Equipment Review: The Best Stainless Steel Skillet, Our Testing Winners and Why All-Clad is Worth It

[Music] we love stainless steel skillets in the Test Kitchen while cast-iron carbon steel and even nonstick of them pushing them out of the limelight these are still our top choice for Goulding uniform browning and to develop fond the fond is the secret weapon of chefs those brown bits of stuck food at the bottom of your pan are the key super flavorful dishes and pan sauces but only if you have a high-quality skillet because bad pans Lafond that skimpy or scorched we also love that these pans are all metal they can go right from the stovetop into the oven to finish cooking thicker cuts of meat and fish or to bake skillet pies or skillet roast whole chickens unlike carbon steel or cast iron pans stainless won't react with acidic foods so you can cook without fear of metallic flavors or damaging the pan seasoning Plus stainless will never wear out like nonstick so if you want perfect searing super flavorful sauces and cook anything stoked oven versatility for a lifetime you need this pan now we've had a longtime favorite it's called the all-clad d3 stainless 12 inch frying pan with lid which sells for about $120 it may not look that special but this pan has hidden technology it's built from layers of different metals bonded together using a process patented in 1967 by a metallurgist called John ulam who founded the company all clad when the whole pan is made this way with layers of metal it's called fully clad and it works like a charm this pan has three layers aluminum sandwiched on top and bottom by stainless steel the layering means you get the best of both metals aluminum's fast heat conduction controlled by slower transmitting heat retaining steel and all that translates to beautiful even golden browning now sometimes you see pans that have clad bottoms those we call disc bottom pans and you'll see a little seam along the side that shows you they literally stuck a disc of steel and aluminum onto the bottom of a thin steel pan this is a much cheaper way to try to layer metals and frankly it just doesn't work as well especially in a skillet you get scorched food all around the edges where the disc doesn't reach and the disc itself tends to heat very slowly and then get too hot skip discs bottom hands now recently we see many more fully clad pants on the market some boasts even more metal layers plus other special features that pretty stunning prices even all clad launched a five layer skillet the d5 stainless making us wonder if our old favorite was still the best choice so we bought 15 fully clad 12 inch skillets press from 47 99 to $400 we put them through tons of cooking tests browning onions searing strip steaks and making pan sauce from the fog sauteing green beans pan roasting asparagus and cooking a whole cut-up chicken that starts on the stove and finishes in the oven and then building a pan sauce from the drippings we scrubbed the pans by hand and in the dishwasher we check for warping then we even knocked them around to simulate years of use these pans can be a great investment but only if they last the good news is that we cooked successfully in most of these pans where we saw major differences was in how easy they were to use sadly we had less success with cheaper pans pressed less than $100 it seems that in this category shelling out a little more money does pay off first sighs well they're all 12 inch skillets the sides sloped differently leaving you more or less actual cooking space some of the cheaper pans are just eight inches across we preferred pans with wide cooking surfaces from nine to quarter to ten and a half inches across that let food fit without crowding so it could Brown if it's crowded food steams instead of searing but too big is not good either the biggest skillets are also super heavy as much as four and a quarter pounds empty lifting these was no fun especially when they were ripping hot from the oven full of sizzling chicken our favorite pan was much easier to maneuver it weighs 2 and 3/4 pounds and has nine and a half inches of cooking surface that gave it enough room to cook comfortably all feeling light and well-balanced whether it was empty or fall now handle shape and size matter for your sense of control some of these handles were too thick or too thin which strained our hands and if they're too round and smooth if it's slipped in our hands and that's especially scary when they're slippery with grease and full of hot food what we liked were handles with angled shapes that didn't slip some of these also had a y-shaped that was supposed to help the handle stay cool that just didn't work most of them still got hot especially right where we wanted grab them our favorite stayed cool and actually let us skip potholders most of the time now one thing about these big heavy skillets they have so-called helper handles those didn't help they just added weight that through the pans off balance and they were useless when we needed to hold the pan up with one hand they got hot they trapped grime you don't need helper handles on a skillet in fact these handles were a symptom of our lowest ranked pants which were bigger and heavier overall with shapes like saute pans they were wide they were heavy they had tall sides with straight walls and that's the kind of pan we prefer for braises and other liquid heavy dishes a skillet works best if it's light trim and well balanced with low flaring sides that encourage evaporation for better browning not steaming or stewing and you need a five layer skillet no in our tests five layers cooked about the same as three layers so why pay almost $100 more for them when we compared the all-clad d5 skillet to it's three layered III skillet the five layer pan was a bit heavier and cooked a bit more slowly now this makes sense since that five layer pan contains extra steel and as you know steel transmits heat more sluggishly than aluminum now other pans with five layers ranked even lower due to other design problems and they also cost more now high tech features on the pricey pans were mostly a bust do you really need nano bonded titanium like on this fancy heston skillet it looks great but we didn't see any functional benefit in fact the darker color only made it harder to monitor browning I mean to constantly use its proprietary cleanser or it looked blotchy it did cook nicely but it seemed like a stretch to spend $400 for this pan if we pay a lot for a pen we expect great durability after all our cooking tests we check to see if any pans had warped then we checked again after heating the pans to 500 degrees and plunging them into ice water and striking them three times on a concrete block now here the in expensive pans had a real problem five of the eight warped just from routine use and after our abuse test three of them had Wiggly handles too in the more expensive pans only one showed very slight warping and all the handle stayed solid now on all 15 pans we could see dents where we'd struck them ranging from pretty bad to barely there our old winner from alclad held up through all of this with no warping an intact handle and almost undetectable dents now to understand why some pans were tougher we consulted the material science and engineering department at MIT or Mike tarkanian explained that thicker pans will be less prone to warping and denting and pretend to cook better too he said thinner pans would have less heat retention because there's less thermal mass and they probably run a little hotter and have worse heat distribution sure enough when we measure the thickness of their cooking surfaces the best-performing pans were three to 3.3 millimeters thick lower-ranked pans were thinner as low as two point four millimeters this helped explain why some cheaper thinner pans had had a problem maintaining heat for instance with steak would get a great brown crust on the first side but when we flipped to the second side weaker pans seemed to lose heat and struggle giving us poorer browning and skimpier font tarkanian also ground into the pans so we could look at the metal layers under a microscope we can see that some pans had different thicknesses of inner and the outer layers of metal but you could also contribute to warping as they heat and cool at different rates in the end while we recommended several of these pans only one pan had it all the all-clad d3 stainless 12 inch frying pan our old winner it won again at a moderate price of $120 it even includes a lid it performs beautifully it's easy to use and it proved itself to be tough as nails this is a pan that will last a lifetime [Music] you [Music]

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 1,305,811

Rating: 4.8909783 out of 5

Keywords: stainless steel pan, what's the best skillet, what's the best stainless steel pan, all clad pan, steel skillet, the best skillet, equipment review, america's test kitchen, review, product review, cook's illustrated, cooking, stainless steel cookware, fry pan seasoning, how to season, skillet, how is a skillet made, clad cookware, what is fond, high quality skillet, fully clad cookware, disk bottom pan, is all clad worth it

Id: KzNOy10nz6s

Length: 8min 18sec (498 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 26 2019