I use mostly stainless-with-copper-bottom pots and pans, but I’d like a good non-sticking skillet, and a cupcake pan and cookie pan for baking. Prior purchases haven’t worked well.
Is Calphalon (sp?) good? If I’m going to pay that kind of price, I want it to last my lifetime and go to my heirs. How about good enamel, or other materials?
Thanks in advance!
Serious cooks use whatever does the job, and cheap teflon has its uses. Ok, I’m not going to say I’m a serious cook, but I totally use cheap teflon pans for cooking sticky stuff like eggs. The pans are cheap and can be replaced every couple years.
IMHO, Calphalon is expensive teflon, and teflon in general has a limited lifetime.
If you want “lasts a lifetime and beyond” I’d go with good quality cast iron, or cast iron with a baked enamel coating.
Calphalon is good but All Clad is much better. If you get the all stainless, it’s dishwasher safe. There’s also stainless exterior with nonstick interior which is very easy to clean. All Clad is on the expensive side but the pieces are great quality and last a long time. Now and then there are specials and some pieces go for great sale prices. I work at Williams-Sonoma which is how I know, but I can’t think of other retailers offhand that also carry it.
For baking, serious cooks go for a SilPat liner. It’s a nonstick specially made silicone baking mat that you line the cookie sheet with. They’re not cheap but they last forever, supposedly.
If not that, then line the pan with parchment paper.
I don’t understand why you’re asking about a cupcake pan. Aren’t cupcakes cooked in the little paper liners? I don’t see why a pan would make that much difference.
Actually, no All-Clad nonstick is dishwasher safe, including the stainless.
I will second the recommendation, however, with a caveat: it’s not the same as the cheapo teflon pans. You can’t expect to use them with NO oil at all, like you can with teflon. Also, they recommend that you don’t use cooking spray on them. I’ve found that using cooking spray results in the pan becoming discolored and not as non-stick over time.
That said, you can get away with using very little oil in them, and they last pretty much forever if you care for them correctly. They also are as high quality as any other All-Clad - they are very heavy, and cook wonderfully. Overall, I find the cooking quality and the heavy duty construction make up for having to use a little bit of oil in them.
For baking, it’s hard to beat parchment paper, especially if you’re dealing with delicate items like meringue cookies and the like. Well-seasoned cast-iron is great for most skillet tasks, but you can’t use it for everything – acidic foods can be a problem, for instance, and for sticky stuff the skillet better be really well-seasoned. I still use my clad stainless sautes and skillets for most things, but for things like omelets and scrambled eggs, I do like having something non-stick around.
For a little while, Calphalon was making a line of cookware for Target called Bistroware that was heavy-guage aluminum (not anodized) with a non-stick interior. It wasn’t anywhere near the quality of the high-end Calphalon anodized cookware, nor was it all that inexpensive. When it went on clearance, however, and I was able to get a few pieces for half or less of the original price, I went for it, and they’ve been well worth it. They’re made to resemble commercial kitchenware, have rubber sleeves that slide onto the the riveted aluminum handles so they can go in and out of the oven, and are made of aluminum heavy enough to perform fairly well.
If I had to go stock a kitchen from scratch, I’d probably find a restaurant supply store that’s open to the general public and score some decent quality commercial stock. I’m not trying to impress anyone with what my cookware looks like, so it’s all about how it cooks and how it holds up. For the price of one 10" All-Clad non-stick saute pan, I could snag three or four different sized pans that would perform about as well and hold up about as well – they just wouldn’t look as good on a hanging pot rack over the kitchen island. Any non-stick surface is eventually going to get scratched and/or begin to separate from the pan. I’d rather buy something that I can live with throwing away later when it starts to go.
For even less, you can always scour the discount stores and even your grocery stores for the heaviest Mirro skillet/saute/omelet pans with Teflon or Silverstone coatings – I’m talking the thick ones, not the ones you can bend out of shape with your bare hands. Spend $20-$25 on the largest one and throw it away when the coating starts to go.
A poor artist blames his tools. I pretty much prefer the basic stuff. We have some all clad, and some teflon stuff. The teflon doesn’t last well.
The stuff I go back to and use over and over again are some pots and pans I got from a restaurant supply store. They’re just basic stainless steel, but fairly thick. Nothing fancy.
I like this basic simple stuff. Season it with oil, maybe some garlic so it’s blackened at the bottom, and it basically makes its own nonstick surface, like a nice wok.
