Seasoning and Maintenance: Big black cast iron skillets require proper seasoning and maintenance to develop and maintain their non-stick properties. Regular seasoning and gentle cleaning are essential to preserve the skillet's performance and longevity.

Below is a table of the distinct features of a frying pan:

Camping Dutch Oven

Even big manufacturers such as Cuisinart have shifted much of their skillet production to China. One approach to finding out where a skillet came from is to look underneath.

Cast Iron Vegetable Grill Pan

Most of these pans have a long handle, making it easy to move the pan on and off the stove. However, larger frying pans may include a smaller grab handle to carry the weight.

Best for: Scrambled or fried eggs, pancakes, fish, grilled cheese, and any other food that has a high probability of sticking to a typical pan. With nonstick skillets, these foods slide easily from frying pan to plate.

The details: These pans solve the frustration of food sticking, and they require little oil for cooking. Plus they’re lightweight, easy to clean, and affordable. But they can’t take the high heat of a cast-iron or stainless steel frying pan. “You’re not going to get much of a sear in a nonstick pan,” says Cindy Fisher, who conducted Consumer Reports’ cookware tests.

And they don’t last as long as cast-iron, stainless, or copper frying pans. “Nonstick is going to wear out the fastest,” Nitahara says. “The nonstick coating is fragile, and once you scratch it, it’s hard to flip an egg.”

In our tests of nonstick pans, we cook four eggs in quick succession. An excellent rating means all four eggs easily slid out of the pan. A poor rating indicates that some egg residue was left behind. To test nonstick durability, we rub the pan with steel wool for 2,000 strokes or until the coating has worn through.

Pans are measured according to the diameter of the lip, not the diameter of the cooking surface. Most home burners can only comfortably fit a pan of around 12 inches in diameter. Because of its straight sides, a 12-inch sauté pan will also have a large, 12-inch-wide cooking surface (about 113 square inches). A skillet, on the other hand, loses at least an inch on each side, making the effective cooking area only 10 inches wide (about 79 square inches). This means that, given a skillet and a sauté pan of equal diameter, the skillet will have 30% less cooking area than the sauté pan. That's not an insignificant amount.