THE COMPANY
Cuisinart (pronounced “KWEEZ-in-art”) is a subsidiary of the Conair Corporation, which is perhaps better known for hair dryers. But don’t let that fool you; Cuisinart has been around since 1971.1 The short story is that Carl Sontheimer started Cuisinart in 1971 after visiting France and seeing semi-automated food preparation machines. He reversed-engineered a machine and added a feeding tube. His creation, dubbed a “food processor,” was a success. Cuisinart subsequently expanded into choppers in 1986. Sontheimer sold the company in 1989 for $60 million, which was re-sold to Conair Corporation later that year. Under Conair’s management, Cuisinart expanded its offerings to encompass virtually everything kitchen-related, from bakeware to wafflemakers.
THE PRODUCT BEING REVIEWED
Today, we’re going to look at the Cuisinart 89336-30H Professional Stainless Saute with Cover, 6-Quart, although this review is applicable to the rest of the product line
Overall Rating: 4.6/5 Excellent. For an explanation of ratings methodology, click here.
Cleanup: 4/5 Very Good. I never give 5/5 to stainless steel because it can stick, but if you preheat the pan, then turn down the heat to low (or medium low depending on your burner’s strength) and add oil, and THEN add food, you can minimize sticking. Deglazing a pan (adding a little liquid such as wine to stuck-on bits of protein while the pan is still hot) can also help with cleanup as well as make a great pan gravy.
As far as stainless pans go, it is of average stickiness. The saute pan has two rivets per handle, but I won’t deduct a point for rivets even though they are harder to clean than rivetless designs.
If you ever find yourself with dull protein stains or rainbows of heated oil left on the pan, try boiling a little vinegar and water in the pan. If that’s not enough, use Bar Keepers Friend.
Durability: 4/5 Very Good. The lids are glass, which some people may prefer (lets you see through, better insulation), but arguments can be made for stainless steel lids as well (durability, oven safe beyond 350 degrees Fahrenheit).
The body is on the thin side (0.6 mm thick stainless sidewalls; commercial cookware is usually at least 0.8 mm thick), but as long as you don’t bang around the Cuisinart pan too much, it shouldn’t dent. The rivets are firm, and the pan is oven-safe to 500F (350F with the glass lid). I have not noticed problems with warping (bending) in this pan, which is to be expected since it has such a nice, thick base.
Cuisinart won’t say what the steel quality is, so I’m going to assume that the interior is made out of 18/4 stainless (SAE 200 series), which they’ve used in their other product lines. It won’t resist corrosion quite as well as 18/10 but should suffice for most recipes–just don’t do day long, salty/acidic braises in it. Like almost every other stainless steel cookware made these days, the bottom steel is made out of magnetic 18/0 stainless (in order to make it induction-compatible), which is another step down in terms of corrosion resistance. Try not to let the pan sit wet for long periods of time.
Even heating: 5/5 Excellent. Take a look at the below screenshot from Fissler, a German cookware maker (I review Fissler Cookstar products here).
Most disc-base cookware is built like the “Other” pot in the photo, because it’s cheap to manufacture. Let’s say the bottom flat diameter of a pan is 24 cm. A hot aluminum disc of, say, 20 cm diameter is slammed onto that pan bottom, which flattens/squishes it slightly. (Often a stainless steel wrapper is wrapped on top of the aluminum to make the pot bottom more durable and induction-compatible.)
The lack of aluminum around the edge of the bottom of the cookware results in a ring of temperature discontinuity. On electric, this means a large temperature dropoff as you near the edges of the cooking surface, because no aluminum is there to transfer heat from the hotspots to the edges. On gas, this means a large temperature increase, because hot gases rising from underneath the pot will heat the thin stainless steel, with no aluminum to cushion the blow. This results in scorched oil and food at the edges of your cooking surface.
For an example of this problem, see at the above thermal image of my Sitram Profiserie Rondeau, 7.2-quart (I review it here). It’s about 12 inches in diameter, but with a ~0.6 inch thick temperature discontinuity ring around the bottom cooking surface.
