Gear Heads | The Best Nonstick Skillets for Avoiding Sticky Situations

look at that that is wow the pan is clean beautiful release not really a beautiful toss on my part but well you get tired yeah an 8-inch non-stick pan looks kind of adorable next to a 10 or 12 inch version but these petite pans are useful in their own right they're great for things like one or two fried eggs an omelette or recipes that are scaled down for one to two people to find the best eight-inch non-stick skillet on the market we surveyed the options and chose eight pans priced from seventeen dollars all the way up to a hundred dollars four were made from traditional ptfe nonstick and four were ceramic nonstick which is an alternative coating often marketed as green or environmentally friendly now to find the absolute best of these we rated them in three areas non-stick ability durability and ease of use i personally spent 66 hours at the stove and cooked 700 eggs to find the best pan we're just going to show you the highlights today though check it out [Music] all right so we're here with our first non-stick test and we're actually doing an industry standard test where we cook eggs one minute per side over and over again in the pan with no fat at all until the eggs start to stick half the lineup is traditional non-stick which are these in the front plus this one over here that we're going to start with that is poly tetrafluoroethylene ptfe it's a plastic polymer coating um in the back here we have four ceramic pans this is kind of like plastic and this is kind of like a glass beach sand composite all right this is the oxo see if that one comes out wow wow totally clean so that's our 50th egg in this pan we're giving that a pass all right so here's the bioletti wow look at that looks good oh okay that's a mess all right that one's gone it left its little brown layer on here it's it's looking bad i had a personal rule of four eggs when i was doing this stuck four in a row it's out oh come on how's it going oh oh oh no it's like leaving a layer behind and coming off yeah this is bad total fail it's like sitting at us we're going we are just going back time for the all clad this pan is induction friendly beautiful perfect on the pricier end of things but a great pan we're on a croissant break yeah they're testing chocolate croissants in the back and they just said you want one of these yeah we break for croissants always any time after the first round of testing we started to notice major differences between the traditional ptfe pans and the ceramic pans and it all came down to differences in the composition of their coatings the coatings on ceramic pans are more brittle than the polytetrafluoroethylene on the traditional pans and that means they're more susceptible to stress during normal use they develop microscopic surface flaws and the more flawed it becomes the more food sticks and then the faster it wears down all right so score one for the traditional pans let's see if this trend continues in round two durability [Music] all right so it's time for our durability testing we do scratch tests with metal utensils a thermal shock test where we heat up a pan and cool down real fast and then a cinder block test where we bang the pans on cinder block and these are accelerated durability tests obviously we know you're not banging your pan on a cinder block on the regular but this gives us a good idea of how these pans will perform over time one two three four five okay they do not look happy i see like some really big scratches here so there's material coming off the pans you see that powder not something you'd want in your food oxo scan pan the spatulas why thank you all right 48 49 50. these look pretty good yeah thermal shock is anytime you're changing the temperature really quickly and really extremely from very hot to very cold it's really bad for metal that's how you get warping all right we are zeroing in 400. that's pretty good oh yeah the handle is wobbly over the years i've done a lot of this kind of test where we've used skillets by whacking them against the edge of a concrete block i'm handing the reins of the skillet whacking test over a lot of ledges that are afraid of this lady over here okay all right chipping denting that ceramic surface is kind of brittle and it looks like it just flew off when you hit it scan pen from denmark check out that handle okay definitely wiggly all right let's try the oxo this guy is your traditional non-stick here we go a little bump there little tiny bump there all right so that's pretty good yeah unfortunately the ceramic pans continued to fall behind in our durability rounds throughout this testing we saw the ceramic pans were much more likely to warp and crack and this is due to the brittle nature of their coatings the pans that were more intact and less dented at the end they got the most points let's move on to our third and final round ease of use [Music] all right so we chose scrambled eggs as a user test because you really interact with the pan a lot lisa here is going to demonstrate we've got the oxo pan right here traditional non-stick how'd that feel to swirl it felt good it's a really light pan and feels pretty well balanced how does it feel working inside the pan really nice really easy the sides are low enough that i can like get the spatula there but they're not so high you know they're not like coming in at a weird angle copper chef wow this is weird you know i'm i just want to move it a little bit it's got these like sharp little edges like it's like i'm trying to grab the business end of a spatula it's not very comfortable let's do tifa okay oh my gosh i just threw some out of the pan yeah this one just feels like the sides are shallower we're gonna have to check our cholesterol after this i know this is the all clad right lisa is very pro this handle i feel like it cuts into my hand a little bit it's a little divisive it's a little handle heavy which is odd like the handle feels like overbuilt for this little pan i like the lack of rivets that's a good feeling i mean not bad non-stick ability aside there were certain design factors that made some of the pans easier to use than others we looked at things like capacity cleanup and weight in this round but the thing that really made the biggest difference to our testers was the comfort of the handles some of these had sharp edges that really dug into our hands and if it had a brushed stainless steel finish or a grippy silicone sleeve that was a nice bonus after putting these pans to the ringer we finally have a winner the oxo good grip hard anodized pro non-stick eight-inch fry pan priced at 30 bucks it bested all the rest for its superior non-stick ability super comfortable handle and crazy durability it came out of testing looking just as good as it did going in now keep in mind this pan is not induction friendly so if you have an induction stove we recommend the all clad and if you really want a ceramic skillet our top rated ceramic model was the scan pan for our full testing and more info on our winning products check out the links below make sure to leave us your equipment questions in the comments and don't forget to hit that subscribe button [Music]

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 476,400

Keywords: nonstick skillet, equipment review, cookware, nonstick, oxo nonstick skillet, skillet, kitchen equipment, kitchen equipment review, kitchen tools, fried eggs, nonstick pans, america's test kitchen, americas test kitchen, equipment testing

Id: QZ3ZsLRgmw0

Length: 7min 35sec (455 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019