Stainless

by Magda D. Healey

Created on: April 13, 2008   Last Updated: December 01, 2010

Stainless steel is the main cookware type of choice of professional cooks and there are good reasons for it. Although non-stick can be very useful for some dishes (always buy the best quality you can afford, it really matters with non-stick), and heavy cast-iron, enameled casseroles are also indispensable, for most of the cooking needs stainless steel is simply unbeatable.

This article's author is an experienced cook who has used cheap, medium priced and expensive stainless steel as well as cheap, medium priced and expensive non-stick. At all price brackets stainless steel beats the non-stick.

This isn't to say that other types of cookware are without benefits: cast-iron Le Creusets or silicone loaf tin are brilliant and copper pans have fantastic uses too. Overall, though, for pots and pans for the majority of cooking tasks you can't beat stainless steel.

1) Stainless steel will last longer. Whatever you do, if used regularly and in a normal manner, the non-stick coating will, eventually, develop scratches, and peel and crack. It is actually recommended to change the non-stick cookware every few years! Excuse me, but I can't afford (and in all honesty, don't want to) use a product that seems to have built-in obsolescence. If I spend close to (or even more than) 100 USD on a cooking pot, I expect it to last for many years, not to need replacing almost as soon as I get used to it.

2) Stainless steel is much more forgiving. With most non-stick surfaces, you are limited in the range of cooking tools and cleaning implements that you can use. Even the ingredients of your dish (bones and shells for example) can scratch the surface. I am busy and cook in a flurry of creative chaos (to call it nicely) and I think the effort to keep special plastic or wooden tools for the pot or pots I am using every day is just not worth the additional benefit. Plus, once those little scratches appear, something will stick and as you try to clean it, the surface will get damaged more, and then stick more, and so on.

3) Non stick sticks. I am yet to see a truly non-sticking non-stick. It might be a personal talent for burning things, but they do, occasionally, burn, cook dry, overheat and similar. With a stainless steel cookware it can pretty much always be scraped, scrubbed and sanded off. With a non-stick surface, although it might take longer for the disaster to happen, once it's stuck, that's it: you can't resort to Brillo pads or sharp blades, you can only throw the thing away.

4) Stainless steel is more heat resistant. It can be used in the oven at all temperatures (including over 200C), and if you accidentally overheat it on the hob, it doesn't start to emit mysterious fumes, but just goes, well, very, very hot.

5) Non stick produces noxious fumes. Overheated stainless steel fumes won't give you a headache, kill your canary or cause a bad reaction in your child. In fact, there won't be any fumes at all, just a very hot pan. Overheated non-stick can produce pretty noxious fumes that have been known to kill pet birds and cause people to suffer to.

6) Stainless steel doesn't chip and the chips are not a health hazard, like chips of non-stick are often considered to be.

7) Non stick is more fragile. You can stack stainless steel pans inside each other, chuck other things made of metal into them and generally store them with much less care than you have to give to non-stick.

8) Good stainless steel doesn't clean any worse than non-stick with a bit of a soak, and is in fact much easier to clean if anything does stick.

Although it's cheaper to buy a whole set, it's better - and ultimately, probably more economical - to buy your pots one by one, especially if you are replacing older items rather than starting from nothing. You know best what you need, and a large set will doubtlessly include some things you don't need and might still not have everything you want. There is a lot of excellent stainless steel cookware out there. The top of the range is, of course, the copper-and-aluminium core All Clad, but Stellar (look out for Lamina and 1000 series) and Cusinart also offer good choices.

Learn more about this author, Magda D. Healey.
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