If you’re boiling liquid, then the liquid will help move heat around and that temperature discontinuity might not matter so much. But what if you aren’t? What if you are cooking something solid? The usual solution is to stir, but sometimes you can’t be babysitting one pan continuously, or the food can’t be stirred easily. For instance, my wife Ann has a recipe that calls for peas, and chasing little peas around the perimeter of the saute pan is not very fun.
Cookware manufacturers are aware of the temperature discontinuity problem and have solved it in various ways:
- Fill the gap. Fissler in its Fissler Original Pro series (I review it here) has opted to completely fill the area underneath the bottom stainless steel wrapper. Their base bonds aluminum all the way to the edges of the cookware. The problem? High prices. Fissler wants over $200 for an 11 inch skillet for instance. For that price you might as well get a Demeyere Proline instead, as the Proline will also cook up the sidewalls as well.
- Bond a cladded vessel to an aluminum disc base. Cristel Casteline and others utilize such a hybrid design. The problem? High prices. Cristel’s prices aren’t any better than Fissler’s.
- Use oversized bottom discs of aluminum or copper that do not stop short of the edges. A stainless steel wrapper protects this protrusion and makes the pot induction-compatible. The diagram below is a screenshot from Demeyere; the photo is of the bottom of an actual Demeyere Atlantis saute pan. Demeyere’s design reduces the temperature discontinuity to maybe 0.2 inches or so–so small that it basically does not matter. The problem? High prices. Demeyere charges even more than Fissler and Cristel (though in Demeyere’s defense, copper is better than aluminum at spreading heat so you gain benefits other than removing the edge temperature discontinuity).
Enter Cuisinart’s newly-launched Professional Series Stainless series of cookware. Their “PowerBond” disc bottom looks an awful lot like Demeyere’s, protruding wrapper and all. You can see the result in the thermal image to the right. Just like the much more expensive Demeyere Atlantis series, the Cuisinart Professional Series Stainless series has minimized the band of temperature discontinuity. While a difference of 100 degrees F may sound bad, it’s actually pretty good for such a wide pan and significantly better than the 144 degrees F difference with the Sitram. For gas users, you won’t have a 0.6-inch ring around the edges that can overheat and scorch food/oil. And the price for the Cuisinart saute pan is amazingly affordable. I can’t think of any other manufacturer that’s done what Cuisinart has done, at the same price point or even close to it.
In terms of even heating, larger-diameter pans are penalized in my thermal testing because they have to spread heat a longer distance away from hotspots, but I also tested the 26cm saute pan in this product line to make it a little fairer, and I can tell you that products in this product line perform very well–about as well as pans with 5 mm thick aluminum disc bases, though it’s hard to say for sure due to the variation in design and coverage (because Cuisinart Professional Series Stainless has to cover more area, it’s at a disadvantage in my thermal testing compared to designs that truncate their discs and thus have a more even heating disc but a huge temperature falloff where the disc ends).
As for thermal retention, the pan does pretty well. It’s not going to be mistaken for extra-thick aluminum disc-base cookware like the much more expensive Paderno Grand Gourmet, which hold exceptional amounts of heat for searing massive steaks, but the Cuisinart still works fine for normal cuts. Plus with a thick aluminum base you can keep the heat on while cooking, without as much hot-spotting. Overall it’s a good balance between heat retention and responsiveness.
Handling and ease of use: 5/5 Excellent. The Cuisinart 89336-30H Professional Stainless Saute with Cover, 6-Quart weighs 3090 grams (1975 grams without lid). That’s 6.81 pounds and 4.35 pounds, with and without the lid. Given the large diameter and weight, it’s almost a must to have a helper handle, and thankfully this saute pan has both a comfortable handle and large helper handle for easy maneuvering–even with oven mitts on. The downside is that the handles look rather utilitarian. At least they have rounded corners.
The pan has flared rims for easy, drip-free pouring.
The glass lid has a large loop handle, so you are unlikely to burn your knuckles when you lift the lid.
Value: 5/5 Excellent. Cuisinart’s Professional Series Stainless product line is a good value. You would normally have to pay roughly three to five times as much money to get disc-base cookware without temperature discontinuities. And even if you don’t care about such discontinuities, the Cuisinart Professional Series Stainless heats more evenly and retains more heat than the company’s cheaper/thinner Cuisinart Chef’s Classic product line, making the modest increase in price easily justified.
