Misen stainless steel pan review (After 6 months of use)

*Uk shipping is available for the Misen products sold on Amazon UK

Key takeaways

I have found Misen 12-inch stainless steel pan a very affordable 5ply pan that did well with almost all kitchen tasks I have been changing it, starting from sauteing the veggies, preparing risottos, and searing the meat cuts to making the dishes that start on the stove and finishes up in the oven.

I lacked the appropriate lid for this pan that I tend to use with some dishes, and I found the skillet to be a little heavy to move too much during cooking. However, these were just the minors of the total impression of the quality and cooking performance of this pan. At the end of the day, I finished with no observable wrapping of the pan surface after a lot of use which left me with a great impression of its quality aligned with the lifetime guarantee that Misen offers for this pan.

Who is this pan for?

For all of the home cooks that are looking for an affordable high-quality stainless steel pan, that can be used on a weekly or daily bases. If you are a lover of sauteing the veggies, searing the meat and tofu, or you enjoy pan dishes from the oven then I believe that pan will be a good surprise for you(like it was for me).I found the 12-inch pan very good for preparing meals for 2-3 people while I believe that a 10-inch skillet will be great for 1-2persons.

*If you will need the solid lid for some of your cooking applications, take it from another 12-inch cookware piece or just order it independently from Misen can be a good option.

 1.Pan weight and design

One of the first visual impressions of Misen 12-inch pan before testing was the big cooking surface area(25cm or 9.85inch).

However, if you want to have such a bottom diameter in a 12-inch pan this pulls the need to have steeper walls which can reduce water evaporation. Moreover, this can be a drawback in frying since you usually want to have this intensive vapor release while preparing food this way.

However, to my surprise, the vapor release from the pan was pretty efficient. Moreover, I was very happy to use this pan for meat searing, and sauté the veggies where this is crucial.

However, In some dishes where I wanted to keep the moisture inside of the dish, it is quite handy to have an appropriate lid for the pan. However, the Misen only sells the 12-inch silicone lid which won’t serve well as something more solid like a glass or stainless steel lid. Because of this, I was using the lids from some other cookware that I have.

The Misen 12-inch skillet is a full-clad pan with 5 layers of metal. Cladding is basically the term when the pan is made from multiple layers of dissimilar metals. In this case, the aluminum sheets are inserted between the stainless steel layers which helps with the heat conduction performance(aluminum is a much better heat conductor than stainless steel). Finally, the cladding is applied for increasing the pan resistance to wear and tear.

It was really amazing to see a 5-ply pan for such a price. Moreover, the construction of the pan proved its quality by showing great resilience to hear and tear after a lot of use(See Durability chapter)

The pan weighs 1689g, which was for me a little heavy for freely moving around in hand, so it hasn’t been ideal for pancakes. However, this weight comes with the fact that the pan is 12 inches and is constructed from multiple layers of good quality materials. Moreover, I believe that a 10-inch pan will be much more suitable for handling pancake flips.

Finally, I needed to say that I found the handle quite suitable for my grip. Even if I was afraid that it will be a little slippery since it is rounded, it turned out that it fitted my hand pretty well.

It is good to say that, my preference for handle design and skillet weight may not be in line perfectly with the opinions of others, since we are all different in body size, weight, and hand size. However, I believe that these observations can give some indications of what you can expect.

2.Heating spreading, retention, and responsiveness

2.1.Testing methodology

To test the heating evenness, heat retention, heating up speed, and some related things I have been using an Infrared thermometer. However, there was one important difficulty to overcome here.

Using the Infrared thermometer with a shiny surface can be tricky, and polished stainless steel is not an exception( reference).

In other words, the IC thermometer was showing much lower temperatures than the actual surface of Stainless steel cookware. A picture below is a good example, where the thermometer shows only 56C or 132F(you can spot the red point where the thermometer is measuring) while just a cm away the water is boiling(temperatures of around 100C/212F or higher)

Because of that, I needed to find something that I can put on top of my pan during heating up that won’t make problems with infrared measurements, but that would reflect the temperature of the pan’s surface well.

And as I figured out the simple drop of oil showed to be a good reference. I confirmed this by putting the drop of water and the drop of oil next to each other in the pan that was slowly heated up. When I started to observe the boiling of the water the thermometer was showing the temperature of the oil drop around 100C/212F(I catch the picture some seconds after 100C/212F when the temperature continued to increase even more)

2.2.Pan heating “responsiveness“

So after setting the experiment methodology right everything was ready to test the pan heating up performance.

