If You’re Searching for a New Skillet, Consider Stainless Steel

If you'll excuse the pun, skillets seem to always be a hot topic.

More than in other sections of cookery, there is a continual quest to find the best one, or at least the best one you can afford. I've seen cycles of fetishization come and go for copper, cast-iron, and carbon steel.

At the Mall of New Hampshire in the 1980s, I remember watching a miraculous cooking-store demonstration of omelettes effortlessly sliding out of a Teflon pan. Then, only a few years ago, the industry pretty much dropped the whole Teflon category like a hot potato due to the pans’ propensity to give off harmful fumes if they get too hot. Less durable ceramic immediately filled the void, and we're already realizing how quickly it can lose its nonstick magic.

All this time, stainless-steel pans have been waiting in the wings. They are durable, and lighter and less fussy than cast iron and carbon steel. They’re not nonstick, but that’s often fixed with a pat of butter. They sear well, and with a bit of TLC, they're built 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, particularly as some are new to the market and others have been flying under the radar. Along with a 10-inch All-Clad, I called in similar-sized pans from Hestan, Viking, and Heritage Steel. Testing all these sounded like fun at first, but things got weird and stayed weird for a while, and only with a bunch of hands-on data gathering and time at the stove did I understand which pans I could recommend.

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 an America's Test Kitchen and Wirecutter darling for years, with advocates seeking out traits like uniform heating across its surface, a comfortable handle, and cladding (layers of different metals). It's $170 with a lid and $150 without, which is a good chunk of change, but it feels like a fair price for buy-it-for-life durability.

I own and love one of All-Clad’s 4-quart D5 Essential Pans, which is like a high-sided skillet, and it has a perfectly flat cooking surface. But the cooking surface on the D3 skillet All-Clad sent to me for this story was a bit domed–high in the center and low around the outside—not horribly so, but surprising to me, and among the dozen or so pans I called in, it was among the furthest out of whack. I also noticed that the rivets that hold the handle to the pan weren't fully squished on there. It felt fine and didn’t wobble, but an All-Clad representative confirmed this wasn't right. They sent another pan, and the rivets were as they should be on that one, but the bottom was pretty much the same. I learned that this amount of doming is within All-Clad’s tolerance range, but not within mine. What can I say? I like flat pans, I thought, looking wistfully at my perfect D5.

I had a similar level of trouble with another pan I had high hopes for. The new 10-inch Viking Pure Glide Pro, which I had seen at my favorite trade show, has a textured titanium layer for the cooking surface above an aluminum core and stainless-steel bottom layer. Impressively, this combination of materials created a capable nonstick competitor that I'd be a lot more excited about if it was part of a better, sturdier pan. The Viking had some temperature management issues that I'll get to in a moment, and it either warped or arrived warped to the point that heating oil would form a moat around the center of the pan. If Viking fixes this, the Pure Glide Pro has the potential to be a hell of a pan, but it’s not there yet.

Confronted with these unimpressive results, I stewed about what to do for a good long while. Then I put all the pans on the counter next to the stove, bought a feeler gauge set with angled blades, opened a spreadsheet, and started some really monotonous data collection. After that, I opened up some cookbooks I'm excited about and got some real-world experience with these pans.

For the data collection, I measured the heat distribution across the whole pan, how domed each pan was, the cost, whether or not it's dishwasher safe, and how easy it is to handle. As a bonus, I judged how well I could do a skillet toss–snapping your wrist to flip the contents of the pan–with each model.

A few things really stuck out. For heat distribution, I put each pan on the same burner, handle at 6 o'clock, temperature set to medium-low. On my induction stove, this meant every pan cooked over the exact same heat setting, and I let each one warm up for 3.5 minutes. I'll note here that whether you are rating a pan or just cooking Tuesday dinner, it’s best to use a burner matched up to your pan size. Yes, heat will make it out to the edge on some pans better than others, but if your pan is matched to the size of the burner, you'll be much happier.

On my induction burner, the temperature on the surface of all of the pans except the Viking’s averaged somewhere around 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and the surface-temperature range between the hottest and coolest spots was only 14 to 21 degrees. Better yet, there were no hot spots to report. Talk about nice uniform quality! The two Vikings, though, were essentially giant hot spots, with the surfaces of each pan reaching the mid to high 300s, more than twice as hot as the competition. Yikes!

