One of the main features of a cast iron skillet is its flat, smooth surface, which makes it perfect for cooking a variety of foods. Whether you're grilling a steak, grilling vegetables, or making pancakes, the even heat distribution of a cast iron skillet ensures your food cooks evenly and develops a delicious crust. Plus, the cast iron skillet 's large surface area allows you to cook multiple foods at the same time, making it perfect for preparing meals for groups or extended families.
Whether you’re preparing a curry for dinner or whipping up your Sunday breakfast, chances are you’ll be using a frypan. Also known as an open French skillet, or simply a skillet, a good frypan is an essential tool in any kitchen. One of the most versatile items of cookware, a frypan can be used for fast cooking, frying, searing and browning among a range of other things (frypan pizza, anyone?).






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In addition to their beauty, enamel pots are also known for their durability. The enamel coating not only prevents stains and scratches, it also helps distribute heat evenly for thorough, consistent cooking. This makes enamel pots a reliable and long-lasting addition to your kitchen cookware collection.
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.