Firstly I wanted to measure the pan heating “responsiveness “. This would be the measure of how fast eh pan can get hot after exposing it to a hot stovetop. Fo that I have turned the stovetop with the pan on the highest setup. I measure that pan reached 180C/356F in around 55sec, which is the sweet spot temperature on which ss is used for most frying purposes.

Being able to heat the pan for less than a minute to desired working temperature was a more than the satisfying result for me.

2.3.Pan heat spreading

After the heating-up “responsiveness“, I wanted to evaluate the heat-spreading capacity of the pan. To observe that I have used a stovetop with a smaller surface than the bottom of the pan. The stovetop diameter was around 18cm or 7 inches while the pan bottom was around 25cm or 9.85inch as mentioned above. This helped me to challenge how much of the heat will be transferred by pan out of the contact surface with the stovetop.

I heated the stove on the lowest heating setting, and leave it for some time when I observed that the stove temperature is constant (around 200-210C/390-410F on different points of the stovetop). After that, I put the room-temperature pan on top. After 15 sec I added the oil on top of the pan to avoid the problems of measuring the temperature of the stainless steel directly as explained above and started the measurements on different points of the pan

*The red line presents the edge of stove bellow the pan

I found out that the temperature of the pan started to drop in areas that are not in contact with the stove by up to 14%(The heat in the stovetop middle was 113C/235F degrees while the corners of the bottom had 98C/206F.

Subjectively speaking this seemed like quite good conduction since the corners of the pan bottom which were 3-4cm from the contact with the heat were showing just a 14% drop in temperature.

However, In my future stainless steel pan reviews planned to use this temperature drop trend out of the stovetop contact surface to compare different pans, and see which one has better conduction. For sure, this will help with giving more objective conclusions compared to just evaluating the single pan for itself

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 handle. I found out that After increasing the pan temperature to 200C/390F on the stovetop and moving it to a wooden board it keeps the temperature of 100C/212F for around a minute.

As expected, this temperature retention time was low, compared to cast iron and carbon steel pans(More info is coming up in some new posts about cast iron and carbon steel). As a brief conclusion, this misen stainless steel pan(as well as other clad stainless steel pans)

Finally, I measured the heating up of the handle, which showed me that the panhandle hadn’t heated more than 35 C/95F at the 5cm distance from the pan even when the pan was 200C/390F. This was proof of a good pan design and no need for worrying about burning your hand when touching the handle.

3. Non-stick performance and behavior with different dishes

When it comes to Stainless steel and the nonstick effect, it is all about the good temperature. In my post related to cooking with stainless steel pans without oil, I went into detail about getting the nonstick effect with stainless steel cookware by preheating.

In short lines, the surface of stainless steel is a porous structure which causes the food to get into pores and easy to stick. However, when the pan is heated up enough, the metal expands and these small pores became closed which makes the surface of stainless steel smooth and nonstick(In one of my upcoming posts, soon, you will be able to find an easy guide on how to preheat stainless steel on a right temperature).

So you may wonder, does this mean that all of the stainless steel pans have the same nonstick behavior since they are made from almost the same materials? (even though there are slight variations in the composition of different stainless steel grades)

It seems like you are perfectly right, with one important thing to add up.

A good nonstick performance of the pan also relies on the even distribution of the heating. Moreover, not all stainless steel pans have the same heat distribution performance.

Bad heat distribution can cause the occurrence of hot or cold spots on the pan surface. This will further lead to the situation where some parts of the pan are at the ideal temperature for getting a nonstick effect, while others will be too hot/too cold and cause food to stick.

I would like to add up that heating the pan too much is also not the best scenario. This causes the food gets burned, which is again prone to sticking even to the heated-up surface of the pan. (In one of my upcoming posts soon, you will able to find here a simple guide on how to preheat your stainless steel cookware at the right temperature)

In the previous subheading, I dig deeper into the measurements that I did to test the heat distribution of the pan. However, there is nothing better than real-life cooking proof.

I have been frying delicate food like sunny/scrambled eggs or saute veggies which sometimes stick very easily to the pan. After all, I found that this pan showed great heat spreading and non-stick performance.

In the other words, I was able to achieve great heat control of the pan, and it hasn’t happened to me that food in some parts of the pan gets burned or non-cooked. This way easiest to see with pancakes, or scrambled eggs which were always evenly cooked in Misen 12 inc stainless steel pan.

