Cooking: High Quality Cookware

Cooking rice in half the time? A new cookware material that was developed by a professor in Pennsylvania makes it possible. Read more…

Non-stick cookware has never been very eco-friendly - until now. The problem with nonstick cookware was always a chemical called PTFE, which is… bad, bad, bad! (Lots of harmful chemicals and energy gets wasted in the process of creating “normal” non-stick coatings).

But now, a company form the Netherlands developed an alternative that is much more resilient than other “green” non-stick cookware.

They use N² Technology (what a fancy-shmanzy name, huh?) and to put it short: it’s better.

It’s the first time that such a high-quality eco-friendly non-coating cookware is launched to the mass-market - you’ll be able to get it at your local Walmart store soon.

Stainless steel cookware is great because it’s durable, versatile and easy to maintain. But the downside of stainless steel as a material for cookware is that it’s a very bad conductor of heat and the heat doesn’t get distributed evenly. That is why high quality cookware made from stainless steel always has some copper or aluminum added to it.

Copper has great heat conductivity characteristics (which is great for cookware) but also reacts with foods easily (which is bad for cookware). The same is true for aluminum, though copper is still the number one metal when it comes to heat conductivity in cookware. Copper has 9 times better heat conductivity than stainless steel, aluminum has 5 times better heat conductivity than stainless steel.

But cookware manufacturers have managed to find a way to leverage both the strenght of stainless steel and copper by using the two of them in one piece of high quality cookware. There are different methods of how copper is worked into stainless steel cookware, and depending upon what you are willing to pay you will get either low quality or professional stainless steel cookware.

If you go for cheap discount stainless steel cookware you will probably get just that – stainless steel cookware, no copper, no aluminum inside. Foods will burn and stick easily and cooking will be stressful, cleaning will be tiring. Good luck with that.
If you are willing to pay medium prices then the stainless steel cookware will have a core disk of copper or aluminum inside the base. This is already a huge improvement in terms of heat conductivity and will make cooking for you so much easier.

Now if you really want to master the cooking skills then you want on of those professional stainless steel cookware sets – additionally to the copper core disk inside the base they also have added copper cores in the sides or even for the full height of the cookware.

The good thing about buying professional stainless steel cookware is that it often comes with a "lifetime guarantee" from the manufacturer. If you follow the handling instructions (which basically tell you how to avoid some stupid things that you shouldn’t do with cookware anyway) then they will replace your cookware in case it ever get’s damaged. In the long run it’s much cheaper to spend a bit more and then never have to replace it and enjoy the high quality every day than to save a few bucks, have to deal with the hustle of cheap cookware and buy a new piece of cookware every couple of years. Better choose good cookware in the first place.

If you have questions just leave me a comment, I’d be glad to read from you.