The Best Saucepans

Cookware doesn’t get much simpler than a saucepan: It’s basically a steep-sided bowl with a handle and a lid. But it also doesn’t get more important, since this is the vessel you’ll use to prepare everything from soups and sauces to pasta and grains to custards and puddings. And when it comes to performance, we’ve found that the differences between models can be surprisingly significant. 

We think that a stainless-steel saucepan with a capacity of 4 quarts is the best all-purpose size for most cooks. It’s a little less than half the size of our favorite Dutch oven, giving you a handy medium-size vessel in which to make a wide variety of foods.

Consider a 2-quart saucepan if you cook for one or two people or just want a smaller but still durable saucepan that will let you warm up leftovers, make small batches of soup or rice, or heat milk or water.

Yes, up to a point. Over the decades, we’ve tested dozens of saucepans in a wide range of prices. We’ve found that less expensive saucepans are often less well-made and less durable, warping or denting more easily or having handles that loosen over time. They can be too heavy or poorly balanced, making them difficult to lift and maneuver, or too lightweight, making them prone to warping. And they have other design flaws that make them perform less well. 

Our favorite saucepan costs more but is worth the investment. It performs better than cheaper models, is easy to handle, and is much more durable—it will last a lifetime if you treat it right, saving you money in the long run. In our opinion, you don’t have to spend more than what our top choice costs—fancier, more expensive five-ply models won’t perform better and will be heavier and more ponderous to use.

There are good options if you’re willing to sacrifice some durability and ease of handling, though. Our Best Buy is about half the price of our favorite and performs nearly as well, though it’s more vulnerable to damage.

• Fully Clad Construction: We prefer saucepans that are “fully clad,” meaning that the cooking surface and walls are made of three or more layers of bonded metal, such as two layers of nonreactive, moderately heat-conductive stainless steel sandwiching one layer of highly heat-conductive aluminum. This construction is engineered to heat evenly and reasonably quickly.

• Straight Sides: Saucepans with straight sides are easy to see into, so you can tell if your butter is browning or your onions are properly softened. 
• Broad Cooking Surfaces: We liked pans that gave us plenty of room to cook on; for 4-quart saucepans, this meant a surface diameter of at least 7.5 inches.

• Moderate Weight and Even Balance: We liked pans that weren’t too heavy, especially since we often need to tilt them for controlled pouring or keep them aloft with one hand while scooping or scraping out food with the other. Pans that weighed more than 4 pounds without their lids were hard to lift and maneuver when laden with food. But good balance was even more important than weight: The Le Creuset saucepan we tested, for example, weighed about 10 ounces less than the All-Clad model but felt off-balance and was thus more cumbersome to tilt and pour from.
• Main Handles That Are Easy to Grip and Stay Cool: The best handles had angled shapes of moderate breadth that let us lock in a secure grip. Our favorites also stayed cooler on the stove, letting us skip pot holders.
• Large Helper Handles: These secondary handles made it easier to move and maneuver the saucepan.
• Tightly Fitting Stainless-Steel Lids with Large, Looped Handles: We liked lids that fit into pans snugly, as these kept steam from escaping, ensuring evenly cooked rice pilaf. And we preferred stainless-steel lids, as they were more durable than glass ones.

• Great Durability: The best saucepans resisted warping when we subjected them to thermal shock, heating them and then plunging them into ice water. They also didn’t dent and their handles remained tightly affixed even after we banged them against a concrete block three times.

• Disk-Bottom Pans: With these saucepans, metal layers are found only in a disk attached to the bottom of the pan, which is otherwise constructed of a single layer of stainless steel. While disk-bottom pans are cheaper than fully clad models, we’ve found that they heat more erratically, allowing food to scorch. 
• Flared or Bulging Sides: These made it harder to see into the pan, so we couldn’t monitor cooking progress as easily.
• Narrow Cooking Surfaces: Smaller cooking surfaces limit the volume of food you can cook at a time or force you to crowd your food so that it steams instead of browning properly.
• Heavy Weight and/or Poor Balance: Heavier saucepans were unwieldy and hard to maneuver, especially when laden with food. But pans with poor balance were even more cumbersome, making us struggle to pour custard or drain beans easily. 
• Narrow or Round Main Handles: These were hard to grip securely. Narrow handles cramped our hands, and round handles slipped in our grasp, rotating suddenly and dangerously as we were pouring out boiling water, steaming-hot pilaf, and molten custard.
• Small Lid Handles: Small and knob-like handles were harder for us to grasp, especially when our hands were sheathed in oven mitts or protected by pot holders. 
• Poor Durability: Only a few pans came away from our abuse tests unscathed, with many models denting when we whacked them on a concrete block or warping when we heated them and plunged them into ice water. 

Minor Flaws

• Glass Lids: These are less durable than stainless-steel lids and steam up quickly during use, limiting the visibility that they promise.
• Pour Spouts: We’ve found that these actually make it harder to pour foods neatly. They also allowed steam to leak out when we used the saucepan with its lid, resulting in unevenly cooked rice pilaf.