Saute Pan | Choosing and Buying the Right Saute Pan

The Most Important Pan In Your Kitchen

A good sauté pan must be one of your most important cookware pieces. If you want to purchase a decent pan to cook at home, make it a saute pan!

What is a sauté pan?

The pan to the right is a sauté pan. It has a wide, flat bottom, straight sides, a long handle, and a lid. Sometimes, you'll find them with a short "helper" handle opposite the long handle, like in this photo.

Every feature of the sauté pan is important when you are using it to sauté something. That's why it is critical not to let someone sell you a fry pan or skillet as a sauté pan.

Can they be used to sauté chicken breasts or filet of fish? Of course, but not as effectively as a properly designed, traditional sauté pan.

The concept behind sauteing is to cook food quickly over high heat in a little bit of fat (butter or oil).  The term sauté comes from the French term "sauter, " meaning "to jump."

You often see chefs in commercials or on cooking shows tossing the pan back and forth over a giant flame, sometimes flipping the ingredients in the air only to have them land perfectly back in the pan.

If you try this at home, be careful. It takes a lot of time and practice to master this skill. I would start with cold ingredients before trying it with hot oil and ingredients.

Learn How To Sauté

Important features of a good sauté pan?

Design

The saute pan is designed with a wide flat bottom so there is enough room in the pan not to crowd the ingredients. You want the ingredients to brown quickly without burning or steaming. Let's say you are sautéing some chicken breasts. If the pan is too crowded, the breasts will steam rather than brown and the end result will be soggy.

Another advantage of a flat bottom is when making the pan "jump" on the burner. A flat bottom is a lot easier to slide back and forth than a curved pan.

And most importantly, a flat bottom provides you even distribution of heat. When cooking a couple of flounder filets, you want the pan's heat to be uniformly distributed throughout the entire bottom of the pan otherwise you'll end up with unevenly cooked food.

The sides of a sauté pan are straight and also low when compared to a sauce pan. The straight sides help when making a pan sauce by keeping the liquids from spilling over the sides. They also help keep the food in the pan when making it "jump."

(I've got to tell you, I don't do much pan jumping when I'm sautéing. I'm just trying not to overcook the food but I do appreciate the straight sides when I'm stirring during reduction.)

The low sides help circulate air which helps prevent the food from getting soggy and keep the overall weight of the pan down so you can move it around a bit.

Handle

You want a long handle for a few reasons. You do move the pan around some on top of the burner. You may not be flipping ingredients in the thing in the air, but you do some shaking back and forth.

You may also move the pan from the top of the stove to the oven to finish cooking. A long, sturdy handle also has a great feel when cooking, so you must buy pans that feel good in your hands.

No matter what you use your sauté pan to cook, you want a well-constructed pan with a handle that you feel secure won't fall off when working with it. So look for sauté pans with securely attached handles to the pot. You want one that uses heavy screws or rivets with their handles.

Some of the new cookware on the market have handles that resist getting hot when used on your stovetop. This is great if you want to move the pot from the burner to the sink but you want to be careful if you put it in the over for any reason.

Cool resistant doesn't mean coolproof. Always use your oven mitts when taking any cookware out of a hot oven which means your sauté pans handle must be ovenproof.

You may like the look of a wooden handle, and it will definitely stay cooler than a metal one, but you can't use it in the oven, so forget about it.

Lid

You want a cover for your pan that fits tight. Besides using my sauté pan for sautéing, I often use it for braising where a tight cover is important.

Materials

There are many different schools of thought about what a good pan should be made of. In his article, you will learn about the various materials you can choose from, including copper, aluminum, cast iron, stainless, nonstick, and a combination of different materials. Each material has its own pluses and minuses, including cost.

Because of the nature of sautéing, you want a pan that is very responsive to the heat, so it gets hot quickly and cools off just as fast. This has to do with a pan's conductivity.

This means that the pan can transmit heat from the heat source to the food and do so both evenly and efficiently. Well-made sauté pans are highly conductive when they can transfer heat evenly across the bottom and up the side so the food cooks the way it should. Every metal conducts heat differently, so that's why it's important to match the type of pan you are using with the way you cook.

The best choice for conductivity is copper. The problem with copper is cost and they are a pain to keep shinny. I really don't have the time to polish my pots and pans, but maybe that's just me.

In my opinion, I think the anodized aluminum pans are the way to go. They transmit heat effectively and cost much less than copper, and they clean up easily.

You want to be sure the pan is made of heavy gauge material and that the bottom of the pan is thick. A thin bottom is a recipe for disaster because it often transmits heat unevenly and develops hot spots.

Just like ovens, all pans have hot spots. The cheaper pans have bigger hot spots and more of them. That's why you want to invest in a few really good pans if you are going to be doing a lot of cooking. And who doesn't have to cook every day?

If you want to spend less for that pot you boil your corn and spaghetti in, that's fine, but spend the extra buck on your sauté pan.

Companies like Calphalon created a "hard-anodizing" aluminum for cookware using an electrochemical method of preparing raw aluminum that was developed by NASA for the aerospace industry.

Talk about cooking with George Jetson. The end product is actually harder than stainless steel and is non-reactive to acids.

I would avoid nonstick surfaces for your sauté pan because they limit what you can do with them. Most nonstick pans can't go in the oven, although that is now changing.

They make it almost impossible to make a good pan sauce because it is difficult to create those brown bits called fond when sautéing a piece of meat or chicken.

I just purchased my first Calphalon One sauté pan and love it. It's not nonstick, and I use it for searing and making pan sauces, but the ingredients don't seem to stick to the pan like my older Calphalon pans. Cleaning it is also a breeze. Highly recommended!

Size

You can find sauté pans in various sizes from 1 qt. to 7 qt. but I think somewhere right in the middle is fine. My new Calphalon One is a smaller 2 quart pan but my 15 year old Calphalon is 3 quart.

 

Buying Sets or Individual pans

Some people like to buy the whole set at once and get it over with. When I started buying cookware, I couldn't afford to do it that way, so I started with one 4 ½ qt. saucepan and added on.

I bought some really cheap pots right out of school, but they didn't hold up very well and were awful to cook with. They're most likely buried in some box in the garage somewhere. Can't seem to throw them out.

The other reason I'm glad I didn't buy them all at once is that they keep coming up with new materials, designs, and features. It's great to find a new piece of cookware under the tree at Christmas and discover some new feature that makes using it easier.

So you can see there are a lot of choices when it comes to materials. Your choice will depend on what's available, the cost, and what feels good in your hand.

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