Cooking: High Quality Cookware

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.

High quality stainless steel cookware is a great choice for save cooking. Many kinds of cookware react with the foods, either changing the taste of the food or even releasing harmful materials into the food that can cause imbalances or diseases. Many non-stick coatings like teflon are save – but once they get scratched or overheated they can start to leak chemicals in the food that are according to some scientific studies dangerous and possibly carcinogenic.

Stainless steel cookware is very save. Stainless steel is a mix of different metals: iron, chromium and nickel. Iron, as you are probably aware of is not a dangerous metal for the human body – one of the healthy aspects of spinach for example is that it has a lot of iron.
Chromium also is healthy for humans – between 50 to 200 (microgram) mg per day are recommended. Studies have shown that when you cook one meal in a stainless steel pan or pot it releases about 45 mg of chromium into the food – so that’s even less than what’s recommended daily, a very save amount of chromium. That means even if you eat four meals a day that are all cooked in stainless steel pots and pans you would still be in the save range, since 4 times 45 mg equals 180 mg (less than the daily 200 mg that are totally fine).

About nickel – nickel really isn’t something that you want to put in your body. Fortunately when you cook with stainless steel cookware there is very little nickel leaking into the food – so little that scientists and medical professionals consider it absolutely save. The only people to whom the nickel might pose a threat are people who have nickel allergies. If you have a nickel allergy I suppose you already talked to your doctor about that. Since stainless steel cookware is used in so many public places (restaurants etc.) I suppose that it still is normally not that big of a threat, but again, check with your doctor.

To some this might all sound a little weird and they might be surprised that when they cook part of the cookware also gets into the food. But this is really normal, it’s the world we live in. You drink from a can and some tiny amounts of the can material will get into your drink. You drink from a bottle and some tiny amounts of the plastic get into your drink. When you cook there is heat involved which enforces reactions between different materials. This is nothing bad – remember that we human beings are designed to live in this world and to handle these kinds of things.
When you buy high quality cookware you can be pretty sure that it is save to use – cause all these big brandname manufacturers have a reputation and they don’t want to risk lawsuits. Of course if you buy cheap noname cookware that’s a different case – which is one of the reasons why I always choose high quality cookware.

I hope you found this article insightful – if you have questions or comments, just write something by clicking on comment – I’d be glad to hear from you.

 

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