If You’re Searching for a New Skillet, Consider Stainless Steel

如果你在寻找新的煎锅，不妨考虑不锈钢材质

If you’ll excuse the pun, skillets seem to always be a hot topic. More than in other sections of cookery, there is a continual quest to find the best one, or at least the best one you can afford. I’ve seen cycles of fetishization come and go for copper, cast-iron, and carbon steel. 请原谅我玩个双关语，煎锅似乎总是一个“热门”话题。在烹饪领域的各个门类中，人们对寻找最好煎锅（或者至少是你能负担得起的最好煎锅）的追求从未停止。我见证了人们对铜锅、铸铁锅和碳钢锅的追捧周期来来去去。

At the Mall of New Hampshire in the 1980s, I remember watching a miraculous cooking-store demonstration of omelettes effortlessly sliding out of a Teflon pan. Then, only a few years ago, the industry pretty much dropped the whole Teflon category like a hot potato due to the pans’ propensity to give off harmful fumes if they get too hot. Less durable ceramic immediately filled the void, and we’re already realizing how quickly it can lose its nonstick magic. 在20世纪80年代的新罕布什尔州购物中心，我记得曾看过一场神奇的厨具店演示：煎蛋卷毫不费力地从特氟龙（Teflon）平底锅中滑出。然而，就在几年前，由于特氟龙锅在过热时容易释放有害气体，整个行业几乎像丢掉烫手山芋一样抛弃了这一品类。耐用性较差的陶瓷涂层锅迅速填补了市场空白，但我们现在已经意识到，它的不粘效果消失得有多快。

All this time, stainless-steel pans have been waiting in the wings. They are durable, and lighter and less fussy than cast iron and carbon steel. They’re not nonstick, but that’s often fixed with a pat of butter. They sear well, and with a bit of TLC, they’re built for a lifetime of hard work. 一直以来，不锈钢锅都在幕后静候时机。它们耐用、轻便，且比铸铁锅和碳钢锅更容易打理。虽然它们不是不粘锅，但加一小块黄油通常就能解决问题。它们非常适合煎烤，只要稍加呵护，它们就能陪伴你度过漫长的烹饪生涯。

All-Clad has been one of the great brands in stainless for years, but I wondered if other slightly more expensive skillets were worth a look, particularly as some are new to the market and others have been flying under the radar. Along with a 10-inch All-Clad, I called in similar-sized pans from Hestan, Viking, and Heritage Steel. Testing all these sounded like fun at first, but things got weird and stayed weird for a while, and only with a bunch of hands-on data gathering and time at the stove did I understand which pans I could recommend. 多年来，All-Clad 一直是不锈钢锅领域的佼佼者，但我很好奇，其他价格稍贵的煎锅是否值得一看，尤其是考虑到有些是市场新秀，而有些则一直默默无闻。除了一个10英寸的 All-Clad 锅，我还找来了 Hestan、Viking 和 Heritage Steel 的同尺寸产品。起初，测试这些锅听起来很有趣，但过程变得有些诡异且持续了一段时间。只有通过大量的实测数据收集和在炉灶前的反复尝试，我才明白哪些锅值得推荐。

Pans Labyrinth

锅具迷宫

A smart and easy cheat for someone like me is to use All-Clad’s 10-inch D3 Fry Pan as a baseline. (“Fry pan” and “skillet” are used interchangeably in this category.) The D3 has been an America’s Test Kitchen and Wirecutter darling for years, with advocates seeking out traits like uniform heating across its surface, a comfortable handle, and cladding (layers of different metals). It’s $170 with a lid and $150 without, which is a good chunk of change, but it feels like a fair price for buy-it-for-life durability. 对于像我这样的人来说，一个聪明且简单的捷径是以 All-Clad 的10英寸 D3 平底锅作为基准。（在这一类别中，“Fry pan”和“skillet”可以互换使用。）多年来，D3 一直是《美国测试厨房》（America’s Test Kitchen）和 Wirecutter 的宠儿，拥护者们看重的是它表面受热均匀、手柄舒适以及多层金属复合（cladding）等特性。带盖售价170美元，不带盖150美元，这虽然是一笔不小的开支，但考虑到其“终身使用”的耐用性，这个价格还算公道。

I own and love one of All-Clad’s 4-quart D5 Essential Pans, which is like a high-sided skillet, and it has a perfectly flat cooking surface. But the cooking surface on the D3 skillet All-Clad sent to me for this story was a bit domed–high in the center and low around the outside—not horribly so, but surprising to me, and among the dozen or so pans I called in, it was among the furthest out of whack. I also noticed that the rivets that hold the handle to the pan weren’t fully squished on there. It felt fine and didn’t wobble, but an All-Clad representative confirmed this wasn’t right. They sent another pan, and the rivets were as they should be on that one, but the bottom was pretty much the same. I learned that this amount of doming is within All-Clad’s tolerance range, but not within mine. What can I say? I like flat pans, I thought, looking wistfully at my perfect D5. 我拥有并喜爱 All-Clad 的4夸脱 D5 Essential 锅，它就像一个高壁煎锅，且拥有完美的平整烹饪表面。但 All-Clad 为本文寄来的 D3 煎锅，其烹饪表面却有些拱起——中间高、四周低。虽然不算太严重，但还是让我感到惊讶，在我找来的十几口锅中，它的平整度偏差是最大的之一。我还注意到，固定手柄的铆钉没有完全压实。虽然摸起来没问题，也不会晃动，但 All-Clad 的代表确认这确实不正常。他们又寄来了一个，这次铆钉没问题了，但锅底的情况几乎一样。我了解到，这种程度的拱起在 All-Clad 的公差范围内，但不在我的接受范围内。我能说什么呢？看着我那完美的 D5，我无奈地想，我就是喜欢平底锅。

