A pan is a slow ingredient.
Cookware
What your food touches, every single day
Most kitchens hold four or five pans, bought at different times, for different reasons, and kept for years. They are the most repeated point of contact between a material and a meal in the whole house — and almost nobody knows what theirs are made of. This page is not here to tell you to replace them. It is here to help you read them.
Material awareness
Reading a cooking surface
Cookware is unusual: the material is visible. You can look at a pan and see most of what you need to know. What follows is what each surface actually does under heat — not a ranking, because the variable that matters most is rarely the material on its own.
| Surface | Shake’s read | What is actually going on |
|---|---|---|
| Fluoropolymer non-stick PTFE, Teflon, and similar |
Avoid | PTFE is a PFAS compound, and PFAS sits at Tier 1 on Shake’s repository. The coating is stable through normal cooking and begins to break down above 280 °C (536 °F), where it releases fumes. An empty pan on high heat reaches that within minutes; a pan with food in it generally does not. That figure is the point at which breakdown starts — it is not a promise that anything below it is fine.Merck Veterinary Manual; Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. |
| Uncoated stainless steel | Use mindfully | Nothing coats it, so nothing can wear off it. Small amounts of nickel and chromium do migrate into food, which matters for people with a nickel or chromium sensitivity and generally does not for anyone else. Migration is highest when a pan is brand new and falls sharply with use. |
| Enamelled cast iron | Worth seeking | The glassy enamel, not the iron, is the food-contact surface, so no metal touches the food. The open question is what the enamel itself is made of — and most brands do not publish it. A chipped or crazed enamel is a different surface from an intact one. |
| Seasoned bare cast iron | Worth seeking | Iron, and a layer of polymerised oil you build yourself. Nothing proprietary, nothing undisclosed, and it improves rather than degrades with age — the only surface on this table of which that is true. Iron does migrate into food, which is relevant to anyone advised to limit iron intake. |
| Solid ceramic fired through, not coated |
Worth seeking | No metal, no coating to wear through, no layer to fail. Kiln-fired through, rather than coated. The distinction that matters is between ceramic through and ceramic over — a ceramic-look coating on an aluminium body is a coating, and coatings wear. |
| Ceramic-coated aluminium | Use mindfully | Usually a sol-gel coating rather than a fluoropolymer, which is why “PFAS-free” claims here are often true. The questions are what the coating is made of, and what is underneath it when it eventually wears — because something is. |
| Borosilicate glass | Worth seeking | Inert, non-porous, nothing to migrate and nothing to disclose. Its limits are practical rather than material: it will not sear, and it does not like thermal shock. |
Scroll the table sideways →
Awareness
What to be mindful of
Six things that change what actually ends up in the food. Only two of them are about the material.
Heat is the variable, not the label
Almost everything that goes wrong with cookware goes wrong at temperature. Coatings are stable through ordinary cooking and break down above a threshold. Metals migrate faster into acidic food, and faster again as the pan gets hotter. The same pan behaves entirely differently under a gentle braise and under a dry, empty preheat on full flame. An empty pan on high heat is the single riskiest thing most people do in a kitchen, and it is free to stop.
A grade number is not an answer
304, 316, 18/10 — these are facts about the steel, not about what reaches your food. When researchers measured it directly, the mass of nickel in a stainless steel did not correlate with the amount that leached into food. The protective oxide layer and the pan’s age mattered more. A brand that publishes a grade has told you something real; it has not told you this. We used to treat grade as a virtue on this page, and we were wrong to.Kamerud, Hobbie & Anderson, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 2013;61(39):9495–9501.
A new pan leaches most
This one surprised us. In the same study, a new stainless saucepan contributed around 483 micrograms of nickel to a 126-gram serving of sauce on its first use. By the tenth cooking cycle that had fallen to about 88 micrograms, and it had largely stabilised after the sixth. The oxide layer takes a few cooks to settle. The most conscious thing you can do with a new pan is use it — and if you are nickel-sensitive, to know that the first few meals are the ones that matter.Kamerud et al., 2013. An oral dose as low as 67 µg can provoke a reaction in nickel-sensitive people.
