Published September 1, 2006. From Cook's Illustrated.
Paying top dollar for a saucepan or skillet isn't hard to justify. But how much should you spend on the infrequently used sauté pan?
While a sauté pan—basically, a lidded skillet with straight rather than flared sides—is essential when you pan-fry cutlets and braise chicken parts or vegetables, almost $200 seems like an awful lot of money for a pan that might see action just once or twice a week, even in a busy home kitchen. Given the dizzying number of choices in the cookware aisle these days, we wondered if we could get similar performance for less money.
Since every pan passed our first tests without incident, we wondered how much we'd overspent on cookware over the years—until we had our first problem—burnt fond and crepe edges from one of our pans. The reason? The thick aluminum disk stamped to the pan's bottom did not quite extend to its outer edge, leaving an unprotected 3/4-inch ring.
To really push the pans, though, we designed an intense challenge: pan-seared steaks, cooked five minutes per side over very high heat (450 to 500 degrees). To see how well pans negotiated the fiery heat below versus the cold steaks above, we fastened a temperature probe to the cooking surface. Our test taught us several lessons, the first of which revealed itself before the steaks even hit the pan. With the probes in place, we let the pans preheat until the surface reached 500 degrees. The variation in preheating times was shocking.
The four fastest pans had one thing in common: clad-style construction, meaning that the entire pan is made of layers of stainless steel sandwiched around an aluminum core. The slowest five all had thick aluminum-core disks attached to the bottom. Because the clad pans were much thinner on the bottom than the disk pans, they heated up more efficiently. Of course, responsiveness is only part of the equation. A pan also needs to retain heat well. When the cold steaks hit the pan, the tables turned: The heat-retention champs were the two thick, disk-bottomed pans that kept the cooking surface between 450 degrees and 500 degrees for almost the full 10 minutes. The clad pans were much more volatile—dropping precipitously, then recovering, only to drop off again when we flipped the steaks. But despite the drama, the clad pans produced fine steaks.
The steak test convinced us that the ideal sauté pan would balance responsiveness and heat retention—too much of one or the other meant either having to wait forever to get the pan hot enough or having to be super-vigilant in monitoring the temperature roller coaster.
Two design details figured in as well. First, the size of the cooking surface matters. The pans tested ranged in cooking-surface diameter from 8 1/2 to 10 inches, and that extra inch and a half is not insignificant. Handles were not as important. Most, but not all pans had long metal handles that stayed cool. (We didn’t like the model with the plastic handle, which stayed cool on the stovetop but precluded use in an oven hotter than 375 degrees.) However, five pans came with a "helper" handle, a small, loop-shaped second handle that made it easier to keep the pan level during transport. A dealbreaker? No. The occasional tiebreaker? Yes.
In the end, it turns out you can get a great sauté pan for less than $100, unless you really want that helper handle.
* Note: One of our recommended brands, Gourmet Standard, is no longer in business.
