The Best Sauté Pans, Tested and Reviewed

We love a good cast-iron skillet or carbon-steel frying pan, but if there’s only one pan to keep in your kitchen, it should be a sauté pan. The best sauté pan can do just about anything you need it to. Like a frying pan or skillet, it sears and browns, with ample surface area to cook multiple pieces of meat, blocks of tofu, whole vegetables and just about everything else. The high sides make it ideal for one-pot meals, letting you cook with plenty of room to groove. That height also makes it possible to deep-fry foods, simmer stocks, boil water for pasta in a pinch, and generally stand in for a Dutch oven. Even if a sauté pan isn’t the perfect pan for a job, odds are good that it can still get the job done.

To make full use of its potential powers, the best sauté pan needs to be oven-safe, which not only lets you move things from the stovetop to the oven to finish cooking, but allows you to use it in place of a roasting pan when making chicken or braising pork. It should be sturdy enough to hold up to daily use, but not so heavy that it’s difficult to maneuver. And, of course, it needs to be easy to clean. Scroll down for our two top picks and everything else we found when we tested some of the best sauté pans on the market.

This pan handles like a dream, and gets the nod here over other towering names in the world of stainless-steel cookware like AllClad and Demeyere because it’s such a tremendous value. Its 4" high straight sides kept spattering schmaltz well contained, the skin on our chicken thighs shattered like glass when we cut into them, and not a single speck of fond remained stuck to the pan when we deglazed it for a pan sauce. All that in a pan that, at the time of writing, costs less than $80. The handles and lightweight construction made it easy to transfer in and out of the oven without worrying about losing balance. It’s large enough to fit an entire head of shredded cabbage; while we had to remove the opaque stainless-steel lid to keep an eye on the cooking process, the pan remained hot enough to cook it down in about five minutes. The pomodoro cooked perfectly, and it took nothing more than a few seconds with a soapy Scrub Daddy to remove any traces of sauce left behind. We’re recommending the 5-qt. version, but there is a larger 6-qt. Tramontina sauté pan for just a few dollars more.

It has an opaque lid—all stainless steel—that makes it a little more irritating to check on the progress of a cook than a glass lid would. Also, like all stainless-steel cookware, food will stick to the Tramontina if you don’t use enough fat in the pan.

Choosing a nonstick sauté pan over a stainless-steel one is a convenience pick over a longevity one. What the GreenPan offers that the Tramontina or a pricier AllClad or Hestan does not is stress-free crisping of chicken skin or stir-frying of vegetables. When we cooked chicken thighs with the Valencia, they released easily and right away. They freely slid around with a shake of the comfortable, but not-so-long handle. This pan also did a fabulous job of cooking down greens and a pomodoro sauce. The one thing to note is that this is a ceramic-coated nonstick pan. We try to recommend ceramic nonstick pans over ones with traditional nonstick coatings whenever possible due ceramic pans’ lack of forever chemicals. But they come with some other advantages over Teflon pans, most notably their high heat tolerance. The GreenPan Valencia is oven-safe up to 600℉. Teflon or other PFAS (polyfluoroalykl substances) coated cookware or bakeware really shouldn’t be exposed to anything over 350℉, which is quite limiting for a pan that will frequently move stovetop to oven. Ceramic pans are also dishwasher-safe, though we always recommend hand-washing all types of coated pans to preserve their nonstick capabilities.

The chicken skin did not get as deeply browned as it did in the good stainless-steel pan; the furthest it went was dark gold. Though delicious in its own right, it won’t be as satisfying for someone hoping for bits of char. The other thing to note about ceramic nonstick cookware generally, is that it doesn’t keep its nonstickiness as long as a well-cared for pan with a Teflon coating. You’ll likely need to look at replacing it in two to three years. We’ve used the pan for months, not years. So while we haven’t experienced this yet, our long run testing ceramic cookware and GreenPan cookware specifically, tells us this will be something to watch out for with this pan.

The first thing we tried cooking when searching for the best sauté pans were skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs. We seared them skin side down over medium-high heat, which showed us how quickly the pans conducted heat and how evenly it was dispersed across the cooking surface. Once browned, we flipped the thighs over and moved the sauté pans to the oven to finish cooking, noting any variations in cooking times, as well as the browning of the undersides. While our finished thighs rested, we returned the sauté pans to the stovetop to make a quick sauce. After adding a bit of chopped garlic, we deglazed the pans with white wine to see if the fond released easily or if the brown bits stubbornly stuck to the bottom.

Next, we cooked down shredded cabbage, which allowed us to test how well the sauté pans retained heat with their lids, and how quickly they were able to evaporate excess moisture. Finally, we tested the pans reactivity by making a simple pomodoro sauce, keeping stirring to a minimum to see if the pans would simmer safely, or scorch the sauce. In addition to cooking, we also paid close attention to the cleaning, noting if a sauté pan required vigorous scrubbing or any cleaning products outside of standard dish soap and water.

We feel similarly about the Hestan Nanobond sauté pan as we do about the Nanobond frying pan and saucier. It is a phenomenal pan. It cooks as well as any pan we tested, but there are three notable differences between it and the Tramontina recommended above: It’s slightly heavier, it’s not as comfortable to hold with one hand, and it’s nearly seven times more expensive. The pan’s a looker and a performer, but you’ll have to decide if it’s worth close to $600.

All-Clad has long been the standard bearer for what cookware should be, and we’ve made no secret of our love for the brand. Its Tri-Ply sauté pan is built around an aluminum core that offers quick, even heating, surrounded by durable, nonreactive stainless steel that offers good heat retention and makes it compatible with induction cooktops. Honestly, it’s a spectacular pan that impressed us in every test, and it will undoubtedly impress you as well. However, it’s a little heftier and harder to handle than the similarly constructed, high-performing Tramontina model—not to mention twice the price.

The Demeyere is another well-constructed pan that did an excellent job searing, sautéing and simmering. Alas, when we tested it side by side with the Tramontina, this sauté pan felt bulky and unwieldy.

Only available as a 3.5-qt. sauté pan, the Made In is fine if you’re cooking for one or two people, but not much use to people with families or who throw dinner parties. It also required two rounds of scrubbing to get fully clean after we made our chicken thighs, as the fond didn’t all release during deglazing, which left the bottom of the pan with some discoloration.

The heat distribution on the Calphalon wasn’t as good as some other pans we tested. Hot spots meant we had to move our chicken thighs around a few times to get them to brown evenly, and the opaque lid kept us from keeping an eye on our greens. It’s a fine pan, and affordable, but a mid-tier performer.

Chicken thighs released easily from this ceramic-coated pan, but as with the GreenPan, they didn’t brown deeply. We’d pick the GreenPan over this one because of the Cuisinart’s opaque lid, which makes monitoring a stovetop cook challenging.

HexClad attempts a sort of “greatest hits” of cookware. Like stainless steel, Hexclads are nonreactive. Like cast-iron pans, they’re durable and retain heat like champs. And like nonstick pans, they’re, well, pretty nonstick. It performed well in all our cooking tests. Chicken thighs, for example, browned brilliantly, the skin left crackling and golden, and lifted off the pan without any resistance. The handle is comfortable to hold, and while it wasn’t the lightest pan we tried, it was still easy to lift and maneuver. The problem with the Hexclad is the slightly ambiguous nature of its materials. The brand has, in the past said that its pans are PFAS free, but also said they do contain PTFE, which is a subset of PFAS. As we said above, we try to avoid recommending PFAS when we can, so while this pan did perform well, it wasn’t so much better that we’d recommend it instead of a ceramic-coated option like the GreenPan.