Recommend me cast iron

[Veb]

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

If you shop at garage sales, take along a ruler. If the pan has ever been way overheated and then quenched it may have a curved bottom that will never sit right on the stove. Besides being tippy, the limited contact area tends to make for slow heating with hot spots on an electric range. Also a pan like that is going to have thousands of pounds per square inch of stress frozen in, so it could possibly shatter like glass if you smack it a good one or overheat the piss out of it again. Not likely, but I'd pass on a warped pan anyway.

Yeah! Jag nailed a really important thing with used cast iron. It has to sit flat or it's a dud. When I researched online ads for cast iron I wondered why the hell they said "sits flat". Of course they sit flat; they're skillets. Until I spotted a curved-bottom one at an antique store. Yep, people do over-heat them that badly. It's really hard to warp cast iron but some people manage.