A large cast iron Dutch oven is perfect for cooking a large meal or feeding a crowd.  These heavy-duty pots are great for slow-cooking, braising meats, and making soups.  The thick walls and tight-fitting lid of a large cast-iron Dutch oven help distribute heat evenly, making it ideal for simmering and baking.  Their size also makes them perfect for baking bread or making large batches of chili.

COMPARISON TABLE OF FRYING PANS

    Overall, knowing how to repair broken enamel cookware can help you extend the life of your favorite pots and pans.  Whether it's ceramic and enameled cast iron cookware or enamel-coated cast iron cookware, there are options for repairing broken enamel and restoring your cookware to its former glory.  By promptly treating enamel chips and using safe and effective repair methods, you can continue to enjoy the benefits of enamel cookware for years to come.

Another thing to keep in mind when shopping for a pan is the amount of space you have available. If you have a farmhouse kitchen with ample drawer space and a pot rack, for example, you can justify picking up one (or more) of each. For more compact kitchens, however, a smaller multi-material set will allow you to do a lot with a little.

Versatile Culinary Tools:

Best for: Almost any food that needs searing, including steak and burgers. Cast-iron pans are ovenproof, so you can use them to roast meats like beef or pork and to bake cornbread, deep-dish pizza, shepherd’s pie, and more. And they retain heat so well that they’re a good choice for deep-frying chicken, doughnuts, or other foods because they keep the oil at a constant temperature.

The details: Cast-iron frying pans are practically indestructible, and they’re handed down for generations in many families. That makes their typically low price even more attractive. And if well cared for, cast iron develops a patina that releases food almost as well as nonstick. But the pans are heavy, and you have to be patient when heating them up because they don’t come up to temperature fast. Once they do, however, they retain heat.

Our tests of coated and uncoated cast-iron pans show how versatile this cookware can be. We sear steaks, brown scallops, and bake cornbread to see how well a cast-iron pan works for home cooks. The best pans ace all these tests. We also judge how easy they are to clean. Because of the enamel coating, the coated pans are a bit easier to clean than the uncoated ones.

Here are two recommended cast-iron pans from our tests.

The cooking vessels are used similarly to frying pans, mainly because they can hold more liquid.

If you’ve ever scrubbed tirelessly at a skillet after cooking to get rid of grease, a nonstick pan will make you breathe a sigh of relief as food residue washes right off its surface. Suitable for cooking on low and medium heat, nonstick pans also require less oil than other varieties, which is a big selling point for the health-conscious consumer. Nylon and wooden utensils are better suited for use with non-stick pans, as their surface can be delicate and prone to scratching.

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.