Measuring the doming (or warping) is a little tricky because I had pans of slightly different widths. I took a hard measurement, putting the pan on a flat edge and using the feeler gauge to determine the gap between the edge and the center of the pan. With use, I was able to account for the pan size differences, and I assigned a score to each pan that I called the Warp Gap. The gaps on the All-Clad D3 and the Viking pans were clearly more than I could tolerate, and everything else was pretty good to excellent. Ironically, in first place was my All-Clad Essential Pan, which after eight enjoyable years of use and abuse, was still absolutely, delightfully flat.

Finally, I hauled out some favorite new cookbooks and started cooking in earnest. From the excellent Down South + East, by Ron Hsu with Hugh Amano, I made stunning shrimp with soft scrambled eggs. From Honey & Co. Daily, I struggled with some recipe instructions but managed to make a nice pork, cabbage, caraway, and dill dish that's like a weeknight riff on stuffed cabbage. I made zucchini seared then poached in yogurt from Ham El-Waylly's fantastic new Hello, Home Cooking. I oven-roasted Joanne Weir and Julia Moskin's whole-roast cauliflower from The New York Times, a longtime standby that gets some lovely char if you let it go extra long. From the same source, Hetty Lui McKinnon's chickpeas al limone with burrata was a stunner. I also used one pan to sear a mammoth ham steak from Bob's Quality Meats in Seattle. I cooked dozens of eggs; as a general rule, fried eggs on enough oil or butter are fantastic on stainless, scrambles are OK, and a fancy rolled omelet is a bridge too far.

The giant 12-inch Titanium Series skillet from Heritage Steel sandwiches three layers of aluminum between a stainless bottom and stainless with titanium and molybdenum cooking surface. In it, I batch-stir-fried veggies for a good 30 minutes with my largest, most powerful induction burner cranked up to high. The pan kept churning out the veggies without complaint. A lesser pan will sneak something like “do not use the pan on high heat” into the instruction manual, because this kind of treatment can warp it, but this pan had absolutely no trouble with all that heat.

This was made more impressive when later I gave it a follow-up Warp Gap test and my inner New Englander proclaimed it to be wicked flat. The data point I didn't clock until later (and which became the turning point for me) is that the 10.5-inch version of the Heritage pan is $150, the same price as All Clad's 10-inch D3 skillet.

That 10.5-inch Heritage arrived at the end of my testing, but it was worth the wait, performing just like its larger sibling and feeling like a great find.

Similarly, I always had a thing for Hestan pans, particularly the cool-looking gray-tinted, titanium-coated, and wildly expensive NanoBond skillet. But at the trade show, the new and more affordable ProBond Luxe, with aluminum sandwiched between layers of stainless, caught my eye. Testing out Hestan’s 8.5- and 11-inch versions, I learned my crush on the brand was well founded.

Hestan’s ProBond Luxe skillet.

Courtesy of Hestan

Along with the heat control you'd expect for a nice pan with notable good looks, three things about the Hestans’ design jumped out at me. Countersunk rivets make for a much smoother interior surface, which is easy to appreciate, considering almost none of the competition uses them. The sidewalls curve up in a way that makes it feel like it puts extra energy into a wrist snap when you're sautéing. Finally, with classy sealed rims, which few other competitors use, it's one of the few brands out there that embrace the dishwasher. Hallelujah! Yes, you'll want to shine it up with Bar Keeper's Friend once in a while, but do you know what's really nice after a quick work-from-home egg-sandwich lunch? Dumping a buttery, eggy pan in the dishwasher and walking away, that's what.

The 8.5-inch Hestan pan is $150 ($200 with a lid), and the 11-inch pan is $200 ($260 with a lid). While the latter is a notable step up in price from the All-Clad D3, it's within my tolerance, especially thanks to its dishwasher-friendliness.

The wheels definitely came off early on in my testing for this story, but a heap of data gathering, number crunching, and testing helped pull things back together. Not sure what happened with that All-Clad, but if you're willing to spend that same 150 clams or a bit more, there are some really nice pans out there. Try them. See what you like, and if the bottoms aren't flat enough, send ’em back!