The Diamond-Plated Sauté Pan That Gives New Meaning to 'Non-Stick'
Buy $221, williams-sonoma.com
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For those of us who live on a budget, cooking is key. Preparing food for the week ahead is one of the best ways to save cash and keep the student loan payments at bay. But if you have any interest in eating well, the whole “food prep” thing can be a fucking mess. You’ve got a mound of mushy vegetables sticking to a deteriorating wok on one burner, chicken burning to a crisp in a frying pan on another, all while your pot of polenta bubbles over onto the stove, scorching you with scalding corn grit shrapnel. Wish good luck to your intestines, because you’re going to be eating soggy garbage all week.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. With the right pan, you could be the pride of the office microwave. And if you’ve got a chunk of change sitting in the piggy bank, it might just be worth it to forego that stupid expensive Equinox membership in favor of Swiss Diamond’s kickass new XD Nonstick Square Sauté Pan. The brand is known for coating its pans with diamond crystals—up to 200,000 on each pan, to be exact. According to the website, diamonds are durable, great for conducting heat, and naturally non-stick. After using this pan extensively for the past few weeks, I’d have to agree with the company’s cringey mantra: “Diamonds are a chef’s best friend.”
You can cook everything in it.
Some pans are multi-use. Whom among us hasn’t stumbled into the kitchen drunk to fry an egg in a stock pot at 3 a.m.? But when you cook a lot, you’ll learn the limitations of each piece of cookware on your stove pretty quickly. Your grandmom’s old saucepan is only good for pasta. The cast iron skillet doesn’t do eggs. The teflon pot burns your fingers. Long have I wondered if there was a pan that could do everything. With its lid, spacious 11-inches-by-11-inches real estate, and five quarts of depth, Swiss Diamond's pan really answers the call. Veggies, pasta, rice, chicken, fish, stir fry—I’ve cooked it all in this pan. Don’t tell my mom, but I’m just about ready to give all my other hand-me-down pots to Goodwill.
Buy $221, williams-sonoma.com
It’s so non-stick it barely needs oil.
I’ve been worried about non-stick pans for a while. There’s a lot of confusion over whether teflon pots can cause cancer (they won’t unless you burn them at super high temperatures). Regardless, there’s nothing worse than scraping food off the surface of a non-stick pan, tearing at the teflon, worrying that you’re getting debris in your food. The Swiss Diamond coating is beyond non-stick, though. This is like, transcendence, or something. The instructions tell you to use “little to no cooking oils or butter,” which I thought was ridiculous, until I cooked up some broccoli on the bare pan. The food slid right off! According to Swiss Diamond, it has something to do with the “20 percent more diamonds” that are sealed into the base of the pan. I guess I love diamonds now.
Cleaning it is a dream.
The worst part of the cooking experience is the clean-up portion. If you’re the kind of sadistic freak who makes everyone else in the house clean up after you, the XD Sauté Pan just made your roommate’s life a whole lot easier. Most of the messes I’ve made in the pan have washed right off with some warm running water from the sink faucet. If there’s any residue left, I take the soft end of my sponge and wipe it right off. Just think, the whole dish-cleaning argument that’s tearing your relationship to pieces can finally be a non-issue. Now what are you going to argue about with your partner?
The Swiss Diamond XD Square Sauté Pan is available now. If you really want to go nuts, you can buy the whole XD eight-piece set, which Swiss Diamond calls the “Full Holiday Meal Set,” for $730 (maybe put it on your wedding registry?). It also says its XD Nonstick Fry Pan is the best-selling pan of the set, the “workhorse” of the kitchen. But for my money, multi-use is key, and the XD Nonstick Square Sauté Pan is my new best friend.
Buy $221, williams-sonoma.com
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