How to choose and use the right Stainless Steel Cookware for you.

stainless steel cookware is the most versatile cooker you can buy but how do you know that you're buying quality and what are your expectations performance today we're going to cover the abcs of choosing the right stainless steel cookware for you [Music] hi i'm jed from cook culture so stainless steel cookware is the backbone of the cookware industry there is nonstick there's copper there's cast iron there's ceramic there's all different types but really the core of cookware on the market for the last 50 60 maybe 70 years has been good quality basic stainless steel cookware and stainless steel cookware is not just stainless steel stainless steel is your inner cooking surface the inner core is going to be where all the work is done the conductivity to the pan and that can be aluminum it can be aluminum alloy it can be copper it can be silver it can be gold uh there's been lots of different sorts of combinations over time but typically it's aluminum inside or what is called encapsulated onto the bottom so this is a clad pan where this is made out of out of sheet metal that is flattened uh and then ruled with other types of alloys and aluminum and then stainless steel so it becomes a clad so you have like a sandwich of material and it is then shaped into a pan you can also have what's called encapsulated where you have a capsule or a disc that is glued or adhered to the bottom of the pan um two different ways of getting the same place and it's not meaning that one is better than the other and that's for a different conversation uh because today we're talking about clad cookware uh so in clad cookware that is really the dominance of the top end of the market in when you're looking to invest in really good quality stainless steel you're typically primarily going to run into clad cookware and like i said before there encapsulated cookware can be of good quality but really 95 of what you're gonna find is gonna be clad cookware and the the easy rule of thumb that i've said many times in the past and what we're gonna discuss today is choosing cookware when you grab a piece of cookware no matter where you are what sort of retailer you're in if you're grabbing a pan compared to a pan the easiest way to understand if that pan is going to be of a better quality is how much does it weigh so there are a lot of technical aspects to a pan but weight matters it's a considerable factor in when you're buying cookware so when those two pans are sitting on the hob together how quickly they heat up and how they hold their heat and disperse their heat is a major difference between how they're going to work now you can start to split hairs a little bit because it doesn't matter really if you maintain your temperatures so you could have a lower quality pan that could do almost exactly the same performance or finished products as a higher quality pen that you spent more money on and you just have to understand how to vary the heat on your stove so there are many factors that go into cooking and there are many factors that go into choosing the right cookware and if you are looking at cookware and you're considering the ocean of cookware in stainless steel that is on the market and you're like you know i don't want cast iron i don't want coated cookware i just want something completely neutral that's going to work for me day in and day out i want to buy a set of cookware because it's always pretty good value what you're going to be considering of course is price different types of cookware that you're going to find on the market that all come with different offers different pricing different discounts and it can be pretty overwhelming like i see it pretty overwhelming and i've been doing this for over 25 years and the price fluctuations and what things are and the cell within the copy and trying to make sense of it is is hard understanding the the quality of what you're getting and what that brand is is is critically important and it just takes a ton of research what i always suggest is to find yourself a retailer close to you that you really trust and let them do that work for you trying to make sense of all of this just by searching the internet can sometimes be pretty overwhelming to be trusting that you're getting the right brand or the right quality and the right price because we all want to make sure that we're getting the right price and the right quality we want to be really happy with the purchase that we've made so to to summarize that uh there are many many offers trusting the best brand all clad demire are the top of the heap those are the two big big brands personally i think the meyer is the best quality cookware stainless steel in the world at the moment nobody competes with them for quality to price and then there are just an ocean of other ones that fill the kind of middle market to the high end if you're going to spend 400 on a set of cookware or you're going gonna spend sixteen hundred dollars on a set of cookware what are you spending that difference on like what's the value in 400 to 1600. it's a big difference it all depends to the person using the cookware i've had customers that have spot you know 200 sets of cookware from me and have been super happy that works really really well for them i have customers that buy you know the demeyer atlantis proline combination sets that are sixteen eighteen hundred dollars and they love them and use them you know to their maximum all the time and you know those customers are really happy we take on the responsibility to make sure we're selling the right cookware to the right people you know i am not going to try to convince somebody who's just stepping into cookware or cooking to buy a 1600 set when they really don't even know how they want to cook yet you know maybe they want to cook a lot more with cast iron and stainless steel isn't for them so trying to understand you know what the best set is for you is really important when you spend the money on cookware when you're buying