Four pots and pans you really need to cook up a feast
MY FAMILY moved often while I was growing up, living in small flats and even occasionally on a sailboat, so our entire kitchen inventory – including a saucepan, frying pan, stockpot and wok – could fit in one box tucked into the back of our Chevy hatchback.
We could cook pretty much everything with those pans, since they were easily adaptable for tomato soup, blueberry pancakes, steamed crabs, fried rice or any other hankering we might have.
As an adult, after spending a couple of decades living in a single-family home with plenty of kitchen storage, my husband and I downsized to a two-bedroomed flat with less space for specialised equipment.
After I gave a Marie Kondo “thank you” to a dusty 11-litre pasta pot, copper crépe pan and an impractical 4.5kg cast-iron frying pan, my newly streamlined kitchen is now focused on the four – okay, maybe five – pans that can take any household from breakfast to dinner.
If you’re building a kitchen as opposed to cutting back, don’t be afraid to buy individual pans instead of a full set, especially because pans come in a dizzying array of materials.
“I’m sort of a minimalist when it comes to kitchen tools because I live in New York City,” says Elinor Hutton, the author of The Encyclopedia of Kitchen Tools, “but wherever you live, it can make sense to mix and match, to customise your pans to exactly the kind of food you cook.”
And if you have an occasion coming up when you are preparing a special dish or a feast for a crowd, consider borrowing any special pans from your neighbours. Your kitchen cabinets will thank you.
Once you decide which kinds of pans to buy, you need to pick the materials they’re made from.
Stainless-steel pans can be great for searing, while hard-anodised cookware (made from aluminium, stainless steel or ceramic) has a surface similar to non-stick pans but may require some oil when cooking. Non-stick cookware, coated in a synthetic polymer, may be important to your lifestyle because it reduces the amount of cooking oil and offers faster clean-up, while traditional cast-iron or glass cookware might be
your jam. Feel free to mix and match so that whatever pan you reach for, it’s exactly the right one for you.
On to the essentials: with a few adjustments to suit your lifestyle, these four pots and pans will be the workhorses you’ll depend on every day.
A casserole dish
“This is the pan I probably reach for most often,” says Hutton. “You can bake bread in it, cook beans in it, even roast a whole chicken in it.”
Typically made of cast iron and often coated with enamel, these wider short pots have a tight-fitting lid and can handle a wide range of recipes.
Hutton suggests a 3 to 6-litre option, big enough to cook chilli and stews, and, if you opt for an oval instead of round shape, is the perfect size and shape for boiling long pasta, negating the need for a larger stockpot.
A SINGLE saucepan, either 3 to 6 litres or 7 to 11 litres, depending on the size of your family, is enough to fulfil most kitchen tasks.
A 30cm frying pan (or two)
There are two styles of these round shallow pans: one has slightly higher straight sides, called a sauté pan, which is great for searing, sautéing and even cooking pasta, while the other (known as a skillet or frying pan) has shorter sloped sides, just right for French toast, grilled cheese sandwiches and fried eggs.
“Whatever kind of pan you choose,” says Hutton, “I would definitely get a lid for it. That way you can use it for steaming, sautéing and frying – it’s a lot of functionality in one pan.”
When opting for two, many folks choose a non-stick slope-sided frying pan, for ease of flipping pancakes and eggs, then a heavier steel or cast-iron straight-sided sauté pan (or skillet), which can also be popped in the oven
for cornbread – with one lid to fit both pans.
A 7–11-litre saucepan
A saucepan is a deep, straight-sided, round pan with a handle, perfect for making rice, gravy or hard-boiled eggs. In my empty-nester household, a 7 to 11-litre is the right size, but a 3 to 6-litre can be more practical for larger families, like Hutton’s, when you might be regularly making a pot of oatmeal for breakfast for the kids. A wild-card pan
This is the pan customised to your own needs. For me, it’s a carbon-steel wok, something I use several times a week; for you, it might be a 7 to 11-litre stockpot for re-creating your Nonna’s Sunday dinners, or maybe it’s the 15cm frying pan that’s just the right size for making your favourite egg-in-a-hole. |