is tramontina a good brand

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The Conclusion

So there you have it. While the Tramontina actually edges out the All-Clad as far as heat retention goes, the All-Clad is an all-around better performer. But is it worth paying three times as much for it? Not really. Only by using controlled quantitative tests could I find any difference at all in how the pans perform. Even then, the differences were minimal. If money is absolutely no object, go ahead and buy the All-Clad. For the rest of us, the Tramontina set should do just fine.

We also have a full review of stainless steel skillets here. You can read more about why the Made In edged out the All-Clad as our top pick (price!) and our budget-friendly recommendation, which is, of course, from Tramontina.

Heat Retention

Theres nothing worse than preheating a skillet on a burner until its smoking hot, then adding a couple of pork chops, only to have them end up slowly bubbling and steaming in their own juices instead of acquiring that perfect crust you were after. Why does this happen? Low heat retention.

Lets say youve got your pan up to around 400°F—in the prime range for delivering maximum browning, which doesnt really begin to take place in earnest until food reaches around 300°F (149°C) or so. Now when you add cold food to this hot pan, the food saps energy from the pan. If your pan is thin, or made from a material with a really poor capacity for storing heat (known as a materials “mass-specific heat capacity,” or “specific heat” for short), the temperature will rapidly drop to well below the ideal browning range. If, on the other hand, your pan is able to retain lots of energy (it has a high specific heat and a high mass), the temperature will remain high enough to sear.

Weight is generally a good indicator of how well a pan will retain heat, since for a given material, the amount of energy it can store is directly related to its mass. The Tramontina pan weighed in at 1 pound, 11 ounces, while the All-Clad was slightly lighter at 1 pound 9 ounces. However, some materials can hold more energy per unit mass than others. Depending on the relative ratios of aluminum and steel, their retention abilities could very. A little more testing was in order:

I placed both pans in a 350°F (177°C) oven for a full hour until they maintained a completely steady temperature of 335°F (168.3°C) as read by my laser thermometer. Traditionally, the next step would be to dump the pans into a well-insulated body of water and note the change in temperature of that water to gauge how much energy was stored in the metal. However, that would give me the capacity of the entire pan, and honestly, I dont care how well the handle or lips retain heat. Im most interested in the cooking surfaces only.

Rather than dump the pans in water, I dumped water in the pans—one pint of 60°F (15.6°C) water into each one—and waited for two minutes before measuring the change in temperature.

• All-Clad: 114.1°F (45.6°C) increase in two minutes.
• Tramontina: 115°F (46.1°C) increase in two minutes.
• Winner: Both pans are monsters in the field of searing, but Tramontina takes it (by a hair).

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