Table of Contents
As a home cook, I have used many stainless tell pans in the last 5-10 years, starting from ones from new international brands like Misen or Sardel to the more local European brands like Zepter or Metalac.
For a long time, I listened to the reviews of the All-clad stainless steel pans and how they are standard of excellence in the stainless steel cookware industry. However, because of the high price tags, I was postponed to take some of these pans for my kitchen. Moreover, I am always turning the same question in my head: Is an All-clad cookware relay worth its price for a home cook?
Finally, I decided to order an All-clad D3 10-inch stainless steel pan and test it in weekly cooking. Now, after almost six months of challenging this pan, shoulder to shoulder with other stainless steel skillets I use, I will share with you my impression if the All-clad D3 stainless steel skillet is worth the price?(from the perspective of a home cook who would use 4-5 times per week?)
In the Kee takeaway section below, I will share my short answer to this question, followed by the summary table with the main advantages and disadvantages behind the pan. Finally, in the main text, I will give details of my tests with an All-clad D3 pan and experiences from weekly cooking, based on which I am writing the conclusions about All-Clad D3 stainless steel in this post.
Kee takeaways
I discovered that All-Clad D3 ply stainless steel pan is very handy for most of the cooking techniques I used, starting from searing meat, making sauces, preparing Italian food like risotto or pasta, as well as making delicate food like eggs, omelettes or pancakes(which I love to flip in this pan.)
However, after testing All clad D3 shoulder to shoulder with some other middle-price tag stainless steel pans I use like ones from Misen or Sardel(e.g. between 50 and 100$), the All-clad D3 stainless steel hasn’t shown a significant difference in its cooking performance (even if it as a bit better in specific tests I did-see upcoming subheadings).
* By cooking performance, I am thinking of parameters like Heat distribution evenness, the heat holding capacity of the pan, heating up of the handle during the cooking, as well as the design characteristics of the pan such as handle design and weight. Moreover, In the following text, I will give more details about the exact test I used to examine this parameter and the results that I got.
| Main Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| High-quality pan that havent shown any sighs of warping after 6months of use | High Price tag (Paying for brands name not just the product) |
| Lifetime guarantee when ordered from All-Clad directly or authorised retailers like Amazon | The cookware ordered from 3rd party retailers oftenly comes as deffective |
| Lightweight- as a 3-Ply stainless steel pan it is much lighter than 5 ply ss pans* | |
| Pan handle greatly designed for tossing and flipping thefood |
*See what 3-Ply and 5-Ply construction means in the first chapter (1.Pan weight and design)
Who should buy this product?
If you are a home cook who Is aiming to use pans such as All-clad D3 each day or a few times a day, you are preparing for cooking competitions, or maybe going towards a professional career, buying All-Clad may be an option to go. Moreover, for professional chefs who would use such cookware in their daily cooking, it may be a great choice.
However, for a home cook who will use such pan several times per week(3-5) like me, the All-Clad D3 pan is not worth its price since quite comparable results can be achieved with some middle price tag pans like Misen, Sardel that I know from personal experience but probably also the pas from some other companies. So would I buy the clad pan if I knew what I know now for weekly cooking as a home cook? The answer is No; I probably would not.
Finally, If you are interested in more of my experience(after more than a year of use) with Misen and Sardel stainless steel pans, you can look at my in-depth review posts about them. There, I presented the cooking performance test results for these pans, some great features I found, but also some downsides that may be good to know.
Now lets jump straight to the different tests and cooking practices I used to challenge the All-Clad D3 stainless steel pan and the results.
1. Pan weight and design
As soon as I received the pan, I noticed that it weightless compared to some other 10-inch fully clad pans I have. Moreover, the good reason is that most of the full-clad pans I use are made from 5 layers of metal, while D3 All-Clad stainless steel comes in 3 metal layers.
However, you may be wondering what full-clad cookware construction means at all and how the D3 All-Cad stainless steel pan is constructed?
Fully-clad stainless steel cookware is basically made of several metal sheets, which, in the case of 3-layer full-clad cookware (like an All-clad D3 pan) include two outer sheets of stainless steel and an inner sheet of aluminium which are all bonded together.
The inner aluminium is there to accelerate the heat transfer between the two sides of the pan since this metal has a much higher heat-conducting capacity than stainless steel.