I had a similar level of trouble with another pan I had high hopes for. The new 10-inch Viking Pure Glide Pro, which I had seen at my favorite trade show, has a textured titanium layer for the cooking surface above an aluminum core and stainless-steel bottom layer. Impressively, this combination of materials created a capable nonstick competitor that I’d be a lot more excited about if it was part of a better, sturdier pan. The Viking had some temperature management issues that I’ll get to in a moment, and it either warped or arrived warped to the point that heating oil would form a moat around the center of the pan. If Viking fixes this, the Pure Glide Pro has the potential to be a hell of a pan, but it’s not yet. 我在另一款寄予厚望的锅上也遇到了类似的问题。我在最喜欢的贸易展上见过新款10英寸 Viking Pure Glide Pro，它的烹饪表面采用纹理钛层，下方是铝芯和不锈钢底层。令人印象深刻的是，这种材料组合创造出了一款强有力的不粘锅竞争者，如果它能装配在更坚固的锅体上，我会更兴奋。Viking 在温度控制上存在一些问题（稍后我会提到），而且它要么是在使用中变形，要么是到货时就已经变形，导致加热油时会在锅中心周围形成一圈“护城河”。如果 Viking 能解决这个问题，Pure Glide Pro 有潜力成为一款绝佳的锅具，但目前还不行。

Confronted with these unimpressive results, I stewed about what to do for a good long while. Then I put all the pans on the counter next to the stove, bought a feeler gauge set with angled blades, opened a spreadsheet, and started some really monotonous data collection. After that, I opened up some cookbooks I’m excited about and got some real-world experience with these pans. 面对这些不尽如人意的结果，我纠结了很久该怎么办。后来，我把所有的锅都放在炉灶旁的操作台上，买了一套带斜角叶片的塞尺，打开电子表格，开始了一些非常枯燥的数据收集工作。在那之后，我翻开了一些我喜欢的食谱，对这些锅进行了实战体验。

Heated Rivalry

加热较量

For the data collection, I measured the heat distribution across the whole pan, how domed each pan was, the cost, whether or not it’s dishwasher safe, and how easy it is to handle. As a bonus, I judged how well I could do a skillet toss–snapping your wrist to flip the contents of the pan–with each model. 在数据收集方面，我测量了整个锅的受热分布、锅底的拱起程度、成本、是否可用洗碗机清洗以及操作的难易程度。此外，我还评估了每款锅在“颠锅”（通过手腕发力翻转锅内食物）时的表现。

A few things really stuck out. For heat distribution, I put each pan on the same burner, handle at 6 o’clock, temperature set to medium-low. On my induction stove, this meant every pan cooked over the exact same heat setting, and I let each one warm up for 3.5 minutes. I’ll note here that whether you are rating a pan or just cooking Tuesday dinner, it’s best to use a burner matched up to your pan size. Yes, heat will make it out to the edge on some pans better than others, but if your pan is matched to the size of the burner, you’ll be much happier. 有几点非常突出。在受热分布测试中，我将每个锅放在同一个炉头上，手柄指向6点钟方向，温度设定为中低火。在我的电磁炉上，这意味着每个锅都在完全相同的热量设置下加热，我让每个锅预热了3.5分钟。在此我需要提醒，无论你是评估锅具还是只是做顿周二晚餐，最好使用与锅具尺寸相匹配的炉头。没错，有些锅的热量传导到边缘的效果确实更好，但如果你的锅与炉头尺寸匹配，你的烹饪体验会好得多。

On my induction burner, the temperature on the surface of all of the pans except the Viking’s averaged somewhere around 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and the surface-temperature range between the hottest and coolest spots was only 14 to 21 degrees. Better yet, there were no hot spots to report. Talk about nice uniform quality! The two Vikings, though, were essentially giant hot spots, with the surfaces of each pan reaching the mid to high 300s, more than twice as hot as the competition。 在我的电磁炉上，除了 Viking 之外，所有锅具表面的平均温度都在华氏150度左右，最热点和最冷点之间的温差仅为14到21度。更好的是，没有发现明显的局部过热点。这才是真正均匀的品质！然而，两款 Viking 锅基本上就是巨大的“过热点”，表面温度达到了华氏300多度，比其他竞争对手高出一倍多。天哪！

Measuring the doming (or warping) is a little tricky because I had pans of slightly different widths. I took a hard measurement, putting the pan on a flat edge and using the feeler gauge to determine the gap between the edge and the center of the pan. With use, I was able to account for the pan size differences, and I assigned a score to each pan that I called the Warp Gap. The gaps on the All-Clad D3 and the Viking pans were clearly more than I could tolerate, and everything else was pretty good. 测量拱起（或变形）有点棘手，因为我手头的锅宽度略有不同。我进行了严格的测量，将锅放在平整的边缘上，并使用塞尺确定边缘与锅中心之间的间隙。通过使用，我能够考虑到锅具尺寸的差异，并为每个锅分配了一个我称之为“变形间隙”（Warp Gap）的分数。All-Clad D3 和 Viking 锅的间隙明显超出了我的容忍范围，而其他锅的表现都相当不错。