Anthony Bourdain Had One Simple Rule For Choosing A Great Sauté Pan

If you've ever come across a quote about food that's sardonic and jarring yet undeniably true, chances are high it came from the late great celebrity chef and writer, Anthony Bourdain. His highly influential book, "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly," is heavily laden with ripe tidbits, including one memorable piece of advice for selecting a particular type of pan: "A proper sauté pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent — the victim's head or your pan — then throw that pan right in the trash," reads the quote listed on Goodreads. While this was a characteristically evocative way to make his point, Bourdain wasn't wrong. Thick, heavyweight sauté pans get better results than thin, lightweight ones in most cases.

Thicker-bottomed sauté pans are often the preference of professional chefs and serious home cooks, largely due to their ability to absorb and distribute heat more evenly. More metal in the base of a pan means fewer hotspots, as the pan will conduct heat more evenly across its surface. That means the food cooks consistently rather than burning in some areas of the pan and cooking slower in others. There's also a difference between searing food (good), and scorching it (bad), and thin pans can quickly take on too much heat, resulting in burnt food.

Thinner pans are more responsive to heat changes, which can be a good thing if you want to rapidly cook food that you can move around quickly at a very high heat — think stir-fry in a wok. Some foods also benefit from a more responsive pan, like eggs or fish fillets that require close handling. When sautéing, however, heat rising and dropping means all-important temperature control becomes harder. Thicker pans with greater thermal mass maintain temperature better when cooler food goes in, meaning your pan decides the temperature of the food, not the other way around.

Thick pans are also less prone to warping from drastic changes in temperature, making them hardier and more durable, another reason they're the go-to for professionals and dedicated home chefs. This makes heavier pans slightly more cumbersome to handle, even if their weight does make them more effective weapons.

This quote from Bourdain's book is far from being the only memorable one. His behind-the-scenes glimpse of kitchens and comments about the "remarkable and admittedly annoying" reality of celebrity chefs have continued to resonate since they were first published more than a quarter of a century ago. "Kitchen Confidential" is a great first read of Bourdain's literary output, but there are plenty of other Bourdain books and TV series to sink your teeth into if you want to find more nuggets of wisdom like this one.