Comments | yarbiedoll: Buying Pot(s)

yarbiedoll

Buying Pot(s)

Jun 08, 2006 09:15

Anyone out there have any experience with Wolfgang Puck Cookware? Tired of using my giant 16-qt. stock pot for soup experiments, I'd been looking for a sturdy, medium-weight, medium-sized vessel and came across the WP 18/10 Stainless 8-qt. Bistro Stock Pot yesterday for $24.99--a bargain compared to most cookware I've ever purchased ( Read more... )

cooking

Comments 2

yesthatjill June 8 2006, 15:57:46 UTC

I have no particular experience with the particular brand, but I do know cookware.

#1: 18/10 stainless is 18% Cr, 10% Ni. Good stuff with high acid resistance. So put tomatoes in your soup with glee and elan!

#2: Stainless steel, because it has so much alloying material in it, doesn't transfer heat very well. A pot made of all stainless usually has 'hot spots'.

#3: Aluminum does transfer heat well, so the tri-ply aluminum bottom will transfer heat along the bottom of the soup pot. Which, for soups, which you want to boil bottom-up instead of from the sides-in, is a good thing. What you probably aren't used to is a thicker bottom than the sides of the pot.

#4: If you can pick up the pot when it is full of water, then it's the right size. ;)

#5: Does it go into the dishwasher?

Oh, I saw the reviews on HSN, and you know what 'they' say: more people will complain about a product than those who will praise it.

yarbiedoll June 8 2006, 18:03:31 UTC

Yep. I picked the pot for reasons 1-4, which are excellent points for any pot-buyers. I handwash pots, so dishwasher tolerance is low on my list.

I'm just wary of this type of bottom. What I'm used to are stainless pots with heavy aluminum bottoms and seamless construction on the inside andoutside. This one is obviously stainless throughout (no inside seams or tell-tale lines of delineation between materials), with an aluminum overfitting thing on the bottom. My suspicion is that the overfitting thing is a cheaper way of manufacturing a pot with the benefits of an aluminum bottom, and that--depending on how the two metals are attached/in contact, there could be some warping that occurs.

I also took into account that the people who wrote glowing reviews on the HSN website also seemed to have been non-stick users in the past. Well, of course they had a better experience with stainless! There's no comparison (well, OK, for some things I prefer copper), in my book. However, I like the size and weight of the pot and I adore Wolfgang, ( ... )