Clay & Terra Cotta Cookware

Emile Henry Flame Top Brasier

Anything ceramic/stoneware/terra cotta/earthenware being sold as sturdy cookware should be high-fired. This means when it's being made, it is put in the oven once at a really high temperature, versus being pulled in and out several times like how most ceramics are made*. Doing this causes a piece of stoneware to become more brittle so it won't hold up as long. A high-fire piece is going to be a heck of a lot stronger and can handle the stove top and oven. Since this cookware is just clay, the heat will distribute evenly, just like a stainless clad pan!


Emile Henry and Piral are the brands I am most familiar with. Since it is sold as an “all-natural” cookware, the colors (at least in these brands) are actually derived from metal oxides, not dyes, which are naturally occurring. These companies make a lot of dutch oven style pots, so they’re a great alternative to a heavy cast iron dutch oven. I always tell people to pick up the pan, then imagine it full of food. Can you carry it? If not, clay is probably the better option!

Natural cookware like this will generally require special care, so read your instructions! Cookware like Piral asks you to soak it before just the first use and to utilize a heat diffuser on electric stoves. Emile Henry also has seasoning instructions before first use, which are kind of funny. You boil a layer of milk and immediately turn the heat off and let it cool. Emile Henry will also start producing what look like hairline cracks inside the piece over time. Completely normal, and actually most cookware in this category will warn you of natural flaws that will occur!

Piral Cookware

If you are cooking with unsealed clay, you will need to soak the piece, usually for 15-20 minutes. The water turns to steam and keeps the food really moist, so these are really great for roasting meat! Generally, clay is only for oven use and is a bit more fragile than the ceramic cookware mentioned above. Clay cookware can be really inexpensive or really expensive like the Romertopf brand that I remember selling a lot of during the holiday season.

Sealed cookware like Emile Henry and Piral are going to be a bit more costly than clay, but are backed by warranty periods, which I think is amazing for something that seems like it should be so fragile.

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*Read more about "Ceramic Dinnerware and Bakeware Basics"

Cast Iron Cookware

Since we started talking about these guys with enamel, we now have to discuss in depth. For regular cast iron with no enamel coating:

Pros:

• All natural!
• Adds iron to your food
• Gets better with age – the more you season it, the more nonstick it will become. Make sure grandma leaves hers to you in her will! I met a man whose family had passed theirs down for over 100 years – he couldn’t believe how “rough” new cast iron feels!
• Hard to kill – if you accidentally wash it with soap, just re-season it! My friend found some badly treated cast iron second-hand and happened to be an art student with access to a sandblaster, so she sandblasted it and re-seasoned it – good as new!
• Lodge – the original cast iron, still made in the USA! 

Cons:

• Heavy
• Not supposed to wash with soap (but if you do, just re-season) or dishwasher
• This leads most people to have specific pans for specific things, and then they just don’t ever wash them, or rarely, at least.
• You can use a mild soap but make sure to dry and season immediately!

Nowadays, brand new cast iron pans will come “pre-seasoned”. This means that they put a bunch of pans in a giant oven and blasted them with vegetable oil. You’re still going to need to season it! Like I already said, the older the better, so you’re going to need to break this baby in. Lodge’s website has great use and care tips that I direct everyone to.

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Porcelain & Enamel Cookware

Chantal 1.5Qt. Saucepan

As I've mentioned before, enamel becomes glass. (This will come up again when we discuss dinnerware.) Glass is non-porous, meaning nothing gets in or out. So any of you thinking that all these funky colors they put on enamel cookware are going to leech into your food, fear not! Glass is also pretty tough, meaning you can be a little harder on these like you would with stainless. This also means you can use metal utensils! You will get surface scratching, but nothing that will damage the cookware.*

Chantal 10" Frypan w/ Helper Handle

Chantal has a patented enamel-on-steel product that really can’t be matched! They’ve been doing this for years—I actually met a girl who said her German grandmother had owned these pans for decades and passed them on to her. (They’re made in Germany!) Their newer line actually has a copper core and was created specifically for induction cook tops, but works well on all types of stoves. The drawback is it’s quite a bit heavier than their older lines, but they put “helper handles” on most pieces to assist. That would be a second short handle on the opposite side of the regular handle so you can grab with both hands.

Le Creuset 6.75Qt. Oval Oven

Porcelain enamel would be what you normally see on enameled cast iron, like Le Creuset, Staub, Lodge, and other brands of enameled dutch ovens.