Bellow, I put a few pictures of loved to prepare while using this pan (Tuscan chicken, Baked fetta in eggplant paprika paste spreading).

4.Durability

I have been using the pan a few or even several times a week for the last half year. Additionally, it happened to me that in places where I have been I didn’t have access to stovetops enough wide for this 12inch pan (which I won’t recommend doing)

Nevertheless, after all this period I have not observed significant wrapping behavior as can be seen in the picture below. 



This has shown me that the quality of the materials of this pan as well as the construction design is really on a high level. Additionally, this was again proof that for a very handy price of 85$ currently(end of 2022) it is possible to get an amazing product that can go in line with other expensive stainless steel pans that sometimes cost hundreds of dollars.

Finally, the pan is covered with a lifetime guarantee which was another amazing thing that is possible to get for such a price. You invest it once and you have it for your lifetime, which was also a good push for me to choose this pan.

Up to now as I mentioned I haven’t had an issue with the pan so I didn’t need to request replacements or something. So, I couldn’t tell you from my personal experience does guarantee works smoothly. However, from the recensions of some other people, I saw that in most of the cases they have been satisfied with Misen customer services provided whenever they had any troubles with the cookware.

5.Cleaning

Like in other stainless steel cookware the cleaning is quite easy and convenient. Most of the time, I clean the pan while it is still warm with the use of a sponge and a little of soap. I believe that I rarely needed more than 4-5min of cleaning.

Additionally, the convenient part about stainless steel cookware is that it can go straight to the dishwasher.

However, there are two more cases that I would add up when it comes to cleaning.

Firstly, in the times when you are just starting with stainless steel pan for the first time, it may happen to you(like It has happened to me a lot of times) that food gets burned a bit. This can cause food to stick a little more seriously.

Additionally, after a lot of cooking with your stainless steel pan, the bottom of the pan can catch up with some grease also. Long terms(After some months of use), this may result in some oil polymerization on the bottom of your pan, which get a brownish color to it. You can ignore it since it doesn’t affect the performance of the pan, but you may want once to turn back the perfect shiny look to your pan.

In both cases, you can do cleaning with soap and water but it can take a longer time. However, there are a few easier ways to handle it.

To show you a step-by-step guide on how to solve both cases, soon you will be able to take a look at my post about the maintenance of stainless steel. It will help you keep your stainless steel cookware shiny looking, even after long use.

This is my picture of Misen stainless steel after several months of intensive use.

6.The size of the pan and which one to choose?

I decided to go for a 12-inch pan because I wanted to be able to cook meals for 2-3 people.

And really, this pan was a great option for cooking lunches and dinners for two to three persons in my family.

Moreover, I will state some quantities of the food that I was preparing comfortably in this pan so you can get a better view of how big portions you can expect to make.

The skillet was enough big to prepare 3 whole legs of chicken(1-1.2kg) or about 0.8-1kg of chicken breast. Moreover, with this pan, I was comfortable preparing 3 big pork shoulder steaks(600-700g in total).

When It came to eggs I was using a Misen 12-inch pan for making 6-7 eggs at a time or an omelet of 7-8 eggs.

Finally, I wanted to say that I haven’t bought Misen 10-inch pan (which I will probably do in the future). But I believe that It will be handier for certain applications.

So, In which cases it would be handier to go for a 10inch pan instead of 12 inches one

I have mentioned that the 12-inch pan is a little heavy to move in hand freely around. Because of that, It wasn’t really handy for flipping pancakes. However, I believe that the Misens 10-inch skillet will be much more suitable.

Additionally, if you move from place to place a lot like me, it is not always easy to find stovetops enough big for a 12-inch pan so, so you need to keep the heat diffuser plate with you or use directly your pan on the smaller cooktops. However, this is not a best practice long-term because it stresses the material due to concentrated heating in just parts of the bottom while not in the others. In these terms, a 10-inch pan will be also handier.

Finally, as I mentioned, Misen doesn’t produce solid lids from glass or stainless steel but just silicone ones. This pushed me to search for the additional lid. However, finding the appropriate lid for a 12-inch pan is sometimes hard, because the pan is too big. This is another advantage of taking a 10-inch skillet and probably having an appropriate lid size at your home without the need to purchase a new one.

The 10-inch pan will for sure, give you less space for cooking. However, If you planned to cook for 1-2 people I would say that it will be an ideal solution. At least this is the number of people to which I can comfortably cook lunch or dinner when I use 10-inch skillets.