These new skillets immediately acquired appeal among outdoor enthusiasts, making it much easier for soldiers to take them during camping or backpacking trips.

The details: These pans solve the frustration of food sticking, and they require little oil for cooking. Plus they’re lightweight, easy to clean, and affordable. But they can’t take the high heat of a cast-iron or stainless steel frying pan. “You’re not going to get much of a sear in a nonstick pan,” says Cindy Fisher, who conducted Consumer Reports’ cookware tests.

And they don’t last as long as cast-iron, stainless, or copper frying pans. “Nonstick is going to wear out the fastest,” Nitahara says. “The nonstick coating is fragile, and once you scratch it, it’s hard to flip an egg.”

In our tests of nonstick pans, we cook four eggs in quick succession. An excellent rating means all four eggs easily slid out of the pan. A poor rating indicates that some egg residue was left behind. To test nonstick durability, we rub the pan with steel wool for 2,000 strokes or until the coating has worn through.

You want to match the pan to the job to get the best results in the kitchen. Skillets and saute pans are versatile, and they can handle most types of cooking methods. However, it is best to choose the suitable pans for your recipe. Take time to assess whether a saute pan or skillet is the right choice.

To help give you a running start, we’ve put together a guide to six of the most common pan materials, how to cook with them, what they’re best used for, and how to decide which one is right for you.

While they both look almost identical, frypans and skillets each have their own roles to play in the kitchen. Frypans are best used for foods that require lower heat such as eggs, pancakes, and the ever delicate fish. This is because the frypan’s curved edge makes it easier to maneuver the ingredients as you cook.

You cannot use metal utensils on non-stick pans as this will chip and scratch the chemical non-stick coating that can then flake into your food. If they become chipped or scratched, they will need to be discarded immediately and replaced. Instead of metal utensils, opt for wooden or silicone utensils when using a non-stick pan.

There's no difference between Frying Pans and skillets.

A:The disadvantages of using copper core frying pans include their high cost and their tendency to discolor with prolonged use.

Because of its wide base, a sauté pan is significantly heavier than the equivalent skillet, often necessitating the addition of a helper handle on the opposite side of the main handle to facilitate lifting and moving. While this weight is no problem when the pan is sitting still on the stovetop or in the oven, the lighter weight of a skillet makes it superior for shaking and stirring to promote even cooking of vegetables or pieces of chopped meat.