The range name is not the pan
One of the more useful things we found while researching this page: a single product line can span coated and uncoated versions under the same name. All-Clad’s own chemical disclosure lists D3 twice — once under PTFE-coated non-stick, once under multi-layer stainless. Both are D3. One has a fluoropolymer on it and one does not. The line name will not tell you which is in the box; the product description might.
“PFAS-free” without a test is a sentence, not a finding
Plenty of PFAS-free claims are perfectly true. The problem is that the claim and the evidence look identical from the outside. What turns one into the other is a laboratory, a named standard, and a report you could go and read. We do not treat a brand’s own assurance as an answer — not because we assume brands are lying, but because a claim nobody can check does the reader no good.
A surface test is not a migration test
You will find readings online for the metal content of enamel and glazes, usually taken with a handheld XRF device. XRF measures how much of an element sits in a surface. The question that matters is how much comes out of it into food under acid and heat — which is a leach test, to a named standard. They are different measurements answering different questions. We do not publish XRF figures as safety findings, and we would ask you to be careful of anyone who does.
If you keep a bird, keep it out of the kitchen
And never heat an empty non-stick pan. Overheated fluoropolymer coatings release fumes that kill birds — fast, often with no warning and no other symptom. A bird’s lungs pull more out of every breath than ours do, which is the entire reason the phrase canary in a coal mine exists. An empty pan on a high flame reaches the temperature in minutes. Moving the cage out of the room costs nothing, and almost nobody has ever been told.Merck Veterinary Manual, Toxicoses of Pet Birds; Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.
Conscious alternatives
Six things worth looking for
These are the questions Shake puts to every cookware brand. You can put them to a product page yourself in about ninety seconds.
Construction, named layer by layer
Not “premium multi-ply.” Which metal, in which layer, with the food-contact surface named first. A brand that knows will say.
What the coating actually is
Wherever anything is coated, glazed or enamelled: what is it made of, and is any fluoropolymer present? “Ceramic” is a look as often as it is a material.
A leach test, to a named standard
Wherever there is enamel or glaze. A laboratory, a standard, a report. A surface-content reading is not this, however precise the number sounds.
The brand’s chemical disclosure
Cookware sold into California must publish its intentionally added chemicals by law. Search the brand’s name plus “AB1200“. It is a filing, not a marketing page, and it is the most honest document most cookware brands have.
Handles, rivets and lids
The forgotten third of a pan. Rivets sit inside the cooking surface. Knobs have heat ratings that people routinely exceed. Very few brands publish any of it.
A pan that can be kept
Repairable, re-seasonable, re-enamelled, or simply built to outlast you. Read the pan you already own before you buy another — and your grandmother’s cast iron will outlive anything on a shelf today.
Heat is the variable.
Not the label.
A different lens on the world
In place of a featured brand
The pan you already own
There is no featured brand on this page, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished.
Featured, at Shake, means the brand we have gone deepest on — the full material story, told at length. It is a depth of coverage, and it requires a working relationship with the brand. We have no relationship with any cookware brand yet, so nobody has earned the slot.
Which leaves the more useful thing to put here anyway. Before you consider buying anything, go and read the pans you have. It costs nothing, it takes five minutes, and for most people it ends the question entirely.
- 1
Turn it over
The base is usually stamped: the material, sometimes a grade, often the country. If it says stainless and nothing is flaking, you have an uncoated pan and there is nothing to wear off it.
- 2
Look at the cooking surface in daylight
A dark, slightly slippery coating that is scratched, dulled, blistered or lifting at the edge is a coating past its life. An intact one is doing its job. This is a genuine difference, not a judgement about the brand.