Some enamels are cheaply made in places like China and I’ve heard negative things in the past about potential issues, but I can’t find anything about it now, so it must not be a problem. This would include the cheaper brands like Rachel Ray, Martha Stewart, and now even Lodge, which is made in the USA, but the enamel comes from China. This lowers the price so they can compete with the more expensive French brands Le Creuset & Staub.

Another great thing about Le Creuset and Staub is that they destroy the molds for everything they create so each piece is unique and well-crafted. If a mold goes in and out of the heat repeatedly, it's quality will break down over time and the end product will not be as good, either. So you're getting your money's worth!

Don’t confuse porcelain enamel cooking surface with the pans that are porcelain enamel with a nonstick cooking surface. Those pans are just nonstick with an enamel exterior. I have a Paula Deen grill pan that is porcelain enamel, and it’s just like any other nonstick—I’ve had it for a couple of years and use it frequently, so it’s starting to die. The exterior has held up really well, though, I must say. I’ve read mixed reviews on other brands holding up as well on the exterior, as well.

 

Paula Deen 11" Grill Pan

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*To clarify to the less graceful ones (like myself), if you drop the pan really hard, you can chip the exterior, which does not affect the cooking of the food, so no worries.  (Actually, if it's REALLY hard, you can damage the whole dang thing, which isn't covered in the lifetime warranty, kids!)

Nonstick Cookware

There are a lot of varieties of nonstick coatings out there, and the great thing is that a lot of them don't contain PFOAs. Teflon has even bounced back from their name being dug through the dirt* and producing nonstick for some of the top brand names again. Unfortunately, in my experience, no matter how much you spend on nonstick cookware, it will always end up “sticking” and eventually chipping or peeling off. At least it’s not toxic anymore, though, right? ;)

A way to keep your nonstick lasting longer is to give it a baking soda or Barkeeper’s Friend “bath” every now and again. Nonstick cookware is porous, so even though you think you’ve cleaned it, there is stuff down in those pores. Baking soda sucks everything out of the pores.

CIA 10" Nonstick...a little worn out already.

Stainless steel with nonstick interior pans will usually still have rivets (see above photo), but on a lot of cheaper nonstick lines you can find rivet-less cookware, which is nice. You can also find some pretty cheap sets, making it a little easier on the wallet to have to replace every 4-5 years. You can’t use metal utensils on nonstick cookware, either.

Paula Deen 11" Nonstick Grill Pan; need to replace soon!

Another thing you want to avoid with nonstick cookware is aerosol cooking sprays because the propellant in it causes the nonstick to break down. You'll also get a sticky residue on the pan. Oil misters can work, but it's easier to use a brush or swirl oil in a pan if you need to use it.

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*In researching this article, I discovered that by Google searching "Teflon", everything below DuPont's website being first related to articles about how PFOA and Teflon are two different things!

Stainless Steel Cookware

The key with buying stainless cookware is that you want to make sure it is clad. Let me back up a little.

All-Clad 2 Qt. Saucier

All stainless cookware isn’t actually just stainless steel. That would take forever to heat up. So there is generally at least one layer of a different metal between the layers of stainless that is a better conductor of heat, typically aluminum. Aluminum detractors, never fear—the aluminum cannot get out unless you sawed these things in half, no matter what style of pan it is. (Unless it’s an all-aluminum pan [not cast aluminum, not anodized, straight up aluminum!] with no stainless, which you’d maybe find in a camping store. Even then only really acidic foods like tomatoes should scare you.)

What you will see in less expensive cookware, or very large pots (anything over 16 quarts, to be exact), is a disc that has been attached to the bottom of the pan. Some people think that the thicker this disc, the better the pan will distribute heat, but that isn’t exactly true. To get a more even distribution of heat, you want something called clad cookware.

What clad means is that the metals are actually laid together like a sandwich, then bent into the shape of a pan, meaning the conductive interior is all over the inside of your pan. See the awesome drawing I made:

Clad cookware DNA

Some brands will have multiple interior layers with various metals inside. The best conductor is copper, which is pretty expensive. [Note to folks with glass stovetops—the majority of glass stovetops take a really long time to heat up, so getting copper cookware won’t help alleviate this issue much, unfortunately.]

The most well known clad cookware is All-Clad, a lot of which is still made in the USA. They have several lines and are the original clad cookware manufacturer. It’s hard to clad anything larger than a 16 qt. but I think the even heat distribution issue is far more important for frying pans and saucepans, anyway. If buying something made in the USA is your priority, please note that not all All-Clad items are made at home anymore, including all lids and accessories. (Note that accessories come in black boxes, making it easier to tell it’s made in China.)

