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What Cookware Is the Best?
Spilling over from Susan’s post on Kamala’s recent cookware purchases is a minor debate on what cookware works the best, for what purpose, and at what price. @doctorrobert, @kedavis, and @jimmcconnell have already commented. But what do you think? I suppose I started the digression with this comment:
I confess to you, I have one of these. I’ve only used it once to fry a single egg. I told my wife before l’affaire Kamala that she might as well start using it — we’re not getting any younger.
Mauviel Copper M’200 CI Fry Pan
Select : 12″
$435 (It was much cheaper when I bought it.)
Williams-Sonoma many years ago. Up ’til now it’s just been too special to use.
What is your favorite skillet, chicken fryer, or saucepan?
Published in General
Most of our cookware is Thermo Core stainless steel that Mrs. Tabby bought before she even met me. So it has been in daily use for more than forty years on both gas and electric (glass top) ranges. It’s heavy enough for even heat distribution, and the bottom stays flat, which we find important on our current glass top electric range. We did replace the plastic handles on some of the pans about five years ago.
Luddite.
What do you make your crêpes in? You know, as with other things collectible, one finds oneself always looking for the best of a type for a certain use. For me perhaps it became a small mania. The best pistol for bear. The best boots for everyday wear. The best violin, or scythe, or skillet. I know I can’t drive a really good sports car to its performance limits, but on the other hand I can drive a good car better than I can drive a poor one.
Long ago a friend told me of the story when he was racing for pink slips. I forget what he drove but it was a big family car like an Impala or something. He did have double four-barrel carburetion under the hood, at the very least, but he had a stock hood. One night he pulled up to the Dairy Queen in his old Impala and got once again ribbed for his family car with its skinny tires. He got mad and he raced, and I think shifting into fourth his driver’s seat ripped out of the floor and he had to finish the race reclining on his back. But he still won. So the story went. And I’ve never forgotten the moral of the story. It’s not what you drive but how well you know it.
I have cookware that out perform my talents, and that I can never make full use of. But still, I can cook better in them than in a thin stainless steel skillet. And they’re shiny.
Oooh, shiny!
Feed the fork, Luke.
I believe that a good skillet, properly handled, will protect you from any pistol bullet under .50.
Wedgewood? I’m not familiar with Wedgewood. Is it that snowy white china with matte colored reliefs? If it’s what I think it is, you’re living high daily. One of the benefits of old age. I like simple white Corel plates, but every month my wife or I say, we really should be using the china inherited from my grandmother, marked Heinrich & Co. SELB Bavaria Germany U.S. ZONE. But it’s not dishwasher or microwave safe.
I like long-lived anything.
I wouldn’t make the claim that it’s ‘the best’ but I have an entire set of nickel-lined copper cookware (9 pieces) that I bought in France in 1983. I use it daily and wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Wow, and it’s never needed replating?
Which one do you use most? And for what?
Do I have to be the one who asks what brand it is?
Yes.
It’s never needed replating. It may help that I’m a professionally trained cook and worked in hospitality (i.e., cooking and catering) for 20 years. The one that gets the most use is a 7 cup (or thereabouts) sauce pot – lots of uses, including the prosaic boiling of water for hard-cooked eggs. Its brand is Mauviel’s Cupronil. Here’s a sampling:
Yesss. Nearly forty years old and as good as they were on day one.
Julia Child’s kitchen has been re-created at the Smithsonian. Her pots and pans:
Another way she had them arranged–she used mostly copper pots:
I received a full set 16+ pieces of circa 1960’s Stainless Saladmaster pots and pans, from a great Aunt through my aunt.
Super high quality that you cannot get today. Bases are all about 1/4″ thick stainless with 16 Guage walls. Even the lids are 20 Guage stainless.
I don’t think I’ll ever need to buy another pot or pan in my life.
Yet I still prefer my cast iron pan.
Is your cast iron pan new? Or does it have a history, too?
Nope it is the cheap Lodge brand. You have to use them for about a year before they start to actually to smooth out and get a proper seasoning on them. That is the best thing about cast iron, the more you use it the better it gets.
A buddy of mine learned a few years ago that if you take an angle grinder to them you can smooth the surface immediately. Alaskan dudes can cook a salmon on a piece of slate.
Anything light weight, non-stick and dishwasher safe. All my expensive name brand heavy pans from years ago sit unused in a cabinet.
Calcephon stainless steel and Lodge cast iron.
We also have several non-stick skillets of various brands, still trying to find one that keeps its coating . . .
Have you tried All-Clad non-stick? They’re not too expensive and seem to hold up pretty well.
I got pissed off at the never ending failure of low quality non-stick pans and bought the D5 allclad set from william sonoma.
One of my core requirements was stainless steel so that it could be washed in the dishwasher.
I recommend them highly.
For frying an egg, the greenpan from william sonoma is great.
Allclad got started by invented patented technology to for jacketing artillary rounds.
You may be right about jacketing on military rounds. I’m not saying you’re wrong at all. From All-Clad, I believe, I once saw a video of the history of bonding and the process by which they bond the layers together.
All-Clad got it’s inspiration from metal-to-metal bonding which was first notice in WWI (I’m sketchy on this) when steel anti-tank rounds fused by force to the steel tanks that were shot at. In All-Clad’s old process. They would take sheets of metal of a greater thickness than the desired result, lay one on top of another, sprinkle or slather very evenly explosive powder on top of the top sheet, hook up detonators everywhere for simultaneous explosions, and take a bunch of these things into a cave and blow them up all at once. The blast out the mouth of the cave was pretty impressive for a manufacturing activity.
I understand they bond the metals together differently nowadays.
Oooo! Like! I just don’t have enough wall space for that.
Which is why my breakfast skillet (10″ cast iron) stays on the stove. For pork products and eggs most mornings.
FWIW, the rule is no moisture ever left behind. Light grease left on it is fine (ideal, really). Never washed, just wiped. (Grease cooked into the iron pores is the basis of seasoning.)
@eherring actually, the reason people used to avoid washing cast iron cookware with soap was that the old lye-based soaps would remove the seasoning layer. NO modern dishwashing liquids are lye-based and are safe to use. I use them all the time on my cast iron. I just don’t soak them. Apply soapy water, clean, rinse, then dry. No problemo!
As an aside I have a Wagner skillet that I bought used at a Toronto thrift store around 1970 for as I recall, about a dollar (poor grad student). The particular makers mark style was discontinued around 1920… so about 100 years old. In those days Wagner milled the cooking surface ultra smooth, and its now got a 100 year layer of seasoning. In my 50 year share of its cooking lifetime it’s been easily nonstick enough for eggs any style. Whenever I use it (which is frequently) I think appreciatively of those craftsmen of a century ago who made it and the previous owners who used it and cared for it.
Best dollar I’ve ever spent.
I still cook with the same Lithware™ set my family has been using for aeons.
You mean like this? This is nice.
I have a cheap Lodge cast iron, which I keep trying to season with avocado oil (highest smoke point). I am seduced by my sub $100 Target set of Farberware, which has two great points in its favor:
Do you have a moment to talk about Hatch green chile?
Sure. What’s Hatch green chile?