- 3
Check the enamel for chips and crazing
Fine hairline cracks in a glaze are called crazing. Once enamel is chipped through, the food is meeting bare iron, which is a different surface than the one you bought.
- 4
Find the rivets
Those two or three metal studs inside the pan hold the handle on. They sit in the food. Nobody thinks about them, including most brands.
- 5
Ask how it gets used, not what it is
A coated pan used on gentle heat for eggs will outlive a stainless one used for daily dry searing. How you cook is a bigger variable than what you cook in — which is the single most useful sentence on this page.
One thing worth knowing before you read a spec sheet. A pan with aluminium inside it is not a pan with aluminium in your food. In a bonded pan the aluminium is sealed between layers of steel and never touches anything you eat — it is there to spread heat. What matters is what the surface is made of, which is exactly why we ask brands to publish their construction layer by layer.
How We Score This Category
Two ceilings, before you read a single number.
A ceiling is not a mark out of ten. It is the highest a pan can reach on that pillar, set by what it is made of and how long it lasts. Everything else a brand does well is measured underneath it. Scored under SOP v1.6.
Undisclosed sits in the same band as the worst disclosed option, on both ceilings and on purpose. Not saying scores the same as saying the least flattering thing. Telling us is free, and it lifts the ceiling the same day.
Scored from published material
Five pans, read closely
Shake scores products, not relationships — so we read what a brand publishes whether or not it has ever heard of us. None of these five has. Every finding below comes from each brand’s own website and its own published disclosures — Made In, All-Clad and Le Creuset read on 2 September 2026, Lodge and Xtrema on 9 September 2026. Cards are ordered by score.
Lodge
Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet · 10¼″ · bare cast iron
- People55
- Animals100
- Gaia100
- Frequency100
Iron and oil. That is close to the whole specification, and it is why this pan sits at the top of the page — there is less in it to go wrong than in anything else here.
- Construction
- Published. Pig iron, recycled steel, castings from Lodge’s own foundry and alloys, poured into a sand mould in Tennessee and cast as a single piece. Seasoned at the foundry with 100% vegetable oil, baked until it polymerises — the dark finish is carbonised oil and nothing else.
- Why it scores 100 on two pillars
- One material, nothing bonded, nothing applied that can wear off: the top band of the Material Integrity ceiling names cast iron outright. It is also the only surface on this page that improves with age, because seasoning builds with use rather than thinning with it. On End of Life it is generational and iron recycles indefinitely.
- Open question
- Lodge describes the skillet as “nontoxic cookware made without PFAS”. We looked for a test report behind that and could not find one, so we do not score it — the same call we made on Made In, for the same reason. The handle is not separately specified either, although the pan is cast in one piece.
We earn from Amazon on this link, not from the brand.
Made In
Stainless Clad · 5-ply · uncoated
- People55
- Animals100
- Gaia85
- Frequency85
Nobody on this page describes how a pan is built in more detail. It publishes its construction in full and names every layer, which is exactly what we ask for and rarely get.
- Construction
- Published in full. Five layers, 2.7 mm: 304-grade 18/10 stainless cooking surface and exterior, aluminium, aluminium alloy, and a ferritic 403 layer. Made in Italy.
- Coating
- None. Nothing to wear through.
- Open question
- Made In publishes its construction layer by layer, which almost nobody does. It also states the pan is made without PFAS, and we could not find a test report behind that. We do not score a claim we cannot check, however easy it is to believe. The handle’s own material is not published either.
We earn from Amazon on this link, not from the brand.
All-Clad
D3 Stainless frying pan set · 10″ and 12″ · uncoated
- People55
- Animals100
- Gaia85
- Frequency85
Says less than Made In and claims less than Made In. Its chemical disclosure names what is actually in the metal, which is worth more than any amount of language about what is absent.
- Construction
- Published. Tri-ply — an aluminium core between two layers of stainless steel, base to rim. No grade number is given, which costs it nothing with us: a grade does not answer what reaches your food.