Finally, the 5 layers full clad stainless steel comprised of outer and central layers are from stainless steel, and the remaining two layers between these three sheets are from Aluminium(see the schema below)
*5 layer full clad stainless steel is also known as 5-ply stainless steel while layered ss is also called 3-ply ss
Cladding is used to increase the heat transfer and even spreading performance of cookware and make cookware more resistant to warping. In theory theory 5-ply pans should be more resistant to warping and thus more durable than 3-ply stainless steel pans. However, in practice good quality 3-ply steel pans, like All-Clad D3 pans are also quite resistant and durable(see the durability chapter).
On the other side, the 3ply pans are lighter than the 5ply ones, which can be a good advantage.
The exact weight of the 10-inch D3 All-Clad pan is 944g, which makes it quite lightweight and great for tossing and flipping food. Moreover, its ergonomic design makes a great contribution to such a lightweight impression.
Nevertheless, if I said that tossing and flipping food feels light with All-Cad D3 is just based on my experience, it would be a bit biast. The subjective heaviness of the pan while moving it around, depends on the size of your hand, your strength, and the specific way you used to grip the panhandle.
However, other members of my family had the same comfortable impression and feeling of lightness when moving All-Clad D3 around during cooking(e.g. when flipping the pancakes.)
Finally, I found that due to its wall shape, All-Clad D3 allows me to toss the food a bit more comfortably than some other pans I use, like the Sardel Ss pan.
Here is a picture from some of the tests where I toss the veggies during sauté in an All-Clad D3 face-to-face with other pans I use.
Finally, even though I found All-Clad D3 walls a bit steep for efficient water transfer during food frying, I didn’t observe any serious water condensation with any of the frying techniques(sautee, searing, stir fry, etc.).
2. Heating spreading, retention, and responsiveness
Apart from sharing the subjective experience with using an All-Clad D3 pan after weekly cooking of various dishes, the final impressions about this pan were also the results of some quantitative measures.
In the following chapter, I will go deeper into the experiments I performed with the All-Clad D3 pan to test factors related to heat conduction and its holding capacity.
2.1.Testing methodology
I Explain in more detail how I measure the cookware surface temperature In the post about the Misen stainless steel pan review after more than six months of use. However, briefly speaking, I utilize an IC thermometer for contactless cookware temperature monitoring.
Moreover, to measure the temperature of the stainless steel surface, because of its specific reflective properties, it is important to a bit of oil before monitoring the surface temperature with good accuracy.
It probably sounds weird that adding something transparent like oil on top of ss may change the reading of temperature by the IC thermometer, and it was also weird to me. But by doing some tests, I found that if I add a bit of oil to ss, I get much more accurate readings by IC thermometer than without oil (See more details in mentioned post)
2.2.Pan heating “responsiveness “
The heating “responsiveness” of the pan shows how fast the pan heats up together with the stovetop and follows the two temperature changes.
Nevertheless, you may ask- Hey, but why would you measure heat responsiveness? Why is it important at all?
In some dishes, after previously exposing the food to a certain temperature it is essential to reduce heat fast(to avoid burning or overcooking). In the other dishes, you want to increase heat quickly. So, the cookware that can follow the regulation of heat on the stovetop fast will give great results when the fast increase/reduction of temperature during cooking is important.
Moreover, by measuring heating responsiveness, we can compare different pans quantitatively, so we have some non-subjective measurements to take when comparing the performance of different utensils.
To quantify the heating responsiveness of the All-Clad D3 stainless steel pan, I measured how the pan heats up on the electric stovetop from room temperature to 180C (when the stove heating is turned to max power-6 out of 6).
Moreover, I used the heating up to 180C since it is a common temperature for frying( e.g. frying eggs, meat, veggies) and It Is also interesting to know how much time the pan needs to be preheated before you can put the food in.
The clad D3 was heated up to 180C in around 3min and 34 sec(since not all of the pan surface is exactly the same temperature, I considered that the 180C is reached when the hottest part of the pan reached this temperature(see more about heat spreading and evenness in next chapter).
Moreover, this heating-up timing till 180C on an electric stovetop is quite similar to other fully clad pans I use currently(Misen, Sardel and Zepter stainless steel), and it indicates that the heat responsiveness is quite fast compared to most of the other cookware types(e.g., cast iron, carbon steel, enamel cast iron, e.t.c), However, between the mentioned Stainless steel pans I use the responsiveness measured through mentioned parameter is quite similar.
