The Best Cookware For Every Cooking Occasion

1. Our Place Always Pan

To be clear, this post is not sponsored. Genuinely, I use this pan more than any other. It washes easily, heats up quickly, and has a comfortable handle and nontoxic, nonstick coating. I use it for single dishes, like glazed carrots or garlic peas. But I also use it for cooking full individual meals in one pan. For breakfast, sausage, eggs, and potatoes; for lunch, steak, fried rice, and zucchini, the shape of the edge makes tossing food super easy without losing a bunch out of the sides. It responds quickly to everything I want to do with it, so when I want to cook something fast, this is the pan I reach for. It’s the Honda Accord of my cooking collection - maybe not the flashiest or fanciest, but dependable, functional, and pretty. 

2. Le Creuset Cast Iron Dutch Oven

The heat retention of cast iron is unrivaled, and the enamel coating solves all of the maintenance headaches of traditional cast iron. Of course, the downside is the cookware is no longer a source of iron in your diet (which is a real thing - using cast iron cookware to supplement iron levels), but the upsides are worth it for most, I’d say. Durability, heat retention, capacity - I use this one a lot for stews, soups, curries, pot roasts, whole roasted chickens, and braises – a lot of moist-heat cooking methods, but also great for larger cuts of beef or poultry. I trust this dutch oven to do anything I need. 

3. Material Sauté Pan

There’s very little you can’t cook in a pan like this. I often talk about what pans I would choose if space were limited. But if I had to choose only one pan to have - only one, total - it would be between this and my cast iron dutch oven. You can fry, sauté, boil, braise, and roast - what it lacks in capacity, it makes up for in versatility, and if you’re cooking for 2-4 people, this one will do anything you need. I use this pan for vegetables of every kind, and it transitions flawlessly from stove to oven for combination cooking (sear a roast, finish it in the oven, for example). 

4. Baking Sheet Pan w/Cooling Rack

I’ve had a similar set of these pans for 15 years. Granted, mine don’t look this clean and I often get remarks about that. “Barkeepers friend will clean that pan right up!” Meh. These things work like a charm, discolored or not, and they’re still my most used roasting pan. I often roast at higher heats than a lot of recipes say (gotta get that browning), and these baking sheets handle it better than sheets that have a coating, like the Our Place Oven Pan mentioned below. That’s probably why I continue to reach for these, time after time. 

5. All-Clad Perforated Multipot

This was a Christmas gift from Jules about five years ago, and I still use it a few times a week. If I could only choose one pot to have, it would be this. The 8qt capacity is great for small groups (though, admittedly, I’m eyeing the 12qt since we entertain so often), and there’s not much you can’t cook with it. Originally marketed as a pasta pot, it’s now called a multipot because the strainer basket is versatile for more than just pasta. I use it to boil and strain potatoes for mashed potatoes, to make large batches of stock, to blanch vegetables, and, yes, strain pasta. 

6. Our Place Perfect Pot

Another versatile piece of cookware, the Perfect Pot has the same nontoxic, nonstick coating as all of Our Place’s goods, with more capacity. This is the only pot I use for rice, and because the surface is nonreactive it’s great for tomato sauces and acidic foods. It doesn’t have as high of capacity as some of my other pots, so I only use it for soups and curries we don’t have company coming over. But since most nights we don’t, I use it a lot. 

7. Material Coated Pan

This is my favorite pan for eggs. Material goods are great quality, non-toxic and versatile. I cook a lot of things in this pan - vegetables, steaks, chicken, fried rice. But I usually use it for those things only if I’m first cooking some eggs in it. When I cook, it’s just cleaner to use the same pan for multiple things, so if I pull this pan out for eggs, then I’ll cook several things in it before I’m done. So even though this one is further down my list, if I were limited on space, it’s one of the pans I’d definitely make room for. 

8. Our Place Oven Pan

This is a great baking sheet and cleans up really easily. I dare say it’s better than my old-school baking sheets listed above, but I’m a creature of habit and haven’t quite made the shift to reach for this one first. It has taller sides than a typical baking sheet, the nonstick coating is non-toxic and works great, and it comes with a silicone baking mat. I use this one for roasting potatoes & vegetables and baking cookies, and it even works as a griddle on the stovetop for pancakes and eggs, which we’ve done a few times. 

9. Mauviel Copper M’150 B Saucepan

Jules bought me a full copper set of cookware for Christmas a couple of years ago, and for some reason, I often forget to reach for them. Maybe because they look so beautiful on the shelf, I see them more as decoration than utilitarian. But whenever I do use them, they’re amazing. Very responsive to heat changes. I use the saucepan the most out of all of the pieces because it heats up the fastest for boiling water. I use this one for boiling and poaching eggs, making smaller portions of soup for lunches or sick kids, warming and mixing sauces, and the occasional packet of ramen. (okay, more than occasional)

10. Black Cube Wok 

The purists may come at me about this one, but I love these new hybrid cooking surfaces like Black Cube and Hexclad. A carbon steel wok is the ultimate cooking vessel, to be sure. But cooking, clean up, and maintenance are a lot easier with this than with carbon steel, especially in our humid climate (anything high carbon starts to rust within a day or two). This has been one of my favorite new pans of the last year, and it's so fun to break out. I use this for stir-fry, deep frying, fried rice, noodles, curries - a lot of Asian-style foods, which I’m trying to become better at.