If you’re looking for a new frying pan, consider stainless steel

If you will excuse me Pans always seem to be a hot topic.

More than in other sections of the art of cooking, there is a constant quest to find the best, or at least the best you can afford. I’ve seen cycles of craze come and go for copper, cast iron, and carbon steel.

At a mall in New Hampshire in the 1980s, I remember watching a culinary store’s miracle demonstration of an omelet that slid easily out of a Teflon pan. Then, just a few years ago, the industry pretty much abandoned the entire Teflon category as a hot potato because of the pans’ tendency to release harmful fumes if they got too hot. Less durable ceramic immediately filled the void, and we already know how quickly it can lose its non-stick magic.

All this time, stainless steel frying pans were waiting in the wings. They are durable, lighter and less difficult than cast iron and carbon steel. It’s not non-stick, but this is often fixed with a stick of butter. It burns well, and with a little TLC, it’s built to last a lifetime of hard work.

All-Clad has been one of the great stainless steel brands for years, but I wondered if other, slightly more expensive pans were worth a look, especially since some are new to the market and others are flying under the radar. Along with the 10-inch All-Clad, I recalled similarly sized pans from Hestan, Viking, and Heritage Steel. Testing all this stuff seemed fun at first, but things got weird and stayed weird for a while, and it was only with a combination of hands-on data collection and time spent at the stove that I realized which pans I could recommend.

A maze of pans

A smart and easy cheat for someone like me is to use the All-Clad 10-inch D3 Fry Pan as a baseline. (“Frying pan” and “skillet” are used interchangeably in this category.) The D3 has been America’s test kitchen and beloved cord cutter for many years, with proponents looking for attributes like uniform heating across its surface, comfortable handle, and cladding (layers of different metals). It’s $170 with a lid and $150 without a lid, which is a big chunk of change, but it seems like a fair price for the durability of a lifetime purchase.

I own and love one of All-Clad’s basic 4-quart D5 skillets, which is like a high-sided skillet and has a completely flat cooking surface. But the cooking surface of the D3 fryer All-Clad sent me for this story was a bit domed — high in the middle and low on the outside — which wasn’t terrible, but it was surprising to me, and of the dozens of fryers I came into contact with, it was among the furthest from a hit. I also noticed that the screws holding the handle to the pan were not completely crushed in there. It looked fine and didn’t wobble, but an All-Clad representative confirmed that wasn’t true. They sent another pan, and the screws were as they should be on that pan, but the bottom was pretty much the same. I’ve learned that this amount of dome is within the All-Clad’s tolerance range, but not within my own tolerance range. What can I say? I love flat pans, I thought as I looked wistfully at the perfect D5.

I’ve had a similar level of problems with another pan 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 coating for the cooking surface over an aluminum core and stainless steel bottom layer. Impressively, this combination of materials has created a capable non-stick contender that I would be very excited about if it were part of a better, sturdier pan. The Viking had some issues with temperature management which I’ll get to in a moment, and they were either warped or arrived warped to the point where the heating oil would form a trench around the center of the pan. If Viking fixes this issue, the Pure Glide Pro would probably be hell, but it’s not there yet.