As a little girl I remember my grandmother cooking with her heavy cast iron cookware. Although they were cumbersome, she had used those same skillets for many years, and she certainly knew how to use them to cook up a fantastic meal.
In those days before processed foods and slow cookers, the majority of the food we ate was fried, and cast iron skillets were excellent for frying. The other major method of cooking was roasting, and cast iron roasters turned out wonderful pot roasts and chickens.
You just couldn’t beat cast iron for dispersing the heat evenly. Sometime in the late 1950s, however, my grandmother did away with the cast iron cookware in favor of more modern, aluminum pots, pans, and roasters. Even though Teflon hadn’t been introduced yet, and everything stuck to the aluminum cookware, she wanted to keep up with the times.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I started seeing cast iron pans in mail order catalogs again in the 21st century. The Lodge Cast Iron company, the premium maker of cast iron cookware, is still very much alive and well in South Pittsburg, Tennessee. In fact, they’ve been in business for over one hundred years. They still offer a line of cast iron cookware that looks just like the old pans my grandmother used to use, but with a modern twist. The old time pans needed to be broken in, so to speak. They had to be used over and over and over again before they developed a desired patina known as seasoning.
For 21st century users, however, the pans now come pre-seasoned as Lodge has now developed a coating which seasons the pans and makes them perfect to use new from the box. If you ever get down to southeastern Tennessee, you’ll want to be sure to visit the Lodge plant. They have an outlet store where you can purchase high-quality cookware for a fraction of its mail order price along with all the accessories you’ll need to use it. You still can’t beat cast iron for even heat, and it makes excellent cookware for campers and people who like to barbecue.In spite of innovations Lodge has introduced over the years, it’s a part of our American heritage that’s changed very little except to get better and better.
There are different kinds of high quality cookware materials:
Stainless steel
Stainless steel is generally the most versatile and durable material for cookware. It’s the most popular kind of cookware among chefs because you can get really good quality for a reasonable price.
Downside of stainless steel is that it conducts heat not very good – thus stainless steel cookware should have a copper core.
Copper
Specially gourmet cooks go for copper when they have to cook foods at exact temperatures. Copper is the best choice in this case because there is no better conductor of heat. You can cook at exactly the temperature you want, e.g. you can cook at 78 degrees celsius if you wanted to. Great for frying and sauteing.
Downsides of copper are high price and the fact that copper reacts with food when heated and thus needs special coating (most of the time stainless steel).
Aluminium
Great heat conducter (almost as good as copper) and it’s cheap and strong and durable.
But it reacts with acidic foods and thus should generally have a coating to prevent leakage or taste alterations (this is specially true for spinach).
Non-Stick
Non-Stick cookware is great because it allows for low fat cooking and is easy to clean.
Downsides is that non-stick cookware doesn’t last very long and has to be maintained carefully.
Cast Iron
Cast iron cookware is kind of a special case. It needs to be conditioned before using it because it will otherwise react with certain kinds of acidic foods and absorb the flavors of the food. (There’s a special kind of cast iron that doesn’t need conditioning – enameled cast iron cookware. A hard procelain enamel coating protects the cast iron from the food and vice versa.) The advantages of cast iron are that it provides even heating at high cooking temperatures and retains the heat excellently. One downside of this material though is that it heats up slowly.
Cast iron cookware is excellent for baking, browning and frying foods.
Anodized Aluminum
Anodized aluminum cookware has all the advantages of normal aluminum (except for the low price) but makes up for some of regular aluminums disadvantages. A chemical process makes aluminum much more durable and gives it a kind of non-stick surface and also prevents leakage of toxic substances into the food. It really is kind of the cheap version of stainless steel. Can be great for roasters, Dutch ovens, stockpots and saute pans.
However, you’ll have to handwash it because dishwashers might damage the surface. You also should not use steel wool or other aggressive scrubbing tools or corrosive detergents.
Another problem can be that because of it’s dark color it can be hard to observe the food – sometimes you’ll have to judge your food by it’s color and that might be difficult with anodized aluminum if you don’t have optimal lighting.
Glass
Glass cookware is a good choice if you use your microwave a lot. While most of the times it’s used for baking, there is also stovetop glass cookware available (it usually needs special handling though). Foods sticking to glass cookware is pretty unusual because glass is in itself already a non-stick material.
Disadvantages are that it’s heavy weight, and it’s heat distribution (not evenly) and that it’s not easy to handle. Glass is a very save cooking material, I have never heard of negative health effects from glass cookware.
Ceramic
Ceramic cookware has very similar characteristics to glass cookware (and can also be used for microwave cooking and is pretty non-sticky) but retains the heat better than usual glass cookware, distributes heat very evenly and is oftentimes also non-sticky. Oftentimes it’s used to make creme brulee, flan and custard.
Unglazed ceramics like terra cotta have are kind of spongy (that means they have lots of tiny little wholes inside) and thus can make the food a little juice, because the surface of the cookware add moisture in the form of steam to the food.
One thing that you have to be very cautious of when purchasing unglazed ceramic cookware is that the clay doesn’t contain lead.
Ceramic cookware might brake if you don’t handle it careful – but it’s also pretty cheap generally.
Heat conduction is one of the most important quality characteristics when it comes to cookware, asides from other factors such as reactivity with foods, durability and ease of maintenance. High quality cookware always has great heat conduction. There are different ways to achieve this, but the main objective is almost always to distribute the heat evenly to all sides.
There are exceptions where the exact opposite is desired – a extremely hot center whereas the surround shouldn’t be hot. This is specially true for woks, since in Asian cooking there are certain ways of frying dishes on very high heat for short periods of time so that certain gustatory characteristics develop and the nutrients are preserved and not “fried to deatch”.
However, unless you are into Asian cooking you probably want even heat distribution for your cookware. There are different methods of achieving this that different manufacturers of high-quality cookware adhere to. For stainless steel cookware from Williams Sonoma for example this is most often achieved through a copper or aluminum core that is sandwiched inside the base layers of the stainless steel pan or pot, because stainless steel itself has very poor heat conductivity.
Other manufacturers like Magnalite have a certain magnesium-aluminum alloy casting process where the bases are extremely thick and have different grades of thickness. Aluminum is the second best cookware material for heat conduction.
Copper is in and of itself the perfect heat conductor and professional chefs often use gourmet cookware made from copper.
Another great heat conductor is cast iron cookware.
Better heat conductivity has several advantages – cooking time can generally be reduced and in general lower cooking temperatures are possible. But most important of all you can precisely adjust the heat to the temperature that you want. Certain foods need to be cooked at a precise temperature point – gourmet chefs know this – and copper cookware is the only real choice for professional chefs who need temperature precision.
The downside of copper is definitely it’s price (it’s easy to spend more than $1000 on a good copper cookware set) and the fact the copper reacts with certain foods. That is why all high quality cookware made from copper usually has a protective coating that prevents it from reacting with foods. When I say reacting I mean that it will either change the taste of the food, or in some cases even be harmful to your health. (And the same is true for aluminum). However, with good coatings high-conductivity cookware is save to use!
There are many other issues when it comes to determining cookware quality, but in this one I wanted to focus on heat conductivity only. If you want to know more about other factors of high-quality cookware I recommend you read the other articles that are available for free on HighQualityCookware.com
