All Clad Stainless Steel Cookware Review: Pros and Cons

I'm the thrifty sort, so it took a lot for me to decide to buy All Clad stainless steel cookware - and it wasn't even on sale. Oh, except one pot that was at a discount because the manufacturer was promoting the cookware in my area. So I really wanted cookware that wouldn't rust, that would last, that would cook things nicely, and, oh, golly, I had lots of other picky requirements.

I didn't buy a whole set, just the pieces I would most use. I first bought a promotional $20 small saucepan without a lid and contemplated the advantages and disadvantages of making a more serious purchase. Then I broke down and bought a big Dutch oven (stockpot) with a lid and a 2 quart saucepan with a lid, then a wide broad frying pan with a lid. When my mom died, I inherited her two small All Clad frying pans. It's many years later now, and I'm so in love with this motley set of All Clad stainless steel cookware, it's hard for me to fathom. Here are my reasons why.

All the pieces I bought, and thankfully my All Clad Dutch oven (it may be called a stockpot these days - mine has a cylindrical shape rather than a rounded profile) have all metal parts. This means they can go from stovetop to oven easily.

I've used the Dutch oven to roast chicken and brisket. I've used it on the stovetop to slow cook stew, as well as for rice and spaghetti sauce. And because of this versatility, I've developed the quickest recipe for baked lasagna on the market: Make the meat sauce in the Dutch oven, lay in some uncooked lasagna noodles and spread them in the sauce in random patterns, and gently toss in some ricotta cheese.  Cover with shredded cheese.  Put the lid on and bake in a hot oven until done.

When my oven broke down, and I found myself desperate for cookies, I even used it on the stovetop to bake cookies in by placing a metal rack inside it. (I'm sure the manufacturer does not recommend that usage, but I did it anyway, and the cookies were yummy.)

I use my wide, broad All Clad frying pan less than my 2 quart sauce pan and Dutch oven. But what I use it for, I love. These days I primarily use it to boil bagels. Bagels need a big shallow pan to simmer in before they're baked. I can cook 7 bagels at a time in my All Clad - it's highly convenient. The lid is enormous, but it's also tight fitting and has not warped, which I consider a feat of manufacturing, given its size.

All Clad Is Not, However, Invulnerable

Given that I burn things far more than my husband does, I found it exquisite irony that the one time my All Clad didn't recover from a burn, it was my husband who perpetrated the crime, not me. The $20 All Clad pot I bought at the store sat on the stove while my husband, no mean cook himself, merrily burned tea in it. That's right. Tea.

While working in the shop, he boiled tea and sugar in that thing dry for I don't know how long. Sugar, when burned, becomes carmelized and usually can come off with soaking. On this occasion, however, my husband effected some serious chemical bonding, and that pot, with its flaked, burned bottom, has never been the same. We ran out of Barkeeper's Friend trying to get the stuff off.

My husband, who's handy to say the least, promises me he can remove it with some shop tools. I'm still waiting. I am not throwing that pot away. I love that pot...

My All Clad cookware hasn't even remotely begun to rust, and I trust that it never will in my lifetime.  It does have some scratches, since I ignore the instructions not to use metal utensils with it, but I'm the kind of cook that sort of likes my pots and pans to look used, anyway.

The lids to the pots and saucepan remain tightly fitting and shiny.  The cookware looks wonderful on the stove, so wonderful I don't feel I need to stash it away (and that's a good thing, because space shortages are the rule rather than the exception in our home).

Even more important, as I said above, food is so, so easy to clean off. I consider ease of cleaning one of the benefits of stainless steel cookware, and All Clad in particular, over nonstick. Why? Well, because with nonstick pans, I invariably reach for a scouring pad or something that destroys the nonstick surface, because even though it's supposed to be nonstick, it never is for me (my husband will claim that my attentiveness to my cooking, or lack thereof, is at fault, but that's his opinion.). With All Clad, I rarely have to use heavy duty scouring pads.

Because of the design of the pots, the handles of my All-Clad pieces don't get too hot to handle when you cook on the stovetop.  This seems like a small detail, but I can't count the time I've burned my hands on pot handles because the heat carries over and there was no oven mitt available.  That doesn't happen to me on these. 

However, I do have to be careful about the lids, which do get hot.  And this will sound silly, but it's all too easy to forget that a pot you just took out of the oven and set on the stove is too hot to touch!

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