Frying pans are a bit more expensive than French skillets.

Skillets and sauté pans are offered in similar sizes, ranging from 3.5-inch to 17-inch diameters. The most popular are 8-inch, 10-inch, and 12-inch diameters, with most home stoves comfortably accommodating a maximum of 12-inches.

Hard anodised aluminium

What is the difference between a frying pan and a skillet?

Skillet

Similarly to cast iron, carbon steel pans need to be seasoned before use (though some, like ours, do come preseasoned). As if these pans weren’t already versatile enough, carbon steel is also safe to use on the grill as well as over an open flame.

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.

Enameled Cast Iron Frying Pans