3 Best Stainless Steel Frying Pans in 2024 [CNET]

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David Watsky Senior Editor / Home and Kitchen

David lives in Brooklyn where he’s spent more than a decade covering all things edible, including meal kit services, food subscriptions, kitchen tools and cooking tips. David earned his BA from Northeastern and has toiled in nearly every aspect of the food business, including as a line cook in Rhode Island where he once made a steak sandwich for Lamar Odom. Right now he’s likely somewhere stress-testing a blender or tinkering with a toaster. Anything with sesame is his all-time favorite food this week.

Tramontina: It came down to a photo finish for the best budget skillet between the Calphalon and this Tramontina pan. The Calphalon edged out Tramontina’s capable 10-inch skillet, which costs under $40, with a bit more even heat distribution in the tests I ran.

Material (Update: Out of stock): Material’s $125 10-inch sauté pan is a great option if you’re looking for a more robust (read, heavier) pan with a lid. It’s technically a sauté pan and not a skillet since it has straight sides, and it performed well across the board. 

De Buyer: This legacy French producer makes an excellent 11-inch skillet, but it might be better suited for a professional kitchen. It’s heavier than most and costs an impressive $225. This all makes it hard to recommend to the casual home cook. 

Demeyere: This Belgian-made seven-ply skillet was the heaviest of all the pans I tested, despite being just 9 inches across. The 4-pound frying pan heated evenly and seared food well, but that weight coupled with a bloated $270 price tag means it’s probably not a great pick for most people.

360 Cookware: This five-ply American-made skillet performed about as well as any other, but at $200, other pans will give you a better value for your money.

Tuxton Home: I don’t have much bad to say about this budget-friendly skillet, but it was a little harder to clean than some of the others. The Tuxton home three-ply pan can be had for under $50 and will definitely get the job done.

All-Clad Graphite Core: This All-Clad skillet has a light graphite core, so it might be a good pick for someone who struggles to wield a standard frying pan. That said, it’s not cheap — $200 for a 10-inch — and it distributes more unevenly than its aluminum-core counterparts.

As much as we all love cast iron for searing steaks and nonstick cookware for bailing us out of sticky situations (eggs, pancakes), there isn’t a more versatile piece of stovetop cookware than the stainless steel skillet. A good stainless steel frying pan can do just about any sizzle or sauté job you ask of it.

Poke your head into any top restaurant kitchen and you’re bound to see the flash of stainless steel before anything else. The beauty of well-made stainless cookware is that it’s relatively light and durable, and it’s easy to control the heat, from a low simmering sauce to a seared steak or a piece of bone-in chicken. If you find one or two you really love and learn to use them, it’ll mean more consistency and better overall results whenever you find yourself working through a recipe.

Most stainless steel frying pans are made by sandwiching a highly conductive metal such as aluminum or copper in between layers of stainless steel. The middle layer or layers help the pan heat faster and retain that heat while the more durable stainless steel shell can take a beating from the heat below and cooking utensils above. Stainless steel is also a clean and noncorrosive metal so it’ll last longer than those inner layers would and it won’t leech unwanted flavors onto food. Stainless steel is easy to care for, although it’s very much not nonstick, so there will occasionally be left-on food that requires some elbow grease to remove. 

While just about any skillet you find online or in the store will have the above breakdown (two layers of steel surrounding a conductive metal), not all of them are fully clad. Fully clad frying pans have all three layers (sometimes more) of metal running to the top of the sides and not just around the bottom or base. This often results in faster and more even heat distribution throughout the entire pan. Fully clad has become a standard for professional chefs, but an amateur or even novice home cook may not notice the difference.

The amount of layers of steel and aluminum also varies from pan to pan. The better producers, including All-Clad and Made In, can make cookware with as many as five or even seven layers. The claim is that more layers of conductive material mean more even heat conduction and distribution. In truth, the difference in performance results is likely to be negligible and even unnoticeable to the majority of home cooks, myself included. I’d contend it’s probably not worth the extra cost to go beyond five-ply which, incidentally, also makes for slower heating and a heavier pan.

