Enamel-coated Cast Iron Cookware Advantage

    Medium cast iron skillets are a versatile choice for everyday cooking.  Medium cast iron skillets are perfect for sautéing, frying, and pan-frying, and transition easily from stovetop to oven.  Medium cast iron skillet size makes them suitable for cooking for a small family or a few guests, and  also perfect for making one-pot meals.

Using A Cast Iron Griddle On An Electric Stove

“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.

*When in doubt, just remember this: you can often perform the same cooking tasks in either a skillet or a sauté pan, but keep in mind that the angle of the sidewalls of each pan differ, which means that one might be better suited than the other for certain cooking tasks.*

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.

    Regardless of size, cast iron skillets are a kitchen essential that can handle a variety of cooking tasks.  Whether you're cooking for one person or more, there's a cast iron skillet to suit your needs.

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