2.3.Heat spreading
Heat spreading is a term I use to say how evenly pan surface heats up.
Pan surface temperature evenness since it prevents the creation of hotter and cooler spots on the pan which prevents scenarios where parts of the food in the pan can get burned while others are not still cooked. This is especially important for dishes where you move the food too much during cooking, like preparing scrambled eggs, sunny-side-up eggs, and pancakes.
To challenge the heating evenness of All-clad D3, I put it purposefully on the stovetop, which is smaller than the skillet bottom. Even if this is not recommended for daily cooking(because it can accelerate pan warping), heating the pan on a smaller cooktop challenges its ability to transfer the heat even to parts of the pan bottom that are not in direct contact with the cooktop.
The stovetop diameter was around 15cm (5.9 inches)while the pan’s inner bottom diameter was around 21.5cm(8.46 inches).
I heated the stove on the lowest heating setting till the stove surface temperature was constant (around 200-210C/392-410F depending on the exact part of the stovetop I measured since the stovetop surface does not heat up perfectly evenly). After that, I put the room-temperature pan on top, and after 5 minutes, I added a bit of oil(5g) to the pan top to get more accurate measurements with the IC thermometer as explained at the beginning of Chapter 2.
See the results below:
The red dashed line presents the edge of the stovetop.
Surprisingly, the edges of the pan were slightly hotter than the pan centre, unlike in most of my pans. This may be explained by the slightly curvy shape of the skillet bottom that The All-Clad D3 pan design has. Because of this, the pan centre is not touching the cooktop surface while the edges are, so they get hotter.
Such results indicate great spreading greater than in most of the fully-clad pans I used, where the pan centres are a usually few degrees hotter than the edges when performing the same test(including the same stovetops).
However, when preparing dishes it was hard to observe this slightly better performance of All-Clad D3 pans in heat spreading compared to the pans that I use.
E.g. when I fry pancakes in stainless steel pans, I would expect harder detachment of pancakes from the edges in the pans where the cookware surface centre gets some degrees hotter than the edges. In such a situation, the edges of the pancake can stay still uncooked and sticky while the pancake center may be already cooked.
However, in reality, even pans that get a few degrees hotter in the centre than on the edges, perform as great as the All-Clad D3 stainless steel(which has a bit better heat spreading to corners) when preparing pancakes.
2.4.Heat retention and handle heating up
In the end, I wanted to measure two things more. The heat retention of the pan and heating up of a panhandle. I found out that after increasing the pan temperature to 200C on the stovetop and moving it to a wooden board, it keeps the temperature higher than 100C for around 2 minutes.
As expected, this temperature retention time was low compared to, e.g., cast iron and carbon steel pans. However, other fully clad stainless steels pass the same test almost the same(THe Misen and Sardel full-clad stainless steel pans in the same experiment setup kept the temperature above 100C between 1 and 2 minutes) .
Finally, I measured the heating up of the All-Clad D3 handle, which showed me that the panhandle hadn’t heated more than 30-35 C at the 5cm distance from the pan even when the pan was 200C. This was proof of a good pan handle design and no need for worrying about burning your hand when touching the handle.
3. Nonstick performance and behaviour with different dishes
When it comes to Stainless steel and the non-stick performance, good pan preheating temperature is a key.
As I emphasized many times in my other posts about stainless steel, the surface of stainless steel material is porous, which allows the food to get into pores and easily stick. However, when the pan is heated up enough, the metal expands, and these small pores become closed, which makes the surface of stainless steel smooth and nonstick.(For more details see my post about frying with stainless steel with or without oil).
So now you may wonder, does this mean that all of the stainless steel pans have the same nonstick behaviour since they are made from almost the same materials?
(even though there are slight variations in the composition of different stainless steel grades)
The answer is No; the nonstick performance of different pans is not the same. Moreover, the reason lies in previously discussed heat transfer capabilities such as heat spreading, heat responsiveness and retention.
As mentioned in previous chapters, the All-Clad D3 stainless steel showed heat responsiveness in line with other full-clad stainless steel pans I use. Moreover, the heat spreading of the All-Clad D3 skillet was slightly better than in the full-clad pans I used since after heating it up on a stovetop its edges were a few degrees hotter than the center. This indicated that in All-Clad D3 ss pan this pan the heat is not concentrated in one spot.