- Coating
- None on this product. Its California disclosure lists PFAS only against its PTFE-coated lines, and this is not one of them.
- Open question
- All-Clad files a chemical disclosure naming what is in the metal, which is stronger evidence than any claim about what is absent. It does not publish what the handles, rivets and lid are made of, and we could not find it elsewhere.
We earn from Amazon on this link, not from the brand.
Le Creuset
Signature Round Dutch Oven · 9 qt · enamelled cast iron
- People55
- Animals100
- Gaia100
- Frequency55
A hundred years of foundry craft, sand-cast in France, and almost nothing published about the one surface your food actually touches. It wins our planet pillar outright and loses the other two.
- Construction
- Enamelled cast iron, sand-cast at Fresnoy-le-Grand, France. The food-contact surface is described as a light-coloured porcelain enamel.
- Why Gaia scores 100
- It will outlive its owner, and cast iron recycles indefinitely. Nothing else on this page is as durable or as recoverable.
- Open question
- We looked for what the enamel is made of, and for any lead or cadmium leach testing, across the product page, the brand’s guide to enamelled cast iron, and both of its published chemical disclosures. We could not find it. The score reflects what we could check — nothing more and nothing less.
We earn from Amazon on this link, not from the brand.
Xtrema
100% Ceramic Frying Pan · 10″ · with lid · Ceramcor
- People55
- Animals100
- Gaia90
- Frequency55
The only brand here that has published the leach test we ask for — and it still caps, on a glaze it will not describe. Both halves of that sentence are worth sitting with.
- Testing
- The strongest evidence on this page. SGS third-party testing for extractable lead and cadmium, against California Proposition 65 and the German LFGB food-contact standard. Xtrema also draws the distinction we ask for and almost nobody publishes: that a surface reading cannot tell you what comes out of a product, and only a leach test can.
- Construction
- A solid kiln-fired ceramic body — no metal, no bonded layers. Xtrema states the cookware “contains no extractable metal, cadmium, lead, PFOA, PTFE, glues, polymers, coatings or dyes”.
- Why Frequency is 55, not 100
- The same brand describes a “ceramic-glazed surface”, and the black colour as coming from “various minerals and oxides”. A glaze is a surface, and we could not find what this one is made of — so the Material Integrity ceiling sits in its undisclosed band. Naming the glaze, if it holds no fluoropolymer, moves that ceiling to 70 and the overall score to 78.75%.
- Open question
- What the glaze is made of. A PFAS test to stand behind the PFAS-free claim. And the lid — this pan ships with one, and we could not find what it is made of. The listing names a silicone handle potholder, which is the only part of that question anybody has answered.
We earn from Amazon on this link, not from the brand.
Why all five score 55 on People, and what would change it. Not one of these brands can answer all five of our material questions, so none of them is assumed fine — we cap rather than guess. It means the People pillar does no ranking on this page at all, and we would rather say that than let it look like a finding.
Xtrema has come closer than anyone, and it is worth being exact about what that did and did not do. It publishes the third-party lead-and-cadmium leach test we ask for — the only brand here that does, and the single strongest piece of evidence on this page. It still caps, because a leach test answers one question out of five and the PFAS claim, the glaze and the handles are all still open. That is not a moving goalpost. It is what five questions means, and the other four are answerable in an afternoon.
Sending us evidence has never cost anything and never will.
Three things about these numbers. Made In and All-Clad tie, and that is the right answer — they are near-identical products and inventing a difference would be worse than reporting a draw. Animals reads 100 for all five because not one of them is coated: we hold a concern that would apply to a non-stick pan, and it simply has nothing to attach to here. And the two least manufactured objects on the page sit at opposite ends of it — Lodge at the top and Xtrema near the bottom — which is not a contradiction. One of them told us what its surface is made of. Made In, All-Clad and Le Creuset scored under the ShakeUp Standard Operating Manual v1.5 and the cookware rulings of 2 September 2026; Lodge and Xtrema under v1.6, on 9 September 2026.
