Founded in 2015, Stargazer is a manufacturer of American-made cast iron cookware based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Our highly-acclaimed skillets are renowned for their smooth surface finish and modern, practical design. Designed for performance.

Stargazer Cast Iron was founded in 2015 by housewares designer Peter Huntley. After years of designing products for other companies, Huntley became disenchanted by the lack of quality and accountability present in modern goods manufactured overseas. In a time of unprecedented globalization, he saw more and more classic American brands compromising the principles that made them great, in order to cut costs and bolster the bottom line. Fed up with the status quo, he set out to build a product and a company that could be held to a higher standard.

Convinced people should have access to high quality, well designed cast iron at a reasonable price, Huntley set out to build something totally new to cast iron. In the summer of 2015, six months, 21 designs and several prototypes after he began, he had designed the first Stargazer skillet. Peter spent the rest of that summer in his garage producing Stargazer's first run of 250 skillets. Working sunrise to sunset, and often well into the night, he hand-sanded the castings to a smooth finish. He seasoned them in his home oven, boxed them on the dining room floor, and drove them, one compact carload at a time, to the local post office to ship. Today, tens of thousands of skillets later, Stargazer continues to grow, guided by the principles that we were founded on in 2015.

While some cookware is coated with non-stick chemicals (such as Teflon), cast iron is made naturally non-stick through seasoning. Seasoning is fats/oils that polymerize to the skillet either by baking them in or through cooking. The more you cook with your cast iron, the more non-stick it'll become. While preheating is important to get the entire skillet to temperature, once it gets hot, it'll stay that way for a good amount of time. That's what makes cast iron great for things like searing steaks! Another great thing about cast iron is the fact that you can cook on any cooking surface. This includes gas, electric or induction cooktops, on a grill or over an option fire. Cast iron cookware will last you a lifetime. Whether it encounters seasoning loss or rust, it's virtually indestructible, making it something that's often handed down from generation to generation.

Our skillets begin their journey at our foundry, where domestically sourced, primarily recycled iron is melted at 2,800°F. The molten iron is refined and checked for purity, then poured into molds made of sand and clay in a process known as "green sand" casting. Once cooled, the molds are released on a shakeout line, leaving behind a solid, raw casting. The raw castings are sent to our machine shop, where they are individually loaded into a custom-built fixture and CNC machined across the entire interior surface. This allows us to dial in the optimal weight and thickness of each skillet with precision. This process is also the first step towards creating a cooking surface that is naturally non-stick and easy to clean.

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