Best Stainless Steel Cookware We’ve Ever Used (2025)

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The best stainless-steel frying pan

If you’ve ever dined at a restaurant, you’ve consumed a meal that’s prepared in this pan. It’s a favorite of industry chefs and our Test Kitchen editors alike, and has a long-standing reputation for longevity and durability. It has a generous cooking surface relative to its overall diameter with wide angled sides. The high-quality tri-ply cladding (two layers of stainless steel with an aluminum core) does a superb job spreading heat evenly across the surface of the pan, delivering consistent and even cooking results. Inferior stainless-steel pans tend to have hot or cold spots that will cook food inconsistently. It’s an investment, a recurring theme with All-Clad items, but as the centerpiece of your cookware set (and the piece you’ll likely use the most), this is one to invest in. Sizing is up to you, but we think the 10.5-inch is a good middle of the road size that is spacious without hogging too much of the cooktop.

Read our full test and review of more than a dozen stainless steel skillets

The best sauté pan: The All-Clad D3 3-quart sauté pan

Next verse, same as the first. It’s All-Clad again, and we recommend it for all the same reasons we do for the skillet above. So instead of rehashing all that, we will explain why sauté pans are great and you should have one in addition to your saucepan and frying pan. Think of a sauté pan as the original “do everything” pan. While you may reach for a skillet more for casual meals, the sauté pan offers more versatility thanks to its straight side walls that can accommodate more liquid for making braises, stews, and sauces. The broad cooking surface of the All-Clad gives you plenty of room to sear meat for a family of four, and its relatively wide base also allows for quicker sauce reductions because it has more surface area than some other sauté pans.

Read our full test and review of stainless steel sauté pans

The best saucepan: All-Clad D5 Saucepan

Guess who! All-Clad. At this point we want to make it abundantly clear that we aren’t prejudiced against other brands (you’ll see in the next category), but All-Clad really just knows how to design good cookware. The saucepan we recommend is a little different than the other All-Clad on this list though.

Out of all pieces of cookware, heat conduction matters most to saucepans, due to the kind of things you make in them—sauces, caramels, reductions, custards—things that can easily scald, curdle, or burn when not treated carefully. Even, well-dispersed heat will keep the temperature from spiking in the pan, even at a high heat, lessening the likelihood of scorching the food on your stovetop. This is why we actually prefer All-Clad’s D5 saucepan—a 5-ply pan compared to the D3 line’s triply. The additional cladding will heat up more gradually and smoothly compared to the D3. However, if you want consistency in your set, the D3 is still a great piece of clad cookware.

Also, there’s also something called a saucier, which is a saucepan with a more bowl-shaped bottom and edges more accommodating for a whisk. Both get the job done, so the choice is a matter of preference.

Read our full test and review of stainless steel saucepans

The best stockpot: The Made-In 8-quart stockpot

A slight divergence from the trend above, the Made-In stockpot managed to slightly edge out the All-Clad in our tests. Made-In is a newer cookware brand that has quickly gained momentum and a positive reputation in professional kitchens over the past few years. In gathering expert sourcing for our stockpot test, several working chefs were quick to call out the Made-In as their stockpot of choice. In our testing, we came to the same conclusion, and it really all came down to specs. The Made-In stockpot has the same squat and wide dimensions as the All-Clad that can nicely accommodate chicken and even turkey carcasses without too much fussing. The main difference between the two pots, though, is that the Made-In, while a 5-ply pot, is half a pound lighter than the All-Clad. Is it a big difference? No, but hey, when tasked with choosing the absolute best, sometimes we do have to split hairs.

Read our full test and review of stainless steel stockpots

How we tested stainless-steel cookware

We’ve been testing stainless-steel cookware for over five years, and in that time, we’ve done a lot of boiling, braising, shallow-frying, searing, sautéing, saucing, caramelizing, and stock making. The particular tests we do depend on the particular use cases for a given piece of cookware. However, we are always looking for even heating across the cooking surface, smooth responsiveness to changes in temperature, and ease of handling regardless of the shape or size of a pan. There are a variety of ways we evaluate this, and for more in-depth description, check out the individual review of each of the types of pan linked above.

In addition to more objective tests, like analyzing hot spots and response to temperature changes, we put the pans in as many hands as possible, sourcing opinions and feedback across our entire staff, which is a mixture of professionally trained chefs and avid home cooks. We also like to hear from chefs from our favorite restaurants about the cookware they like to use. We then synthesize all this information to inform our judgment and deliver a recommendation that we hope will serve you best in your own home.