On our radar
Noticed, not yet assessed
A brand we have seen and have not got to. No score and no link — that is a statement about our capacity, not about them. The description is drawn from the company’s own published material.
A.C.E group
South African. We read a collection page and a product page and found no material specification of any kind: no construction, no base, no handle material, no origin, no certification. Recorded here so that the gap is visible rather than invisible — and if we have missed a page where it is published, we would genuinely like to be told.
Going deeper
How a pan changes over its life
Cookware is the rare category where the product you own is not the product you bought. Everything on this page ages, and most of it ages in one direction.
Coatings wear. Not dramatically, and rarely all at once — they thin, dull, scratch and eventually lift, and a coating that has lifted is no longer doing the job it was chosen for. What sits underneath is usually aluminium. That is the honest reason to look at a non-stick pan sceptically after a few years: not that it has become dangerous overnight, but that it has quietly stopped being the thing described on the box.
Stainless improves, then holds. The oxide layer that does the protecting builds over the first several cooks, which is why a new pan sheds most metal and a settled one sheds far less. Barring serious abrasion, a stainless pan at ten years is behaving much as it did at ten uses. Scouring it back to a mirror finish with something aggressive resets the surface you spent those cooks building — one of several reasons we care about what you clean with.
Enamel is either intact or it is not. There is no gradual middle. A glaze holds until it chips or crazes, and after that the food is meeting bare iron. Worth knowing that this is a visible, checkable state — you do not need a laboratory to see it.
And bare cast iron gets better. Seasoning is polymerised oil, built up by use, and a well-kept pan is smoother at thirty years than at three. It is the only cooking surface in this category that rewards time instead of spending it.
The greenest pan on this page is one you did not buy from it
A neglected cast-iron skillet from a junk shop or the back of a family cupboard beats almost anything sold new. Rust is a stage, not an ending. Stripped back and re-seasoned, a pan somebody gave up on in 1974 will outlast most things on a shelf today — and no new object had to be made for it. That is about as low-footprint as acquiring anything gets.
Two honest cautions. Bare cast iron is not enamelled cast iron, and a second-hand enamelled pot needs its glaze checked carefully before it goes anywhere near food. And a pan of genuinely unknown history — one that has plainly been used as a paint pot or lived in a shed — is not worth the puzzle. Bare iron, honest rust, no mystery coatings: that is the one worth carrying home.
And if you are buying: buy the one your children will argue over. A pan with a real lifetime guarantee, that can be re-enamelled or re-seasoned or re-handled, bought once and kept, beats five replaced in the same span. That is the whole of our planet score in one sentence.
What you cook with, and what you clean it with
Two things sit next to this page and change what happens on it. Metal utensils are the fastest way to scratch a coating and take the polish off a stainless surface. Aggressive scourers and caustic cleaners strip seasoning and reset an oxide layer. Neither has anything to do with which pan you bought.
The best pan in the world
is usually the one already
on your stove.
Cookware
Cookware is one of the few categories where the conscious answer and the frugal answer are the same answer. Nothing on this page asks you to replace a working pan. Read what you have, cook a little cooler, stop preheating an empty one on full flame, and replace things when they are finished rather than when they are unfashionable. That is most of it.
The label writes the score. We don’t.
Only evidence moves it.
Affiliate disclosure. Some links on this page go to Amazon, and Shake earns a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. We have no relationship with Lodge, Made In, All-Clad, Le Creuset or Xtrema. None of them has been contacted, none has seen this page, and none has paid for or approved anything on it. The scores and the words are ours, and they would read exactly the same if there were no links at all.
