The Best Cookware Sets

These fully clad pans brown beautifully and feel balanced, the handles stay cool, and they’re tough as nails. The set offers essential pieces in practical sizes that will last a lifetime. The set price is a bargain: The 8-quart stockpot alone usually retails for nearly $340.

This huge collection of practical, useful pan sizes and shapes comes at a truly bargain price for clad cookware. (Note: There’s also an 8-piece set, which costs about $110, with five pans [5-quart Dutch oven, 2- and 3-quart saucepans, and 8- and 10-inch frying pans].) Our only quibble: The pans in this set are a bit heavier and not quite as well-balanced as those in our top-rated set, and the handles get hot.

We love the compact, innovative design of this set: Its nesting cookware makes it easy to store. To nest, though, the skillet was wide (which we liked), but the so-called stockpot was stumpy and flat (it resembles a sauté pan); it was impossible to cook more than a pound of pasta in it, and even that was a challenge. If you’re willing to work around this, it’s sturdy, high-performance cookware.

This set was a heartbreaker. It has well-designed, balanced pans with practical sizes and shapes and comfortable, cool handles at an outstanding price. Everything cooked beautifully. And then, on the last day of abuse testing, the skillet warped badly as we heated it to 500 degrees on an induction burner, leading us to worry about the set’s durability. (A second copy of the pan did not warp when we heated it more gradually to 500 degrees, however.) Note: Since we originally tested this cookware set, the manufacturer changed its name from Potluck to Goldilocks; the products themselves remain the same.

We loved that this set included mixed materials; the cast-iron Dutch oven made excellent stew and cleaned up beautifully, the fully clad metal stockpot worked well for pasta, and the tiny nonstick pan was handy for eggs. Pans generally performed well, but we disliked the bent-metal-tube handles, which were uncomfortable and got hot. Cleaning the clad cookware was a pain; it became more stained than other pans, ending up with permanently discolored surfaces (particularly on the skillet), so it quickly looked worn-out.

Excellent browning and comfortable handles helped this cookware score well, but the dinky 5-quart stockpot, which was narrow and tall and just a bit bigger than our favorite large saucepan, was a big disadvantage when cooking pasta and stew; we could fit only 1 pound of pasta and had to stir furiously to keep it from sticking; it took many more batches than usual to brown the beef for the stew. The frying pan’s sides tapered down to a 7-inch cooking surface, which felt cramped.

Steaks and meatballs browned well in this thick five-ply cookware, but the pans felt heavy and off-balance. Handles heated up on the stovetop, and their fat, round shape turned in our hands and made it hard to lift pans full of food. We liked that the set included a saucier with rounded corners for easy stirring. The biggest flaw: It had no stockpot or vessel larger than 3 quarts, so we couldn’t cook pasta or stew.

This set lacked a stockpot, so we couldn’t cook pasta or stew. The knife felt unbalanced, unimpressive, and unnecessary in a cookware set. We wish the saucepan were bigger. That said, the pans it did include were tough and cooked food fairly well, and the handles (though skinny) stayed cool.