Compared to other sections of cooking, there is a constant quest to find the best, or at least the best you can buy. I’ve seen cycles of fascination come and go for copper, cast iron, and carbon steel.
At the mall in New Hampshire in the 1980s, I remember seeing a miraculous cooking store demonstration of an omelet coming out of a Teflon pan with ease. Then, just a few years ago, the industry dropped the entire Teflon category like a hot potato because of the pan’s tendency to release harmful fumes when it got too hot. Less durable ceramic quickly filled the void, and we’re already realizing how quickly it can lose its nonstick magic.
All this time, stainless-steel pans are waiting in the wings. They are durable, and lighter and less fussy than cast iron and carbon steel. They are not nonstick, but this is often corrected with a dab of butter. They hunt well, and with a little TLC, they’re designed for a lifetime of hard work.
All-Clad has been one of the great brands in stainless for years, but I wondered if other slightly more expensive skillets were worth a look, especially since some are new to the market and others are flying under the radar. Along with 10-inch All-Clad, I ordered similar sized pans from Heston, Viking, and Heritage Steel. Testing all of these seemed like fun at first, but things got weird and stayed weird for a while, and only after collecting hands-on data and spending time at the stove did I figure out which pans I could recommend.
pan’s Labyrinth
A smart and easy cheat for someone like me is to use All-Clad’s 10-inch D3 fry pan as a baseline. (“Fry pan” and “skillet” are used interchangeably in this category.) The D3 has been a darling of America’s Test Kitchen and Wirecutter for years, with its proponents looking for features like uniform heating across its surface, a comfortable handle, and cladding (layers of different metals). It costs $170 with the lid and $150 without the lid, which is a nice chunk of change, but it seems like a fair price to buy for a lifetime of durability.
I have one of All-Clad’s 4-quart D5 Essential Pans and I love it, which is like a high-sided wok and has a completely flat cooking surface. But the cooking surface on the D3 Skillet All-Clad sent to me for this story was slightly domed — high in the middle and low around the outside — not so terrible, but surprising to me, and out of the dozen pans I sampled, it was by far the worst. I also noticed that the rivets holding the pan’s handle in place had not been completely hammered in. It felt fine and didn’t wobble, but an All-Clad representative confirmed that it didn’t. They sent another pan, and the rivets on it were as they should be, but the bottom was almost the same. I discovered that this amount of domming is within All-Clad’s tolerance range, but not within my range. What should I say? I like flat pans, I thought, looking at my ideal D5 in disappointment.
I faced the same level of trouble with another pan that I had high hopes for. The new 10-inch Viking Pure Glide Pro, which I saw at my favorite trade show, has a textured titanium layer for the cooking surface over an aluminum core and stainless-steel bottom layer. Impressively, this combination of materials has created a capable nonstick competitor that I would be much more excited about if it were part of a better, sturdier pan. The Viking had some temperature management issues that I’ll get into in a bit, and it was either warped or warped to such an extent that heating the oil would create a gap around the center of the pan. If Viking gets it right, the Pure Glide Pro has the potential to be a hell of a pan, but it’s not there yet.
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