In fact, Cuisinart’s Professional Series Stainless line nearly obsoletes Chef’s Classic; the Professional Series Stainless line heats more evenly AND doesn’t have a temperature discontinuity problem, at little extra cost. For instance, the Cuisinart 89-11 11-Piece Professional Stainless Cookware Set is only ~$50 more expensive than the Cuisinart 77-10 Chef’s Classic Stainless 10-Piece Cookware Set–and the Professional Series Stainless set has one additional piece (a steamer insert) that can be very useful. (On the other hand the Chef’s Classic set comes with stainless steel lids, which some may prefer over glass lids. And while Chef’s Classic is not induction-compatible, it does use a higher grade of stainless on its cookware bottoms (18/4), which is more corrosion resistant than the Professional Series Stainless’s magnetic stainless.)
Versatility: 4/5 Very Good.
The glass lids max out at 350F, so you can’t use them for hotter oven work, though if that’s a big enough issue for you, you could get third-party steel lids, or a universal lid such as this one.
Skillets also work better with cladded sidewalls. As good as the disc bases may be in this product line, they don’t cover the curved sidewalls of the skillets that well, so you can still scorch the sides or else have too-cool sides that can lead to protein sticking to them when you pour out, or runny eggs near the edges.
The pots and pans are dishwasher-compatible.
CONCLUSION
Cuisinart’s Professional Series Stainless product line is a good value and would be my default recommendation for anyone looking for cheap, good-performing disc-base cookware. You would normally have to pay three to five times as much money to get disc-base cookware without temperature discontinuities. And even if you don’t care about such discontinuities, the Cuisinart Professional Series Stainless heats more evenly and retains more heat than the company’s cheaper/thinner Cuisinart Chef’s Classic product line, making the modest increase in price easily justified.
The biggest downside is that Cuisinart Professional Series Stainless has relatively thin sidewalls (0.6mm) and uses what is presumably 18/4 stainless steel, so it’s less physically and chemically robust than 0.8mm+ 18/10 stainless.
Another downside is how most Cuisinart Professional Series Stainless products must be bought as part of a set–and Cuisinart doesn’t even clearly state what sizes the pieces are in its 11- and 13-piece sets. So I’ve listed the set contents below:
- 2 Qt. Saucepan with cover
- 3 Qt. Pour Saucepan with straining cover
- 4 Qt. Sauté Pan with helper handle and cover
- 5 Qt. Pour Dutch Oven with straining cover
- 8 Qt. Stockpot with cover
- 8″ Non-Stick Skillet
- 10″ Skillet
- 18 cm Steamer Insert
- 2 Qt. Saucepan with cover
- 3 Qt. Pour Saucepan with straining cover
- 3 Qt. Saute Pan with helper handle and cover
- 8 Qt. Stockpot with cover
- 8″ Non-Stick Skillet
- 10″ Skillet
- 18 cm Steamer Insert
The main differences between the two sets are:
- The 13-piece set’s saute pan is 4 quarts (26cm diameter, or 10.24 inches) and the 11-piece set’s saute pan is 3 quarts (24cm diameter, or 9.45 inches).
- The 13-piece set comes with a 5-quart dutch oven with lid.
Note that the Professional Series’s 8-inch skillet is lined with nonstick PTFE (e.g., Teflon), probably because they figure that people use that size mostly for eggs, which are notoriously sticky.
Personally I like larger saute pans like the 4-quart one in the Cuisinart 89-13 13-Piece Professional Stainless Cookware Set, because it allows you to cook down larger heaps of greens or to make more food for a larger family or leftovers. It’s also nice to have a 5-quart dutch oven which fits ovens more easily than 8-quart stock pots.
But the Cuisinart 89-11 11-Piece Professional Stainless Cookware Set is a better deal if you don’t need the extra quart on the saute pan or the 5-quart dutch oven.
Some of the skillets might not come with lids, so if you don’t already have other lids that will fit, I would recommend buying a universal lid such as this one.
FOOTNOTES