Home Entertaining: Home cooks can utilize sizzling steak plates and platters to add a touch of flair to home-cooked meals, impressing guests with the dramatic presentation of sizzling hot dishes at dinner parties and gatherings.

    Before using your bacon press, ensure that your cooking surface, whether it be a skillet, griddle, or grill, is preheated to the desired temperature. Proper preheating helps to achieve an even cook and crispiness.

10 Piece Cast Iron Cookware Set

“There are a few things to consider when you’re buying cookware, including how you cook, durability, and price,” says Lance Nitahara, an assistant professor at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, N.Y. “On the low end of the price scale are nonstick and cast iron; copper is on the high end. But each does a different thing.”

Below, you’ll find advice on how to choose the right frying pan for how you cook, plus highlights of top-performing pans from CR’s tests, listed alphabetically and not by rank. You can see how all the pans we test perform in our frying pan ratings and learn more about the different types of pans in our cookware buying guide.

Maintenance and Care:

Induction frying pans are designed specifically for use with induction cooktops. They have a magnetic base that heats up quickly and evenly, making them ideal for high-heat cooking and delicate dishes. However, they are limited in compatibility with cooktops and may not be suitable for all types of cooking.

Best for: Almost any food that needs frying, browning, or searing. Because it’s ovenproof, stainless is also a good choice for foods that you start on the stovetop and then move to the oven to finish, like thick pork chops.

The details: Nitahara says that 95 percent of the pans used in the CIA’s teaching kitchens are stainless steel because they can take a lot of punishment. “The only time we don’t use them is on egg day, when we use nonstick,” he says. He adds that the shiny surface of a stainless pan makes it easy to see whether your food is browning.

In CR’s tests of stainless steel pans, we measure heating evenness by cooking pancakes, and we gauge how evenly a pan sautés by cooking potatoes until they’re tender. We also conduct a cleaning test to see how easy it is to remove cooked-on food. You’d think that all stainless pans would be about the same to clean, but our tests show that some require a lot more scrubbing than others.

Here are two recommended stainless steel pans from CR’s tests.

Stainless Steel Frying Pans

Ceramic cookware fares well when it comes to convenience, looks, and the ability to purchase in a set.