Today we are going to talk about High End Cars, Premium Jewelry, Owner’s Box Stadium Seats and Pots and Pans. Okay, we’ll we’re really only going to cover those last two: Pots and Pans but I think you will find it useful.
Hexclad! Staub Enameled! La Creuset! Made In Cookware! Celebrity Chef Sets like Guy Fieri’s Flavortown, Pioneer Woman, Ayesha Curry. Different materials like stainless steel, copper, ceramic, cast iron, blue this, gold that. It’s hard to know what you should buy and how you can pay for them without taking out a second mortgage on your home.
A Golden Age of Premium Cookware
We seem to have entered a golden age of premium cook ware. Some of the sets are of very high quality and very expensive. If you enjoy the pride of ownership and unique characteristics of these super pans and the price tag fits within your budget then go ahead and splurge on one or even on a set. Life’s about doing stuff and especially doing the stuff that makes you happy so if working with high end cookware does it for you then go get’m!
Top Shelf Food Requires Top Shelf Pans, Right?
Not really. So don’t fret if you don’t want to spend a car payment’s worth of cash on a stock pot or frying pan. You can get Five Star culinary results with cookware that costs far less. In fact most of the high end restaurants I worked in back in the Golden Age of Pompous Dinning used pots and pans that looked as if they’d been used as tank armor in WW2.
Picture a line cook butter-basting a cod loin while it sits in an 8 inch stainless steel fry pan that rests on a 20,000 BTU burner. The pan, pitted and warped from the prior hundreds of heating and cooling cycles, sizzles violently with every drop of moisture rendered from the fillet. The fish is flipped to showcase the deep brown font and slid onto a dinner plate and through the pass to be delivered by the server. Then the line cook takes that smoking hot 500 degree pan and tosses it into the near-by pot sink full of soapy water yielding a mushroom cloud of steam and an even more violent hissing, sizzling, pop! No wonder that inexpensive pan is warped, twisted, stained and battle scarred. It started out cheap, was treated like scrap, over and over but it still delivers absolutely wonderful results!
Restaurant Supply Store Wares
Let’s consider some of the pans sold at my local restaurant supply store. Aluminum for six bucks, stainless for ten. They even sell a non-stick for $5.50! These are the tools used in making many of the best restaurant meals you’ve ever eaten. And keep in mind those pans have been through the pan-abusing scenario I detailed above.
Now these are small pans used for cooking individual entrees and cooking for your family may require larger pans that come at a slightly higher price but you absolutely can get a good set, suitable for home use without spending a fortune. Often for less than $300 and sometimes for far less then even that.
For Example……
I bought a 10 piece set made by Bialetti at my local food store. It has a list price of $249.99 but I bought it on sale for $49.99!
Is it a top of the line set? No, of course not, but it can do just about anything a home cook would want or need to do and we are going to explore this in future discussions and videos.
And best of all, you don’t need to handle them with kid gloves. If you toss them around and they dent or warp, you can sleep well knowing that you didn’t drain your kid’s college fund to buy them.
Don’t Believe Me?
You don’t need to take my work for it. Check out what Consumer Reports said about the comparative cooking experience of a $250 Le Creuset stainless steel saute pan versus a $25 model from Cuisinart. “In our unbiased test, the $25 Cuisinart Chef’s Classic Stainless matched the cooking evenness of the Creuset. And at $125 less than the Cureset we named the Cuisinart a CR Smart Buy.”
What’s It Going To Be?
So if you are looking to invest in some new cookware I have a few suggestions for you. First, if you happen to be at one of those restaurants with an open view of the kitchen, check out the pots and pans they are using and take note of the condition of those tools. If you do this, keep in mind that they know you can see them and so the cookware you see is likely the best they have. In the prep area, hidden in the back, they are probably using much more battle-worn pots and pans to make their stocks and sauces. Next, start to think about the dishes you generally make and which particular cookware pieces you use most often. This will help you select the individual items or sets that will be most useful to you. Start to look at the different types of cookware available in stores and on line – I think you will be surprised at the number of options and variation in costs. Finally, watch for the next two videos in this series over at the Chef Hacker Kitchen Youtube channel where we discuss the box-opening and use of a particular low-cost set.
Make Yourself Happy!
Don’t get me wrong: If you enjoy using high quality high cost cookware, then go ahead – you will not be disappointed. But if you don’t want to go for top shelf pans, either because you can’t or don’t want to pay the price, or because you don’t want to spend the next few years being really careful about how you treat such expensive kitchen tools, you can still get great results using ordinary cookware. If you don’t believe me, just ask your Mom. If she is like my Mom, she made some really wonderful meals using some really rustic cookware.
If you have a favorite or even a hated pot, pan or set and want to share your story you can leave a comment in the “Leave A Reply” section below. I’d love to learn about your experiences!