Pots and Pans

Stainless steel

Most people think that stainless steel is the best material for saucepans. In fact it's not, because stainless steel isn't a good heat conductor. However, it's hard-wearing and easy to clean, so it's not totally useless in a food environment.

To make stainless steel into decent cookware, manufacturers do clever things with other metals. The easiest remedy is to stick an 'encapsulated base' on the bottom – i.e. a disc of aluminium (which is a good heat conductor), encapsulated in stainless steel. At the Cookcraft our biggest encapsulated-base pan range is Kuhn Rikon's Swiss Chef. These are sturdy, deep pans which work efficiently on any stove top, including induction and range cookers like Aga and Rayburn.

Alternatively you can get what's called tri-ply or multi-ply, where the sheet metal has two layers of stainless steel sandwiching a layer of aluminium, which is then formed into pans (some multi-ply pans have more than 3 layers, which is not strictly necessary but sounds impressive). This results in a heavy-ish pan of uniform thickness with superb heat conductivity. Our favourites are Scanpan's Fusion and le Creuset's 3-ply saucepans.

Aluminium

If you can wean yourself off stainless steel, it's worth considering other types of cookware. Plain aluminium used to be the material of choice for saucepans, but it can react with very acidic foods and become pitted. It's also considerably softer than stainless steel, so can warp or dent if it's very thin. There are a few ways round these problems. For example, pressed aluminium pans can be coated with enamel on the outside and a non-stick lining on the inside. We don't sell any saucepans like that, but we have two or three frypan ranges of this genre (Cucina by Kuhn Rikon, for example). Or aluminium can be cast (melted and moulded), which makes it thicker and heavier, but also firmer. Berndes, SKK and le Creuset's Toughened Non-stick are top names, but there are more affordable varieties of cast aluminium.

Anodising aluminium is another way of making it more practical for cookware (see the Bakeware page on this website for info on anodising). Currently our favourite hard anodised saucepans and frypans are made by GreenPan. They are green for lots of reasons, but primarily because they don't contain PTFE (polytetrafluorethylene – the chemical in non-stick coatings), and they don't give off PFOA (perfluoro-octanoic acid - the chemical released into the atmosphere when PTFE is manufactured, or indeed burnt during over-enthusiastic frying). GreenPans have a ceramic coating which is incredibly tough, astonishingly non-stick and almost impossible to destroy. We like that in a pan.

Copper

Copper is an excellent heat conductor. It is also (a) expensive, (b) soft and (c) highly poisonous. For reason (c), it will be lined with either tin or stainless steel. Look for the proportion of stainless steel to copper: Mauviel's 10% stainless steel to 90% copper is clearly going to be a more efficient pan than 30% stainless steel to 70% copper. Don't even bother with a pan that has simply had its bottom sprayed with copper, the only discernible difference will be that it's harder to keep clean. Lining copper with tin is traditional, and perfectly safe. However, you should use wooden utensils on tin linings, as metal ones will scratch the tin off.

Cast Iron

For slow-cook one-pot recipes you can�t beat traditional cast iron casseroles. Properly looked after, they will last a lifetime, and will work on any stove top: gas, electric, range and induction. You can even bung them on the BBQ, if you've forgotten how much they cost (or can afford not to care). Chasseur and le Creuset are both French made cast iron. Chasseur is a bit heavier (though there's not much in it) and has a 'drip back' lid. Le Creuset's volcanic orange is instantly recognizable, but both do a range of stylish colours. Both also make saucepans in cast iron, but as cast iron takes a while to heat up, it's not the quickest way to boil an egg. On the other hand, once hot, cast iron holds the heat very well, so it's excellent for grill pans (ridged, for searing steaks), and griddles (flat, for cooking drop scones).