Enamel pots are a popular choice for slow cooking and stewing.  Enamel coating not only adds a pop of color to the kitchen but also makes the pot easy to clean and maintain.  

A frying pan is ideal for cooking foods using high-heat cooking methods like frying, scrambling, sauteing, searing, and browning with little to moderate amounts of fat.

You can’t go wrong with a frying pan in the kitchen because it can be used for various purposes. Because frying pans are smaller and thinner than skillets, they heat up faster. As a result, your food and pan will be evenly and rapidly heated.

The flat bottom allows efficient heat conduction and a larger cooking surface for foods and fluids. You can distribute the food in the skillet due to the bigger size, but the high temperature may cause the food to burn.

Best for: Almost any food that needs searing, including steak and burgers. Cast-iron pans are ovenproof, so you can use them to roast meats like beef or pork and to bake cornbread, deep-dish pizza, shepherd’s pie, and more. And they retain heat so well that they’re a good choice for deep-frying chicken, doughnuts, or other foods because they keep the oil at a constant temperature.

The details: Cast-iron frying pans are practically indestructible, and they’re handed down for generations in many families. That makes their typically low price even more attractive. And if well cared for, cast iron develops a patina that releases food almost as well as nonstick. But the pans are heavy, and you have to be patient when heating them up because they don’t come up to temperature fast. Once they do, however, they retain heat.

Our tests of coated and uncoated cast-iron pans show how versatile this cookware can be. We sear steaks, brown scallops, and bake cornbread to see how well a cast-iron pan works for home cooks. The best pans ace all these tests. We also judge how easy they are to clean. Because of the enamel coating, the coated pans are a bit easier to clean than the uncoated ones.

Here are two recommended cast-iron pans from our tests.

The best way to tell whether a skillet or a Saute Pan is right for your recipe is to determine how much access you need to your food with a spatula while it cooks, the temperature, and the speed you plan to cook at, and how much liquid your recipe contains. Slow-cooking recipes that contain lots of liquid broths or sauces will benefit from the depth and large, flat cooking surface of a Saute Pan.