Choosing Pots and Pans to Improve Your Cooking

As a Fine Cooking editor, I’ve had the chance to observe lots of great cooks at work. From them, I’ve learned plenty—including the fact that good-quality pots and pans made of the right materials really can improve your cooking.

Rather than having a rack filled with stock pot and pans of all shapes and sizes, owning a few well-chosen pieces will give you the flexibility to cook whatever you want and the performance you need to cook it better.

I polled some of our authors to find out which pans were the most valuable to them and why. I then came up with six pieces, starting with two indispensables: an anodized-aluminum stockpot to handle stocks, soups, stews, some sauces, blanching, boiling, and steaming; and a high-sided stainless-steel/aluminum sauce pan with a lid for frying, deglazing sauces, braising small items like vegetables, making sautés and fricassées, cooking rice pilafs and risottos, and a whole lot more. The other four pieces I picked make for even more cooking agility and add up to half a dozen ready-for-action pots and pans that you’ll really use (see For every pot, there’s a purpose…).

All good pans share common traits

In a well-stocked kitchen store, you’ll see lots of first-rate pots and deep fry pan. They may look different, but they all share essential qualities you should look for.

Look for heavy-gauge materials. Thinner-gauge materials spread and hold heat unevenly, and their bottoms are more likely to dent and warp. This means that food can scorch. Absolutely flat bottoms are particularly important if your stovetop element is electric. Heavy-gauge pans deliver heat more evenly (see “Good pans are worth their price…,” below).

To decide if a pan is heavy enough, lift it, look at the thickness of the walls and base, and rap it with your knuckles—do you hear a light ping or a dull thud? A thud is good in this case.

Good pans are worth their price because they manage heat better

“Good conductor” and “heavy gauge” are the key features of good cookware. Here’s how these characteristics affect cooking.

You get responsive heat. Good heat conductors, such as copper and aluminum, are responsive to temperature changes. They’ll do what the heat source tells them to do—heat up, cool down—almost instantly.

You get fast heat flow. Heat flows more easily through a good heat conductor, assuring a quick equalizing of temperature on the cooking surface.

You get even heat diffusion. A thicker pan has more distance between the cooking surface and the heat source. By the time the heat flows to the cooking surface, it will have spread out evenly, because heat diffuses as it flows.

You get more heat. Mass holds heat (heat is vibrating mass, so the more mass there is to vibrate, the more heat there will be). The more grill pan there is to heat, the more heat the pan can hold, so there’s more constant heat for better browning, faster reducing, and hotter frying.

You’ll want handles and a lid that are sturdy, heatproof, and secure. Handles come welded, riveted, or screwed. Some cooks advise against welded handles because they can break off. But Gayle Novacek, cookware buyer for Sur La Table, has seen few such cases. As long as handles are welded in several spots, they can be preferable to riveted ones because residue is apt to collect around a rivet.

Many pans have metal handles that stay relatively cool when the pan is on the stove because the handle is made of a metal that’s a poor heat conductor and retainer, such as stainless steel. Plastic and wooden handles stay cool, too, but they’re not ovenproof. Heat- or ovenproof handles mean that dishes started on the stovetop can be finished in the oven.

All lids should fit tightly to keep in moisture. The lid, too, should have a heatproof handle. Glass lids, which you’ll find on certain brands, are usually ovensafe only up to 350°F.

A pan should feel comfortable. “When you’re at the store, pantomime the way you’d use a pot or pan to find out if it’s right for you,” advises Fine Cooking contributing editor and chef Molly Stevens. If you find a pan you love but you aren’t completely comfortable with the handle, you can buy a rubber gripper to slip over the handle. Just remember that grippers aren’t ovenproof.

Some pans need special talents

Depending on what you’ll be cooking in the pan, you may also need to look for other attributes.

For sautéing and other cooking that calls for quick temperature changes, a pan should be responsive. This means that the fry pan is doing what the heat source tells it to, and pronto. For example, if you sauté garlic just until fragrant and then turn down the flame, the pan should cool down quickly so the garlic doesn’t burn. Responsiveness isn’t as crucial for boiling, steaming, or the long, slow cooking that stocks and stews undergo.

For sautéing and oven roasts, it helps if the pan heats evenly up the sides. When you’ve got a pan full of chicken breasts nestling against the pan sides, you want them all to cook quickly and evenly, so heat coming from the sides of the pan is important. Even heat up the sides of a pot is important for pot roasting, too. Paul Bertolli, Fine Cooking contributing editor and chef of Oliveto restaurant in Oakland, California, counts on his enameled cast-iron oval casserole by Le Creuset for braising meat because “it’s a snug, closed cooking chamber with even heat radiating off the sides for really good browning.” Bertolli finds that meat fits especially well into the oval shape.

For cooking acidic foods, such as tomato sauces, wine sauces, and fruit fillings, a pan’s lining should be nonreactive. Stainless steel, enamel, and anodized aluminum won’t react no matter what they touch, while plain aluminum can discolor white sauces and foods that are acidic, sulfurous, or alkaline. It can even make those foods taste metallic. Eggs, vegetables in the cabbage family, and baking soda are some of the other foods vulnerable to aluminum’s graying effect. In the past, there was concern about aluminum and Alzheimer’s, but evidence has been far from conclusive.

Interview yourself to help you choose the right pans

There’s nothing wrong with matching cookware in principle. Packaged starter sets are attractively priced, and a whole lineup of matching pans can be attractive, too. But a single material isn’t suited for every kitchen task—with sets, you’re often stuck with pans you don’t need. That enameled cast-iron casserole is just right for the cassoulet you’ll move from stovetop to oven. But its matching saucepan overcooked your last caramel because the pan was too heavy to heft quickly once the sugar turned color.

You’ll get more use out of pieces that you hand-pick yourself. You may already own a matched set (the red Le Creuset ensemble I got years ago as a housewarming present is still hanging in my kitchen), but as you add new pieces to your collection, you’ll have a chance to branch out to different materials (see “Materials that make the pot”).

To decide what you need, ask yourself questions like the ones that follow.

Materials that make the pot

The letters identifying the materials key to the photo below.

A. Stainless steel is a poor conductor of heat all by itself, but it’s a peerless surface metal: easy to clean, durable, shiny for good visibility, and completely nonreactive.

B. Copper is a superb heat conductor and radiates visual warmth, too, if you keep it polished. All alone, copper is highly reactive with food, so the pans must be lined. It’s often used as a bottom layer for better heat conduction.

C. Aluminum is a top-notch heat conductor and is lightweight and easy to handle, but it reacts with acidic, sulfurous, and alkaline foods. Aluminum is often used as a core or bottom layer for better heat conduction.

D. Cast iron is an excellent retainer of heat and great for high temperatures. It’s relatively slow to heat up and cool down, and needs thorough drying and oiling.

E. Nonstick coatings have greatly improved to withstand high heat and abrasion.

F. Anodized aluminum is aluminum that’s been electrochemically sealed, making for a nonreactive, hard surface. The dark interior, though, makes it difficult to see color change in pan juices and translucent sauces.

G. Enameled cast iron’s coating solves the maintenance problems of cast iron, but the heating benefits remain. The enamel coating can chip with wear and abrasion.