you know a 300 fry pan or a 100 fry pan or a 50 fry pan what do you end up getting for that and what i always explain to people in spending the extra money on higher quality cookware is that you're getting a larger buffer within how that cookware works so if you think of the heating process as a spectrum of your cookware from you know off to high sear and as the cookware starts to work is that you're going to have a really sweet spot for that stainless steel cookware where it works perfectly well and almost becomes non-stick and how it works and we're going to go over that visually in a little bit here and when you're in that sweet spot you'll have a a simple test that i'll show you with some water that's going to allow the pan to you know sear and close things up but then become quite nonstick it's a fine line of where you can then get into a browning and burning of the pan and start to build some carbon buildup on the pan and then you have what everybody will recognize of that kind of black or brown oily kind of burnt on marks on your stainless steel pan and that becomes kind of tacky and yucky and it gets messy and ugly and that comes from overheating and it's that fine line so from low to medium quality cookware that spectrum full spectrum that sweet spot is narrow it's quite narrow to a point where if it's really light and really cheap cookware it's super narrow so finding that sweet spot of being able to be like yeah it just works for me i just put on the food and it just does what i want and every time my results are excellent to like wow this is really hard to use and those are the people that usually find that a coated cookware non-stick and or ceramic that sort of thing works so much better for them because they have that buffer and it doesn't stick or or become gummy and yucky and nothing sticks to it and so they can cook kind of however like willy-nilly and just do whatever and the results don't so much matter and the cooking uh they did the cleaning to the cookware is a big deal and that's why nonstick works so well for so many people but when we're looking for high quality results that comes from stainless steel that comes from cast iron uncoated cookware and you can develop flavors and caramelization and browning it's so much better using stainless and cast iron and not a coat of cookware so for the majority of us that are listening to this long into my conversation you care about cooking with stainless so you care about cooking with kath iron and you don't want to be using a nonstick and so what i'm getting back to here in the the spectrum is that the better the quality the cookware the wider that spectrum gets so it gets bigger and bigger and bigger so when you get into something like a seven layer aluminum aluminum alloy pan you know made in in belgium one of the highest quality pieces of cookware made the cooking spectrum is really wide or or i guess to get back to it correctly the spectrum of sweet spot is wide the whole this is the full spectrum from hot to cold but that that cooking sweet spot is actually quite wide so it's very forgiving it allows you to cook you know in a kind of sweet spot space that if you put that food on it would do the job that you're expecting within a really nice wide angle instead of being this like really thin the pen has to be perfect and you want to be like finding that exact same perfect space uh and putting the food on right at the right time and the pan may or may not overheat for you or burn for you on when you're using it depending on what it is you're cooking how cold your food is whichever when you're using something like the meyer especially the pro line and even the five ply in industry it gives you so much more time to to be relaxed and to get your food in and for not to start burning and you're not billowing smoke and that's what you're paying for that's the the money spent right so i could get the same results from a 50 pan as i can from a 300 pan it's not that the results are going to be any better but using the pen day in day out for all different types of jobs different applications different sort of speed you're going to get very good high quality consistent results out of using a very high quality pan and it's not going to be a constant stress on if that pan is going to work exactly as i want it each and every time light pans have a much smaller sweet spot window and you have to be so exact with them and so that's the luxury that you're paying for so if you can afford it and you're buying better quality you're buying the luxury of the pan giving you a more optimal cooking temperature okay i hope that all makes sense if that doesn't make sense please leave a comment below and i'll respond to you but i hope that all makes sense so that's why you spend good money on higher quality cookware and it's always heavier weight than lighter cookware and there's there's your gauge i've taken the proline seven layer fry pan here i've been heating it up on a six and now we're gonna go to do the water test and then we're going to a fried egg and then a scrambled egg and see if we have it nonstick [Applause] some water being it's on induction production is always a little bit cooler on the outside so it's got some heat going on the inside and it does this funky little bouncy round thing with just the variance on the outside of induction so this is common to see this induction but what's happening in the middle there is that it's doing its it's doing its thing so out it comes we're gonna get some oil into there all around that pan give that a sec that was you know room temperature oil going into a hot pan temperature variance is really important here so it's also really important to get a warm egg or room temperature egg putting in a cold out of the fridge egg is going to radically change the temperature of of the cooking surface and it's going to create sticking and so what we're going to do we've got that heated that guy's going to go in [Music] bye [Music] bye [Music] two eggs or three eggs done two ways in a stainless steel