Perhaps this is almost related. Here in Saudi Arabia, the best I can get are the nice teflon pans from Ikea. I have found that the trick is to never, never let anything metal touch the surface.
My skillet lives on top of the stove.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! You don’t live with human beings do you? Sooner or later, one of them is going to get their hands on your cookware, and no matter your admonishments to the contrary, the first thing they are going to do is scratch your teflon & burn something onto it. It’s inevitable. In fact, it’s amazing.
Friends who would never dream of eating crackers in your bed will nevertheless, immediately find something to burn onto your theoretically non-stick surfaces.
We’ve had stainless steel, teflon, and Calphalon. We have now given them all away and gone completely to cast iron. We have both “plain” cast iron skillets and enamel-clad saucepans.
Our enamel-clad stuff is Le Creuset, which is a bit pricey, but should last forever. For the regular cast iron, Lodge and Wagner are both good choices (don’t get the pre-seasoned stuff; it’s easy enough to season them yourself and the non-seasoned pieces are much cheaper). Good cast iron skillets are practically non-stick, and almost impossible to wear out. Rhiannon has a skillet that was handed down from her grandmother and is almost 100 years old. It’s perfect for making 2 fried eggs.
As for cookie sheets, we threw out our non-stick cookie sheets and now have a heavy-duty “professional grade” steel cookie sheet. Cookies generally have enough fat in them that they won’t stick to anything in the first place, but if you are concerned go with parchment paper (**not ** wax paper - they are *not * the same thing).
Ditto for cupcake pans, and always use papers. Muffins, like cookies, should have enough fat in them that sticking won’t be an issue. If in doubt, a quick spritz of non-stick cooking spray will do the trick.
I was really excited when we got our first Calphalon pan, but I honestly don’t think it’s worth the price. Cast iron is every bit as functional, considerably cheaper, and much longer lasting. And because of the thickness and wight it heats evenly and retains heat better.
Just don’t drop it on your toe.
I’m not sure if I qualify as a serious cook, but I have a small, cheap, non-stick omelette pan that I use for frying sticky, delicate things such as eggs and plain fish fillets - anything that is less sticky (sausages, diced meat, chops etc) will either be cooked in my well-seasoned cast iron skillet, in my (also well-seasoned) wok, or (if I’m intending to deglaze the pan and simmer the meat in a sauce) just in the bottom of a large stainless pan.
For baking, I use parchment paper, but my wife has just bought a set of bakeware that is made from some sort of very flexible, rubber-like(although obviously not ordinary rubber) material that doesn’t need greasing or lining and seems to work really well.
You mean this?
It’s what AveDementia mentioned.
I know a guy who has one, and it seems to work really well.
Don’t the pros all use copper pans and pots? I thought copper had the best heat conductivity, hence cooked faster!
Well, if he is talking about actual baking pans, he may mean something like this . I do have to say it looks interesting - and fun!
Susan
They named cookware after me? 
Not all Calphalon pans have teflon coatings. Besides their hard-anodized lines and their new One lines (one is almost entirely non-stick and metal-safe, and another supposedly is entirely metal-safe with a teflon-appearing coating), they also produce a stainless line. I have a stainless stockpot from them with two different steamer basket inserts, and a glass lid so you can keep an eye on what’s going on in there.
Gah. That should have been “hard-anodized non-Teflon” instead, as they do make hard-anodized pots with Teflon coatings as well.
Such was the fate of my last 8" omelette pan - its Teflon coating got scratched somehow, and I was lucky enough to find a cookware store that was going out of business and selling everything at a discounted rate. I got one of the new One pans (not the coated version) at 30% off. glee
I think that bakeware is made out of silicone rubber, if I’m not mistaken. Same stuff is showing up in hotpads/oven mitts as well.
I’ve been accumulating Calphalon for a while, because I love how heavy all their cookware is. You can usually find it with really deep discounts at amazon.com or cooking.com. I just ordered a 100 dollar pot for $19.99.
Their non-stick cookware is somehow non-stick all the way through. So if you cut into it, the scratch will still have non-stick coating on it. Don’t ask me how they do it, though. I’m just repeating what a salesperson told me.
My current cookie sheets are a thick aluminum purchased from a restaurant supply house. They’re fantastic. You might look into getting some cookware from one.
Alternatively, you could try finding an auction when a restaurant goes out of business. According to Kitchen Confidential, they happen all the time, but I’ve never seen one.
Yes; the ones we have are called Flexipan - they look like this