Cuisinart’s Multi-Clad line is consistently top-rated as a great alternative to All-Clad, and I have heard this repeatedly from its users. All-Clad is five-layers of steel (they have other lines now, but nothing is less than five) around an aluminum core, and Cuisinart’s Multi-Clad is three layers. Both clean very nicely. Moving in the opposite direction price-wise, Viking cookware is seven layers of steel around an aluminum core.

CIA 2 Qt. Saucier

If you’re looking for something with a copper core, All-Clad’s copper core line has a stainless exterior. This is a tad on the expensive side, but beautiful cookware. CIA cookware is relatively new to the game, lowering their price point in order to compete, and it has seven-layers of steel around a copper core for about half the price of All-Clad. CIA stands for Culinary Institute of America, which is the only school that can designate someone a Master Chef. Everything in their product line came from ideas vetted by master chefs to make sense in the kitchen.

One thing I have discovered I dislike about stainless cookware is the rivets. Most cookware have rivets, so when I do make a mess in the stainless pieces I own, the rivets drive me nuts. On the pro-side, you can use metal utensils, which I think are just great. I’d never been able to use them my whole life until now.

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Buying Cookware

This is an extremely broad shopping category and is completely based on personal preferences. It’s very difficult to switch away from something that you have been cooking with for most of your life, particularly if it’s what everyone in your family before you also used. I find it best to start this conversation talking about my own personal experience and have discovered that a lot of folks can relate.

My family are a people of the nonstick nature. It’s the only type of cookware I ever experienced anywhere I ever went in my life when visiting anyone, as well as at home. Stainless cookware is for the chefs on TV that know how to make things not stick when you cook. ;)

I now know this isn’t quite exactly true; you just have to have the right stuff and know how to use it and take care of it. One of my favorite reasons for a person returning a piece of cookware was that it “burned their food”. You wouldn’t believe how often we heard that! Most issues with cookware, especially good cookware, are unfortunately the end-user’s fault, not the pans. Sorry! I burn stuff all the time in my fancy cookware. I don’t follow the rules that I tell people! But I know not to blame the pan, and have lots of tricks for getting things clean.

For myself, I still had to ease into trying stainless. I opted to move from nonstick, which I was sick of chipping and having to replace every few years, into a line called Chantal. Their enamel-on-steel patent essentially makes the surface into glass, so it’s non-porous, but acts like a nonstick. Most of my cookware is now Chantal, but I have some really nice clad stainless pieces that I also love.

To make it easier to read, I am breaking up cookware into the various types of cooking surface into single blog posts, containing information about specific brands I am the most familiar with utilizing.

LINKS TO INDIVIDUAL TYPES OF COOKWARE:

Stainless Steel

Nonstick

Porcelain & Enamel

Cast Iron

Clay & Terra Cotta

Cleaning your pots & pans with a "baking soda bath"

BUYING TIPS, USE & CARE

Depending on what type of pan you are using, the use and care can vary, so please click on the individual links at the bottom of this blog post to get more detailed information about your type of cookware. However, there are a few things that apply across the board that I thought everyone should know if they don't already.


LIDS

1. Frypans never come with a lid, because if you put a lid on something you are no longer frying it, but sauteing it.
2. Saute pans have deeper, flat sides, whereas a frypan will have angled sides
3. Most cookware manufacturers realize people love having lids for everything, and therefore will make the lids that fit the saucepans also fit the frypans.
4. If all else fails, reputable manufacturers will make a lid that you can buy separately, but often you will need to find a vendor who can custom order it for you or purchase it direct from the manufacturer.
5. You can find a plethora of universal lids to purchase, too.

STOVE HEAT SETTING

All cookware manufacturers agree that stove manufacturers make the heat settings too hot on residential stovetops. Therefore, any use and care guide you read for any brand of cookware will tell you to not use the pan on the "high" setting. You should be able to sear perfectly on medium-high; patience is a virtue!

OTHER TIPS

1. Do not put salt in a pot of water until it comes to a rolling boil. If the water isn't boiling yet, the salt will immediately fall to the bottom and cause pitting in the bottom of your pan.
2. Do not heat a pan without oil or butter. Generally this is said to decrease the amount of people who turn a stove on and walk away, so you can most likely get away with not following this rule if you are only doing it for a minute or less.
3. Do not use a scouring pad like Brillo on ANY type of cookware, ever! Even on stainless steel it will put deep gouges in the steel that become food traps and make the pan unsafe to utilize.