How Cast Iron Pans Are Made by Hand at Borough Furnace — Handmade

I feel like a kitchen utensil is a very tactile, intimate product, meaning it's something that someone at home uses every day, their food touches it every day, so we're very specific about how we treat that surface. We only try to make products that last forever and are useful. The process informs its value. We start everything with a digital file and machine all our own patterns, which helps us with the design process because we can live with things for a while. While this side would make the mold for the inside of the Dutch oven and that is the outside, among

cast

iron

devotees there are two camps of people who really prefer the old

cast

iron

from the 1930s and 1940s, which has very thin walls and It is polished super smooth. and then modern cast iron is generally very thick and heavy, so our frying pan is a kind of combination of the two camps;

It's heavier because that's what cast iron is good for, but then we spend a lot of time smoothing it out with Making the mold is just a kind of attention to detail and level of practice, so we use new sand for the face of the mold, just a Mix sand with a little resin binder to hold it together. New sand. It's really angular, all those angles interlock with each other and make a really smooth surface, but then most of what we put in the mold is reclaimed sand, basically it takes practice on how quickly you put the sand together so that when you pull it out of the mold, it doesn't leave all the lettering and the logo behind and stuff like that.

There are many details on the pieces that need

hand

finishing and need the types of molds we make, we add a ceramic filter to the Gate it is a small piece of foam that filters out any impurities left on the iron oxide film that forms on the surface of the metal. By having control of the entire process and doing it on a really small scale, we don't have to make compromises. In those things we can make exactly the piece we want, that adds work and time, but I think in the end we get the result we want.

We have a small induction

furnace

that melts about 200 pounds at a rate. The way it works is like an induction stove, it uses the magnetic field to melt the metal. Cast iron is always an alloy of iron, carbon and silicon. You can play with them to give it different properties. I think our raw material is this post-consumer stuff, you know our raw material is a junkyard full of brake rotors because there's so much of it around, the temperature is complicated because there aren't many good ways to measure it because if you put something on it it will melt.

The way we do it as we pour it is to just look at the color of the metal and get an idea of ​​what it looks like when it's ready and it has to be perfect so it doesn't melt. freeze before you fill the mold so it's not so hot that it burns into the sand and forms a really rough surface, we add carbon and silicon to make it less brittle and less hard because otherwise we wouldn't be able to sand it, we've modified it over time through trial and error to make the material we want part of the pouring process: learning to pour at the right speed, filling the mold fast enough so it doesn't freeze. before filling the mold and it solidifies in a matter of seconds because it goes from 2500 at room temperature and not so fast that it creates turbulence and affects the surface finish, so that's something I've acquired over years of doing it . it's the temperature, the pouring speed, the angle and everything right, so after molding it and cooling it we drop the mold into the shaker, which is a machine that vibrates, lets it disintegrate and has a series of sieves inside it to screen. the sand in smaller and smaller pieces until it is shaped like a grain of sand and we can reuse it after melting the

pans

.

We remove the surface of the metal from its rough finish until we obtain a really smooth and pleasant surface. You use different variations of sandpaper. until you get to the fine surface you want, John and I come from an artistic background, it is our predilection. I think making these things by

hand

informs so much of what the idea is that you get this tool that was

made

for you and it just took a lot of care to make it, you know, one of the things about a cast iron skillet is that the handle It's always too hot to pick up, that was one of the starting points was figuring out how we could make one that you can pick up, the heat is dissipated through the fork connection and then there's less mass in the handle as well to keep the heat in, so it's cool to the touch when you cook.

It has a pretty thick base, so again that's good. what it's good at cast iron it has this big auxiliary handle so it's easy to maneuver we have the dutch oven so our cast iron is a little bit thicker than a typical dutch oven and then on the lid it has these little nuggets the lid recirculates the humidity inside, it contains a little bit of climate inside the duct oven and the weight of the lid also helps to not let the steam escape. The other thing we wanted to do with this is attach the handle to the lid.

We will not melt it, it will not unscrew over time. We worked on many of the details of the Dutch oven with longevity in mind. We have two directions it can go after we're done so we can season it or we can glaze it. Both of those things need a surface texture to put them together, we shoot them with steel shot, just little steel balls, so we give it this kind of micro-texture from the shot. The seasoning has two purposes, on the one hand, it is building up. a non-stick 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 that will be the final layer this is totally raw that we use Organic linseed oil has a high fatty acid content and a very high smoke point.

It is considered a very hard drying oil, it does not come off easily with utensils, so we bake them in the oven at high temperature, the fatty acids in linseed oil polymerize and form a bond and form a super hard surface that bonds with the iron, so it adheres and creates a sealant. the seasoning in the pan is not going to wash away, the seasoning is cooked and it's like preparing meal by meal. the most microscopic layer of cast iron is good at holding heat, if you heat a cast iron pan to a certain temperature it will hold that heat, you make the pan very hot and put a big piece of meat in it to the temperature of the The pan is not going to go down, it will maintain a constant temperature, but a lot of the good thing about this is what makes it a hand

made

product.

The very specific surface feel we're going for helps the cooking experience, so when we're done, you'll see. we touch everything to make sure it feels right, that's something that makes our product really good for the glazed pieces that go into this other process that we've brought in-house, this is what they look like before we glaze them, the cast pieces after Spraying the enamel slip on an enamel slip is very similar to glazing a piece of pottery: it is a mixture of glass powder and clay and then dried in a kiln. We started working on the Dutch oven probably three or four years ago.

We were hoping to work with the last major enamelling company in the U.S. After about 60 years, they went out of business, so we decided to bring that process in-house. The difficult part has been manufacturing the machinery to do it, it is not something that exists. on our scale, so we made a glazing setup with used components, got a conveyor from a factory that made auto parts, and added everything else. I cleaned the glaze off the lip where the lid joins the pot because that's usually where a Dutch oven fails and the glaze comes off the lip and we cured it because we wanted them to be somewhat indestructible so we worked with the ceramic engineers from our material supplier, the glaze they developed for us adhered very well. with the iron so that it expands and contracts with the metal instead of falling off.

After the enamel dries, it enters the kiln, which allows the glass and clay to fuse with the metal and each other and create that vitreous layer that makes it easy to use. The porcelain enamel surface is not reactive, yet It has all the main qualities of seasonal cast iron, but you know you cook with it differently, which is why our store is now the only American producer of enameled cast iron as a family business. It's hard to be stressed about the same things all the time, but we have a three-year-old at home, so he does a good job of taking our minds off

pans

when we're out for the day.

More and more people are in tune. with where your stuff comes from, I'm really interested in staying connected to the product at all times, we try to make things that we're proud of.