Speaking of which…

One of the biggest differences between the pans I tested was the weight. The seven-ply Demeyere was the heaviest at nearly 4 pounds, while most three- and five-ply skillets were closer to 3 pounds. You’d be surprised how much of a difference that extra pound makes, especially when you’re trying to fling food around with one hand. 

The benefit of a thick, heavy seven-ply pan is that it should heat slightly more evenly and will almost certainly take longer to bend or warp. That said, a quality three- or five-ply pan should still last many years if you care for it properly. There are also lighter options, including an All-Clad line with graphite core that weighs even less than aluminum or copper core cookware. 

If you’re especially hard on your frying pans (and have a strong forearm), you might want a heavier pan like a Demeyere or De Buyer, but I’d say most home chefs should shoot for a 3-pounder when selecting a 10-inch skillet.

This all depends on how many people you’re generally cooking for. If it’s not often more than three or four people, a 10- to 11-inch skillet is probably right in the sweet spot. It will be light enough to handle with ease and still large enough to fit three chicken breasts. Most producers make 12-inch skillets too, which may be a better fit for the serial dinner party host or for someone with a large family or crew to cook for. 

I hauled in 10 stainless steel skillets. For consistency, I tried to test 10-inch skillets or pans as close to 10 inches as the producer offered. Sometimes that meant 9.5 inches, but with other cookware brands, it was as wide as 11 inches. 

There are several factors to consider when evaluating skillets. Many things, like handle shape, angle and design, weight and size are subjective and will be something you’ll have to decide on for yourself. For the objective, more scientific performance metrics, there are two main considerations: How fast a pan conducts heat, and how evenly it spreads that heat across the surface area. While speed is always nice, a skillet that distributes heat evenly is the single most important thing for an average home cook. 

To test for even cooking, I ran several tests on each skillet. 

The first test was to brown a single layer of finely crushed panko breadcrumbs on medium heat to see how evenly each pan toasted them. Bread crumbs become visibly browned so it wasn’t hard to detect spots that heated up more quickly or slowly than the rest of the pan. Hot spots and cold spots can be managed but, in general, you want a pan that has as few as possible so whatever you’re cooking (fish, chicken, vegetables, eggs) all cook at the same rate.

I also used an infrared thermometer to test for even heat distribution. In this test, I heated each pan on medium for five minutes. At the 5-minute mark, I took five surface readings with the thermometer from six inches away, including the very center of the pan and one reading on each of the pan’s four sides. The reading in the center was uniformly higher than the sides since it was being pummeled more directly with heat, but the closer all five readings were together, the more even the pan’s heat distribution.

None of the pans bombed either of the tests for even cooking although some recorded differences from spot to spot as high as 25 degrees F. The All-Clad D3 did exceptionally well with temperature variances never exceeding 10 degrees F. The Calphalon skillet and Misen frying pan also performed at a high level with the widest deltas still under 15 degrees F. 

To test how quickly a pan conducted heat, I timed how long it took each skillet to boil one cup of room-temperature water on medium heat. I used the same burner for each test and made sure the water started at the same temp. All the pans performed well with no one single pan lagging too far behind. Unsurprisingly, the thicker, heavier frying pans including the De Buyer and Demeyere took a bit longer than the others. The Calphalon and All-Clad D3 were the fastest at just over four minutes. 

To test how conductive each pan was when cooling, I then turned off the heat and waited two minutes for the pans to cool. I took the temperature again in the same spots to see how fast they cooled. The faster a pan can get rid of its heat, the better. When you’re finished cooking and you want the heat off, it’s best for the pan to react as quickly as possible so as not to overcook a protein or break a delicate sauce.

The final test was to cook with each pan (groundbreaking, I know). First, I pan-seared a skin-on chicken thigh in each pan. I waited until the pan came to medium heat (about three minutes) and added a teaspoon of olive oil. I cooked the chicken for five minutes on each side to see how well the skin browned. In truth, all the skillets performed well in this test, but the All-Clad and Misen produced the most color after cooking the thighs.

I also seared a 4-ounce burger patty on each skillet using roughly the same method, heat and cooking time as above. None of the pans botched this test but the Misen, Calphalon and All-Clad D3 all imparted an above-average sear. I imagine the thicker De Buyer and Demeyere pans may have matched those results had they been given more time to heat up, but who has time for that?