How these scores were reached. Four pillars — People, Animals, Gaia, Frequency — each starting at 100. Evidenced concerns deduct; verified virtues add; ceilings cap. The overall score is the average of the four. Price is never an input. Every deduction traces to an entry in our materials repository with an evidence tier and a named source, and where we could not establish something we capped rather than assumed. Any brand may send us evidence at any time, free, and the score is re-checked and updated. That has always been free and always will be. Scored under the ShakeUp Standard Operating Manual v1.5 and the cookware rulings of 2 September 2026.
Not medical advice. Nothing here diagnoses, treats or prevents any condition, and none of it is a substitute for advice from a professional who knows your circumstances. Where we mention nickel or chromium sensitivity, or birds, we are describing a defined group and a documented response — not issuing a general warning.
Sources. Kamerud, Hobbie & Anderson, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 2013;61(39):9495–9501 · Guarneri et al., Contact Dermatitis 2017 · Merck Veterinary Manual, Toxicoses of Pet Birds · Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine · European Food Safety Authority opinion on aluminium from dietary intake · California AB1200, the Safer Food Packaging and Cookware Act of 2021, and Colorado HB 22-1345 · published product and chemical-disclosure pages of Made In, All-Clad and Le Creuset, all read 2 September 2026.
- PFAS
- A large family of fluorine-based compounds used for non-stick, water-repellent and stain-resistant properties. They break down extremely slowly, which is why they are often called forever chemicals. PTFE is one of them.
- PTFE
- Polytetrafluoroethylene — the fluoropolymer used on most conventional non-stick pans, and the material Teflon is a brand name for.
- Fluoropolymer
- The family of fluorine-based plastics used to make things slippery. PTFE is the one you will meet most often in a kitchen.
- Sol-gel
- A coating made from a liquid that sets into a thin, glass-like layer. It contains no fluoropolymer, which is why PFAS-free claims on ceramic-coated pans are often perfectly true.
- Leach test
- A laboratory test that measures how much of a substance actually migrates out of a material and into food, usually under acidic conditions and heat. This is the measurement that matters for cookware.
- XRF
- X-ray fluorescence — a reading of how much of an element is present in a surface. Useful, but it is not a leach test and does not answer the same question.
- Ply
- The number of bonded metal layers in a pan. Tri-ply is three, five-ply is five. More layers usually means more even heat, and says nothing on its own about what touches your food.
- 304
- The most common stainless steel used for cookware — roughly 18% chromium and 8% nickel. Also written 18/8.
- 316
- A stainless steel containing molybdenum, which improves resistance to salt and acid. Often marketed as surgical grade. A different composition, not automatically a better pan.
- 18/10
- Stainless steel with about 18% chromium and 10% nickel. A composition, not a quality rating.
- Ferritic
- A magnetic type of stainless steel, often used as a pan’s outer layer so it works on an induction hob.
- D3
- All-Clad’s three-layer bonded range — stainless, aluminium, stainless. The name covers both uncoated and non-stick versions, so the range name alone will not tell you which you have.
- Oxide layer
- The thin, self-repairing protective film that forms on the surface of stainless steel. It builds over the first several cooks and is what keeps metal migration low.
- Polymerised
- Oil heated until it hardens into a smooth, durable film bonded to the metal. That film is what seasoning is.
- Seasoning
- On bare cast iron, a hardened layer of polymerised oil built up through use. A surface you make yourself, and it improves with age.
- Kiln-fired
- Baked at high temperature until clay vitrifies into a hard, glassy, non-porous solid. Fired through is a different thing from a ceramic-look coating applied over metal.
- Crazing
- A network of fine hairline cracks in a glaze or enamel. Visible in good light, and a sign the surface has begun to fail.
- AB1200
- A California law requiring cookware sold in the state to publish, on the manufacturer’s own website, the intentionally added chemicals it contains from a designated list.
- SOP
- Shake’s Standard Operating Manual — the published method setting out exactly how every product is assessed, so that any score can be checked rather than taken on trust.