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The difference in shape affects five main factors: surface area, volume, weight, tossing ability, and evaporation.
Griddle and Grill Pan Applications: These cooking tools are versatile, allowing for the preparation of a wide range of dishes, including pancakes, eggs, grilled sandwiches, seared meats, and vegetables. The ridged surface of grill pans creates attractive grill marks and allows excess fat to drain away, while griddles provide a flat surface for even cooking.
A good choice, especially for heavily used cookware, is a tri-ply or five-ply combination of stainless steel and aluminum (or hard-anodized aluminum). Stainless steel provides a durable surface, providing excellent heat retention and safety. Interior layers of aluminum ensure even heat distribution. All these work together to create the ideal cooking base, whether you’re using a skillet or sauté pan.
The two can be used interchangeably for grilling, roasting, stewing, and frying. There is no distinction between the two when it comes to cooking. A frying pan, for example, can be used in place of a skillet and vice versa.
Seasoning and Maintenance: Big black cast iron skillets require proper seasoning and maintenance to develop and maintain their non-stick properties. Regular seasoning and gentle cleaning are essential to preserve the skillet's performance and longevity.
If you’ve ever scrubbed tirelessly at a skillet after cooking to get rid of grease, a nonstick pan will make you breathe a sigh of relief as food residue washes right off its surface. Suitable for cooking on low and medium heat, nonstick pans also require less oil than other varieties, which is a big selling point for the health-conscious consumer. Nylon and wooden utensils are better suited for use with non-stick pans, as their surface can be delicate and prone to scratching.
“There are a few things to consider when you’re buying cookware, including how you cook, durability, and price,” says Lance Nitahara, an assistant professor at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, N.Y. “On the low end of the price scale are nonstick and cast iron; copper is on the high end. But each does a different thing.”
Below, you’ll find advice on how to choose the right frying pan for how you cook, plus highlights of top-performing pans from CR’s tests, listed alphabetically and not by rank. You can see how all the pans we test perform in our frying pan ratings and learn more about the different types of pans in our cookware buying guide.
Best for: Almost any food that needs frying, browning, or searing. Because it’s ovenproof, stainless is also a good choice for foods that you start on the stovetop and then move to the oven to finish, like thick pork chops.
The details: Nitahara says that 95 percent of the pans used in the CIA’s teaching kitchens are stainless steel because they can take a lot of punishment. “The only time we don’t use them is on egg day, when we use nonstick,” he says. He adds that the shiny surface of a stainless pan makes it easy to see whether your food is browning.
In CR’s tests of stainless steel pans, we measure heating evenness by cooking pancakes, and we gauge how evenly a pan sautés by cooking potatoes until they’re tender. We also conduct a cleaning test to see how easy it is to remove cooked-on food. You’d think that all stainless pans would be about the same to clean, but our tests show that some require a lot more scrubbing than others.
Here are two recommended stainless steel pans from CR’s tests.