The Best Induction Cookware

There’s nothing like a good nonstick skillet. You can crack an egg into it and count on a perfect fried egg sliding out a few minutes later, even if you get distracted for a minute or are a little clumsy with your spatula. We've tested nonstick skillets with Teflon-style coatings and ceramic nonstick skillets in a variety of sizes.

If you want perfect searing, deeply flavorful sauces, and cook-anything, stove-to-oven versatility for a lifetime, you need a stainless-steel skillet. The best ones are sturdy and won't wear out.

We love cooking in cast-iron skillets. Traditional cast-iron skillets become increasingly nonstick with use and can be handed down for generations. Enameled cast-iron skillets offers the heat retention of traditional cast-iron pans, but the glossy enamel coating prevents the iron from rusting or reacting with acidic foods. We've tested both styles in several sizes.

A good carbon-steel skillet can literally do it all: You can bake, broil, sear, and stir-fry in it; plus, you can cook delicate foods such as fish and eggs in it with no fear of sticking. Restaurant chefs use these pans for all kinds of tasks and they're hugely popular in European kitchens.

When placed on a burner, a copper skillet heats up very quickly, and when the flame is turned down, it cools fast, too. This responsiveness to the stove’s heat settings gives the cook excellent control and is what makes copper cookware a pleasure to use.

A sauté pan is a handy alternative to a skillet. Mid-height and mid-weight with a lid, it's ideal for cooking down heaps of greens, and the straight sides—high enough to corral splatters but low enough to easily reach into with tongs—make it great for shallow frying.

In Spain, paella is traditionally cooked on the grill in a carbon-steel paellera. This pan’s shallow, wide shape maximizes the surface area of the paella, allowing for rapid evaporation of the cooking liquid and optimal socarrat (golden rice crust) development. We also love a paella pan as a roasting pan or griddle. We stock several sizes in the test kitchen.

Stovetop griddles are more compact and easy to store and still give you the extra cooking surface you need to make lots of pancakes, eggs, bacon, grilled cheese, and even steaks or burgers on top of your range in relatively few batches. 

Grill pans are skillets customized with ridges across the cooking surface to mimic the cooking grates of a grill. We use grill pans to make pressed sandwiches and to grill meats and vegetables. The pan’s hot ridges sear grill marks onto the surfaces of food while radiant heat cooks the food.

Is there anything you can’t do with a Dutch oven? We use these large, heavy-duty pots for boiling, searing, frying, braising, and baking food and for sous vide cooking. We use large, medium, and small sizes. We also think lightweight Dutch ovens deserve a place in many home kitchens.

Like a Dutch oven, a braiser has two handles for easy transport and a lid to retain moisture and is usually made from enameled cast iron, which is great for heat retention. A bonus: Most braisers are attractive enough to go from the stovetop to the table as serving dishes. And they're good for much more than braising!

You can do a lot with a big Dutch oven but sometimes you need an even larger pot. A 12-quart stockpot is useful for making large batches of soup or stew, boiling a large amount of pasta, steaming lobsters, or making broth.

A canning pot is an essential tool for large-batch home canning. These pots are typically around 20 quarts—almost twice the size of standard 12-quart stockpots. 

A good saucepan is incredibly versatile, ideal for soups, pasta, grains, and so much more. When it comes to performance, we’ve found that the differences between models can be surprisingly significant. We've tested both large (roughly 4-quart) and small (roughly 2-quart) models.

As their name and wide-mouth design imply, sauciers are built for reducing sauces. We love them for making risotto, custards, and other foods that are prone to getting stuck in the corners of a saucepan and burning.

Stovetop kettles are simple vessels for heating water. But anyone who’s had a bad one knows how irritating they can be. We put a dozen models through a gamut of tests, evaluating how easy each they were to fill and lift, as well as how long they took to reach a boil and whether they were easy and tidy to pour from.

The best moka pots are easy to use and can brew a batch of strong and concentrated coffee quickly. A mainstay in Italian coffee culture, they're popular in kitchens around the world. They brew coffee that is roasty, bold, and well-balanced with notes of dark chocolate, slightly burnt caramel, and even maple syrup.