pan with virtually no cleanup so lean frost effect really helps you understand exactly where your pan is different pans have a higher variant but that works incredibly well so there you go okay so we've got these four pans heating on the hob so we have an all-clad d5 so that's a five ply all-clad six-inch pen we have an all-clad 10-inch copper core 5-ply we have a 9.5 inch 5-ply demire industry an 11-inch 7-ply atlantis or pro-line fry pan we're gonna get these guys onto here and see what happens so i've got a little bit of splitting there got some splitting there okay so he's kind of freaking out a little bit around the outside these guys are falling up he's kind of all freaking out a little bit so the two high quality pans here are kind of freaking out right so and we've got the two five plies that are behaving as you want them to so we've got these i love playing with these things so we've got the water bouncing around doing its thing just right where the the heavier pans have behaved more radically so we're going to crank up the heat a little bit and we're going to see what ends up happening with that so i felt they were quite well preheated um you know these guys here at a 6 are sitting really nicely these are totally prepared and ready now to have uh whatever i'm gonna cook into them go in so that like they're just ready you put a little bit of oil on there wipe it around and you're gonna be ready to go so those guys are showing that they're ready we've gone up with a seven to these guys so behaving a little bit more as we expected so two things i'm seeing here is that either they needed even more pre-time and a six to penetrate to come to the same heat and what i'm gonna do by going up to a seven is that i'm gonna go past that perfect spot so being impatient is not gonna do me well going forward and so i should have just left them with a six and left them until they came to this this just because they're lighter this happened sooner so and i'm saying that more out of experience than any sort of logical scientific sort of thing i'm just saying that if i'm being impatient with really heavy pans and i'm like oh it's not there yet so i'm going to crank the heat that heat continues to go up and that's what i want to be very careful of because what's going to happen is that the the temperature here is going to be different than here even though this is doing the same effect now i'm going to have a hotter cook on this pan so longer time i bet would have been better if i'd given these even more time but these guys came to temperature in about five minutes three minutes and these guys weren't there yet now i've taken them both to a seven and now everybody's behaving the same way but experience has taught me that if i go too quickly into this at a higher temperature i may not get the cooking results i want but like i was saying before your spectrum of where it's going to work really well for you is larger so if we are a little bit hotter in these two pans because they're higher quality it's going to be more forgiving for us so what i mean by that is that i have eggs here and what i'm going to do now is that i'm going to wipe out the pans and we're going to put an egg into these pans i'm going to get the water out and i'm gonna put in some oil into these pans and we are going to fry an egg and see what the results of that are so a little bit of grapeseed oil in the pan all around so remember those two are hotter this guy's smoking now so was the six inch so as i was saying earlier this guy is a hotter cook he's a smaller pan so it makes sense that he's browning [Music] huh [Music] bye bye bye bye [Music] okay so what did we learn we learned that you can do almost anything you want with stainless steel it's the absolute most versatile cookware out there so learning how to use it is really important so knowing your hob knowing the thickness and the density of your cookware getting those two matched up using the water the mercury effect to practice with until you learn it you probably don't need to do that every single time i definitely don't um but you know using that to learn your pan and play and play and play and and figure out exactly what those right combinations of heat and and weight work on your hob and try your different burners too different burners have different power levels so try that also but incredibly versatile cookware so if i was to suggest one type of cookware to people for all different pots and pans stainless steel is it and a high quality stainless steel so i'm a big fan of the demeyer cookware in the industry and all the atlantis pro line uh those do very very well for me i love the non-rivets i love the finish to the to the pans i love the shapes and the handles are super super comfortable so they're my number one choice uh and i sold and have used all clad for decades um but demeyer replaces that across the board in every way they've made a superior cookware so it's a it's my number one choice of top quality cookware so i hope that this video has helped you identify the nuances and some of the difficulties in using stainless and how to counteract those things to make it really simple because cooking with stainless is really really easy once you get the heat and the combination of temperatures down and as you saw all the variances that we had today with some successes and failures um how to nail it and how to get that that success at the end of the day so please reach out uh leave us a comment let us know if you have any questions or contact us directly at the store we'd love to help you so thanks so much [Music] you

Channel: Cook Culture

Views: 149,759

Keywords: stainless steel pan, stainless steel cookware, non stick pan, best cookware, stainless steel pan seasoning, stainless steel pan cleaning, stainless steel pan sticking, stainless steel pan care, stainless steel pan water drop test, stainless steel cookware reviews, stainless steel pan recipes, stainless steel cookware cleaning

Id: 3K25wQknokM

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021