Tramontina Professional 12-Inch Non Stick Large Frying Pan

Why it's worth it

This is the flat, heavy-gauge aluminum pan line cooks use, sold to home kitchens with a removable silicone handle sleeve. At 12 inches it's the one for stir-fries, four burgers, or an omelet big enough to split, and it's NSF-certified.

Restaurant pans are built around one idea: get hot fast, stay hot when cold food hits. Good Housekeeping's Kitchen Appliance Lab clocked this Tramontina reaching searing temperature, around 400 degrees, in under four minutes on a standard gas burner. That put it level with pans costing several times more. If you sear chicken thighs skin-down and want them to brown instead of sweat, that's the number that matters.

The heavy-gauge aluminum body is why it doesn't have hot spots. Thin pans warp and concentrate heat right over the flame, so the center of a pancake burns while the rim stays blond. This one is thick enough to even that out. It's also genuinely flat, which sounds obvious until you've watched oil pool on one side of a cheap pan.

From our review of 8 nonstick frying pans

What we like

• +Restaurant pans are built around one idea: get hot fast, stay hot when cold food hits
• +The heavy-gauge aluminum body is why it doesn't have hot spots
• +Twelve inches is a lot of pan, and that's the point
• +The removable silicone sleeve slides off the riveted handle, which is handy for the oven and easy to lose

What to know

• –It won't work on an induction cooktop
• –The interior is a conventional reinforced nonstick, not a metal-utensil-safe multilayer