Quality saucepans?

Dunno if they will do induction, but my Stellar range of stainless are superb on ordinary cookers

I see the new range definitely does induction but the price is double what I paid :-(

The great advantage of stainless is you can scour the f*ck out of it if you boil the curry dry...

Weight for weight aluminium has better thermal inertia.

Aldi or Lidl.

We tend to kill the non-stick on our pans. Recently switched to Ninja ZEROSTICK Essentials Cookware. Seem pretty indestructible.

Before that we had Tefal Ingenio. non-stick is not as resilient, but my wife cooks on boost all the time, want dials that go to 11. I think they would be fine in normal use. removable handles make for easy storage.

we also have some Ikea ones in a holiday home. don´t get much use but we have had them over 5 years and still ok.

Dave

We went through the same process about six or seven years ago.

Tefal is a good name for ordinary saucepans, and Scoville Neverstick for larger two-handled pots for soups, etc.

Any truth in the theory that aluminium is hazardous and can leach into some foods?

Our induction hob doesn't cycle on/off (at least, not slowly enough to be discernable like old electric rings), I don't know if others do. I prefer it to gas, but one thing which takes some getting used to is the control knob setting. Different pans seem to have different degrees of coupling and, for example, my small frying pan needs to be set to #7 to fry an egg, whereas my large cast iron casserole would boil pretty violently at that setting.

(The controls go from 1/2 to 9 with half steps at the beginning, then there's an 'A' setting which gives a short boost, then a 'P' setting which heats the living f*ck out of the pan. So, in a way, it does 'go to eleven'.)

As for the question asked, just get stainless. Most of mine are Lidl or Sainsbury IIRC.

I think that if you go for non-stick, it really boils(!) down to how careful you are with what you use to stir or move the contents around. And even if you are careful to use wood, silicone, or plastic implements, you might forget and use a metal fork to taste the food whilst cooking. That once is all it needs. :-(

I used to go for the expensive makes, but the last one I bought was a Chinese copy and it was useless. I now go for cheap supermarket own-brand non-stick pans, and just discard them when they are past it. I have found that the cheapest way to buy non-stick pans, as the cost x duration equation is in favour of the cheap ones. YMMV.

Like all good amplifiers :-)

Aluminium pans do not work with induction hobs unless there is some ferrous metal encapsulated within the base.

We have a lot of SS pans of which Prestige are recommended as you can get spares if something breaks as we did recently.

Richard

Another consideration. The last repair cafe I was at, in came a plug in duff single induction hob. As the owner was not aware of the requirement for "special" pans,the failure may have been due to the wrong one/s. A hotspot in the helix of wire had melted the matrix to the point of a short in the turns, blowing drivers ,fuse etc. I was surprised how little was in there , a SMPS and a 2D coil of wire and little else. They say use the wrong pans and such a hob simply does not work, but no mention of using sort of working pans.

Dexam Swift pans, if rather expensive.

Had them several years. They are SS and have a ferrous insert in the base so they work on induction hobs. My only complaint is that the frying pan is a bit small, but they may make a larger one by now.

In both cases they were 'seconds', sold cheaper with small blemishes or dents. They sell/sold those off in their physical shop at the front of their warehouse. I hear the shop isn't operating any more so not sure what they do with their second stock nowadays.

Theo

Nope!

Snap. We have some pans we bought when we moved here 25 years back which are still mint condition and perfect but not induction compatible. Cookware T2025 ISTR. It makes me sad that they are no longer any use. They'll go to the British Heart Foundation shop so they will do some good.

We now have some genuine Denby induction pans, nice but pricey. Plus some pans named after an American chef that came from TK Max. They took work well. They seem to be well put together and feel solid/well made.

The power scale seems non-linear, I'm still learning how to fry eggs/bread etc. It seems almost exponential as you move from 5 (on a sale of 0-9 is 0.5 steps).

Also my hob (Bosch) detects within a second or two if there's no load in range and switches the power off until you place a pan/load in the area.

Just looked in the drawer.

We have some Casa Professional stainless steel pans with copper bottoms which we bought in TK Maxx in around 2006. They appear to be still available. So far they have been very good, although it is a long time since we used a stand alone induction hob (2012).

Cheers

Dave R

It does leach out in small quantities but it is not usually considered as toxic. There was a scare some years back about it causing Alzheimers but it turned out that a lab tech had screwed up a test. Red faces all round.

There was another scare when a delivery driver dropped a load of stuff containing aluminium into the wrong chute and gave the residents of Camelford a massive dose of aluminium in their drinking water. There were some short-term health issues but no associated fatalities and no obvious long-term effects.