practice.
How quickly to pack the sand together
so that when you pull it off of the molds,
it doesn't leave all the letters
and the logo behind and things like that.
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There are a lot of details to the pieces
that need hand-finishing
and need the types of molds that we make.
We add a ceramic filter to the gate.
It's a little piece of foam.
So it filters any impurities that are leftover,
the iron oxide film that forms on the surface of the metal.
Being in control of the whole process
and doing it at a really small scale,
we don't have to compromise on those things.
We can make exactly the piece that we want to make.
It adds labor and it adds time.
But I think that we get the result that we want in the end.
We've got a small induction furnace,
which melts about 200 pounds at a time.
The way it works,
kind of like an induction stove.
This uses the magnetic field to melt the metal down.
Cast iron is always an alloy of iron, carbon, and silicon.
You can play with those to give it different properties.
I think of our raw material
as being these post-consumer things.
You know,
our raw material is a scrap yard full of brake rotors
'cause there's just so much of it around.
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The temperature is tricky
because there aren't very many good ways to measure it
because as you stick something in it, it melts.
The way that we do it as we're pouring
is to just look at the color of the metal
and kind of get a feel for
what it looks like when it's ready.
And it has to be just right,
so that it doesn't freeze before it fills the mold up
so that it isn't so hot that it burns
into the sand and makes a really rough surface.
We add carbon and silicon to it
to make it less brittle and less hard,
'cause otherwise we wouldn't be able to sand it down.
We've kinda tweaked it over time through trial and error
to make the material what we want.
Part of the pouring process is learning
to pour at the right speed.
Just filling the mold up just fast enough
that it doesn't freeze before it fills the mold.
Then it solidifies in a matter of seconds
'cause it's coming from 2500 down to room temperature.
And not so fast that it's creating turbulence
and affecting the surface finish.
That's been something that I've kind
of acquired over years of doing it
is the temperature and the pouring speed
and the angle and everything just right.
After it's cast and cooled down,
we drop the mold onto the shakeout,
which is a machine that vibrates.
Let it kind of disintegrate
and it has a series of screens inside
to screen the sand into smaller and smaller pieces
until it goes back into sand grain form
and we can reuse it.
(machine vibrating)
- After the skillets are cast,
we take the surface of the metal down from its rough finish
to like a really nice, smooth surface.
(sander whirring)
You use different variations of sandpaper
until it gets to the fine surface that you want.
John and I both come from art backgrounds.
It's our predilection.
I think by making these things by hand informs
so much of what it is.
The idea that like you're getting this tool
that was made for you and just
that it took a lot of care to do it.
- You know,
one of the things about a cast iron skillet
is that the handle's always too hot to pick up.
That was one of the starting points,
was to figure out how we could make one
that you could pick up.
- The heat dissipates through the fork connection
and then there's less mass in the handle also
to hold the heat so it's cool to the touch
when you're cooking with it.
Has a pretty thick base.
So again,
it's good at what cast iron is good at.
It has this big helper handle to make it easy to maneuver.
- We've got the Dutch ovens,
so our casting is a little bit thicker
than a typical Dutch oven,
and then on the lid,
it has these little pips on the lids,
kind of recirculate the moisture inside.
- [Liz] Sort of contains a little climate
inside the Dutch oven and the weight
of the lid helps not let that steam escape too.
- The other thing we wanted to do with this
is cast the handle into the lid.
You can't melt it off.
It's not gonna come unscrewed over time.
We worked on a lot of the details of the Dutch oven
with longevity in mind.
We have kind of two directions
that it can go in after finishing.
So we can season it or we can enamel it.
Both of those things need a surface texture to attach to.
We shot-blast it with steel shots,
just little tiny steel balls.
So we give it this kind of micro texture
from the shot blaster.
- The seasoning has two purposes.
On the one hand,
it is building up a nonstick layer of fats
that adhere to the iron.
The secondary function is that it seals the raw cast-iron,
which is very susceptible to rust.
This is the third layer going on.
That'll be the final layer.
This one is totally raw.
We use organic flaxseed oil.
It's very high in fatty acids
and has a very high smoke point.
It's considered a very hard drying oil.
Doesn't come up easily with utensils.
So we bake them in the oven at high temperature.
The fatty acids and the flaxseed oil polymerize
and sort of form a link
and form a super hard surface.
It bonds with the iron.
So it sort of adheres and creates a sealant.
The seasoning on the skillet is not gonna wash out.
The seasoning is cooked on and it's like building meal
by meal on like the most microscopic layer.
Cast iron is good at maintaining heat.
If you heat a cast iron pan up to a certain temperature,
it is gonna hold that heat.
You get your skillet scorching hot
and you put a huge piece of meat in it.
The temperature of the pan is not gonna drop.
It's gonna maintain a constant temperature.
But a lot of what's nice about it
is what makes it a handmade product.
The very specific surface feel
we go for helps the cooking experience.
So when we're finishing,
you'll see us touching everything,
making sure it feels good.
That's one thing that makes our product really nice.
- For the enameled pieces,
those go on to this other process
that we've brought in-house.
This is what they look like before they get enameled.
The castings, after they're shot blast,
get the enamel slip sprayed on.
An enamel slip is a lot like glazing a ceramic piece.
It's a mixture of glass, powder, and clay.
And then it gets dried off in an oven.
We started working on the Dutch oven,
probably three or four years ago.
We were hoping to work
with the last big enameling company in the US.
After 60 years or so,
they went out of business.
So we decided to bring that process in-house.
The hard part has been making the machinery to do it with.
It's not something that exists on our scale.
So we've done an enameling set-up with used components.
We got a conveyor from a factory
that made car parts and we've added all the rest of it.
I clean the enamel off of the lip
where the lid meets the pot
because that's typically where a Dutch oven fails.
The enamel chips off the lip.
Then we season that lip 'cause we wanted these
to be kind of indestructible.
So we worked with the ceramics engineers
that are our material supplier.
The enamel that they developed for us made
to bond really well with the iron
so that it expands and contracts
with the metal rather than chipping off.
After the enamel is dry it goes into the kiln,
which lets the glass and clay fuse
to the metal and to each other
and creates that vitreous coating
that makes it easy to use.
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- The porcelain enamel surface is non-reactive.
It still has like all of the core qualities
of the seasoned cast iron.
But you know,
you cook with it differently.
Now our shop is the only US producer of enamel cast iron.
- As a family business,
it's hard to be stressed about the same things all the time.
But we've got a three-year-old at home,
so he does a good job of taking our mind off of skillets
when we leave for the day.
More and more people are in tune
with where their things come from.
I'm really interested in being connected
to the product all the way through.
We try to make things that we're proud of.