However, when It came to practical experiences with preparing food, even the mentioned All-Clad D3 pan showed slightly better performances in quantitative measurements such as heat spreading, haven’t observed a better nonstick performance or behaviour with different dishes compared to other full-clad pans I use.
Don’t get me wrong, the All-clad D3 was very efficient in handling almost any dish I used it for, starting from sautee tofu and veggies, cooking different cuts of meat, preparing pasta, making dishes that start on the stovetop, and finishing in the oven(e.g. skillet beef ragu lasagna) or baked dishes like pizza: Nevertheless, I just haven’t observed nonstick abilities or performance in repairing different mentioned dishes much better compared to other full clad pains from my kitchen(e.g. Misen Sardel or Zepter Stainless steel pans I use).
Because of this, I really haven’t considered the All-Clad D3 price tag adequate, and I feel that a significant part of all clad cookware prices comes from paying for the brand’s name, rather than the product.
Below, You will find a picture of some dishes that I prepared with All-clad D3 in my weekly cooking practices with this skillet.
4. Durability
If there is something that All-Clad is famous for, then it is its good quality scoped with a long-lasting and lifetime guarantee on the stainless steel pan it produces. Moreover, In practice, my impressions about AllClad D3 stainless quality and durability were the same
I have used the All-Clad D3 stainless steel pan on a weekly basis (e.g., 2-5 times per week) for almost six months, and I have not noticed its changes in shape since I ordered it. The newly received pan had a bottom design that was not flat but had a gentle curvy shape where the centre of the bottom was raised for a millimetre or so compared to the edges of the bottom.
However, as it was explained in Chapter 2.3 about heat spreading, such a design of the bottom allows for avoiding the focusing of the heating on one central point of the pan, and it allows the temperature to spread also to the edges.
Finally, what I can say au the All-Clads Warantee.
Regarding the All-Clad lifetime guarantee conditions, on the All-Clad official page, it is highlighted that they only provide warranty for purchases from authorized retailers like Amazon (information source)
. However, I could not speak from my personal experience about the details of the warranty and how it works in practice since I never requested it from All-clad up to now. If that will be the case I will bring updates to the post with some personal experiences on how processes such as Product returns work.
5. Cleaning
Like for the other stainless steel cookware, the cleaning is, usually, very easy with an All-Clad D3 stainless steel pan. In most of the cases, I need 3-4 min of cleaning with a bit of soap and hot water.
Moreover, the stainless steel is quite convenient since it can go straight to the dishwasher. In addition, this is especially true if you have 10-inch or smaller pans that usually fit most of the dishwashers.
However, there is one particular cleaning case that may need more of your attention when it comes to All-clad D3 and stainless steel cookware in general. After using the cookware dozens of times, it may happen that small quantities of oil get in contact with the bottom of your pan and create polymerization.
The polymerization on the bottom will not affect the functionality of the pan in any way. However, we sometimes want to have our cookware good-looking and shiny, which may be a good reason to remove the oil polymerization on the pan’s outer side😊
This can be done within 5 minutes with a bit more elbow grease, some soap, and the rough side of the sponge or kitchen wire(They don’t damage the stainless steel). However, using the cleaning technique with baking soda will make the removal of polymerization from stainless steel much more effortless. (Soon you will find it here in my upcoming post home-cooks cleaning tips for the stainless steel )
6. Which size of pan to use?
I found that 10-inch clad D3 stainless steel is a great option for cooking a main dish (lunch or dinner) for 1-2 persons.
However, here are a few examples of the food amounts I prepare in a pan of this size, which may give you a better perspective on which quantities of dish you can make in a 10-inch All-Clad D3 ss pan.
In a 10-inch pan, I used to prepare 4-6 sunny sides of eggs at a time in this pan. Moreover, when it comes to meat like chicken breast, I usually sear a few cuts of around 500g at a time or two big chicken legs with thighs of around 600-800g.
In addition, I found a 10-inch pan perfect for making flipping pancakes, unlike the 12-inch stainless steel pans, which I found a bit big for such a task.
Nevertheless, If you are planning to cook for 2-3 or even four persons and around 30%-40% more food than in the examples provided for the 10-inch pan, then 12-inch seems like a size that will fit you better.
For instance, I use Sardel and Misen 12-inch pans, and I find them perfectly sized for preparing a dinner or lunch main dish for a few friends or family when there are 2-3 people apart from me for whom I am preparing 😊
