A master pan

It’s time to replace the dented old pots and pans left over from your first apartment. Or, maybe you’re just getting more serious about cooking at home.

Should you buy whichever giant box of pans is on sale this week? Or, will you look for the pans your favorite Food Network chef uses?

Choose carefully. You could be using the pans to cook meals for your family for the next 15 or 20 years. Do some research before you buy. What works for one person, even a professional chef, may not work for everyone.

According to Ray Delfino, executive chef at The Spokane Club, there are only three things that really matter when choosing the right pots and pans for your kitchen.

“It’s got to look right, feel right, and really it’s got to work right for you,” he says.

Kris McIlvenna has run Greenbriar Inn catering in Coeur d’Alene for 21 years, and she has just one standard for choosing a good pan: It must have a heavy bottom.

“Otherwise everything burns, even on low heat,” she says.

But the cookware needs of a catering company are not the needs of a single family, or of an apartment dweller, or of a novice cook.

Lynn Alley, a sales associate and pan expert at Williams-Sonoma in River Park Square, tries to guide people to the right pans for their kitchen.

“If someone has an electric stove, I always recommend stainless steel,” she says.

On electric stoves, you can’t see the flame, and you can’t gauge the temperature. What’s medium on one stove will be completely different on the next stove, she says. And the right pan can be the difference between sautéed and scorched.

“Stainless buys you a little time,” she says, because it heats more slowly than other metals.

The downside is that steel doesn’t heat evenly; it gets hot spots and cool spots. To improve the heat conductivity of stainless steel pans, many are built with an inner layer of aluminum, which is one of the best conductors of heat. It’s these steel-clad pans that Alley says are most popular.

But, she warns, not all steel-clad is created equal. All-Clad brand cookware has aluminum lining on the bottom and sides of the pans so that all cooking surfaces are evenly heated. Some lower-priced steel-clad pans, including All-Clad’s Emerilware line, have aluminum lining on the bottom only. The sides of the pan just hold in the food but don’t contribute to the cooking.

Delfino uses steel-clad pans at the restaurant, but in his kitchen at home he uses Calphalon brand anodized aluminum pans.

Anodizing is an electrochemical process that thickens and hardens the metal. Anodized aluminum conducts heat just as well as regular aluminum, but it doesn’t warp or react to acidic foods the way aluminum does.

Delfino likes how thick the pans are, how evenly they heat, and, with their matte gray exterior and shiny stainless steel handles, they just look elegant.

Calphalon pans have optional nonstick coating, but many cookware experts are wary of nonstick pans, including Doug Fisher, chef instructor at Spokane Community College.

“Food sticks because the pan is either too hot or too cold,” he says. But if the pan and the cooking oil are at the correct temperature before you start cooking, you won’t need nonstick.

And there are so many rules to follow when using nonstick cookware. Don’t turn the heat up too high or the coating may peel off, and use plastic or wood utensils only, lest the integrity of the pan is compromised by knife slices or fork prods.

And there are growing concerns about the dangers of polytetrafluorethylene, best known as the DuPont brand Teflon. Fumes from an overheated nonstick pan can cause flulike symptoms in humans, called polymer fume fever. According to DuPont, Teflon only releases dangerous fumes when heated over 600 degrees, much higher than recommended cooking temperatures. A 2005 study conducted by Cooks Illustrated found that a heavyweight, high-quality nonstick pan reached 572 degrees while stir-frying chicken over high heat. DuPont recommends using nonstick pans on low to medium heat only.

DuPont and several other chemical companies also recently reached an agreement with the Environmental Protection agency to eliminate the use of a chemical in the production of Teflon that could be harmful to human health.

Yet nonstick pans find a place in most households because they’re so convenient, especially when it comes to cleanup.

Even Fisher has a nonstick pan in his kitchen. It was a gift, he says, and he would not have bought it himself. But he still uses it for cooking eggs and sautéing vegetables once in a while.

Nonstick pans will never become family heirlooms like other kitchenware sometimes does. Fisher still has a cast iron pan he and his wife received as a wedding present 36 years ago. It’s the special pan they reach for when making pancakes.

Cast iron pans heat up slowly and retain heat for a long time, making them a good choice for a big batch of flapjacks and for slow-cooking methods like braising.

“You can put a brisket in at 2:30 in a Le Creuset, and nothing is more tender,” Alley says.

Le Creuset is a high-end brand of enameled cast iron cookware that can be washed with soap and water.

Unfinished cast iron is a fraction of the cost, but it should be seasoned and rubbed with oil and placed in a low oven every time it’s washed. In fact, cast iron is not supposed to be washed at all, just wiped clean after use. Some people aren’t comfortable with that, Alley says.

Choosing the right cookware for your kitchen is a personal decision. So Alley makes her customers pick them up and see how each one feels in their hands.

Are the handles comfortable? Is the pan too heavy to lift easily? What kind of cooking do they plan on doing most, she asks.

It’s a big investment her customers are making, one that will affect every meal they make.

For chefs, they are tools of the trade. In your home, they are tools for everyday life.