The Best Cookware Sets, Based on Years of Testing Pots and Pans

At Bon Appétit we’re a staff full of people with strong cookware opinions. Our editors have spent years building their own ideal lineups of pots and pans, piece by piece, so the concept of a preassembled cookware set has always sparked debate. Our usual advice? The best cookware set is the one you assemble yourself, over years, that includes the cookware you use and love the most.

But that’s not realistic for everyone. Plenty of home cooks don’t have the time, experience, or opportunity to test-drive five different pans before committing. That's why a premade cookware set can be a smart starting point, giving you enough essential pieces to cook most recipes confidently while leaving room to expand your collection later (say, with a Le Creuset Dutch Oven or a cast-iron pan). That’s why we like streamlined 7-piece sets: They focus on the core pots and pans (and lids) you’ll reach for daily, without loading you up with specialty items you don’t need. And within those options, stainless steel—not nonstick—consistently proves the most versatile, durable, and reliable material for everyday cooking.

• The best cookware set overall: All-Clad D3 7-Piece Cookware Set
• The best budget set: Goldilocks 7-Piece Cookware Set
• A pricey (but worth it) upgrade: Fissler M5 7-Piece Cookware Set
• A small cookware set for tiny kitchens: All-Clad D3 5-Piece Cookware Set
• If you really want an expanded set: All-Clad D3 10-Piece Cookware Set
• And if you're itching for a copper set: Mauviel M'Heritage or Ruffoni Historia

To come up with this list, we analyzed the most common cookware sets on the market, and determined which collections offered the most utility. Then, we cross-referenced those sets with our extensive testing of individual pieces and chose sets that included those lines. Check out our curated list of the best cookware sets below, all of which make excellent starter kits for any home kitchen.

New in this update: After a few additional months of testing, we replaced our previous budget winner, the Ninja EverClad 7-Piece Set, with one from the DTC brand Goldilocks and now include recommendations for copper cookware sets as well.

All-Clad has long been an industry standard for professional restaurant kitchens in the United States. Their brand has a strong and well-regarded reputation that stands up to scrutiny, as we’ve found year after year in our product tests for the best stainless-steel skillets, saucepans, and stockpots. The D3 line is a tri-ply, clad stainless steel that boasts excellent heat distribution across the cooking surface with no cold or hot spots. The pieces are sturdy and comfortable to handle, making them easy to maneuver across a cooktop. All-Clad cookware is expensive, but it is high-quality cookware that will last you a lifetime with good care, which is why we feel confident in recommending it to people.

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Goldilocks 7-Piece Cookware Set

$215

Goldilocks

As far as value goes, Goldilocks cookware impressed us quite a bit in recent tests, and it has become a favorite budget alternative in our tests of a number of individual pieces of cookware. In terms of the shape and design of each piece, the cookware strongly resembles All-Clad products. Are the pans a little thinner, more volatile, and scorchy in comparison to All-Clad? Sure, but for the price, they’re about as good as you can get. The set comes with two different saucepans and doesn’t include its sauté pan—the budget pick in our product test. Unfortunate, but we still think it’s worth recommending this set due to the quality it offers, and if you really want the sauté pan, you should just add it to your cart when purchasing the set.

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Fissler M5 Pro-Ply 5-Ply Stainless-Steel 7-Piece Cookware Set

$900 $675 (25% off)

Fissler

$1,000

Amazon

Deputy food editor Hana Asbrink has an affinity for German-made cookware brand Fissler, which has become more readily available in the US in recent years. The brand’s pans can go toe-to-toe with All-Clad in terms of quality, design, and reputation. Like All-Clad, these are multi-clad stainless-steel pans with an aluminum core (this particular set is 5-ply, which means it has two additional layers of metal in addition to the three the All-Clad D3 and Goldilocks has). They heat evenly, and are lightweight and comfortable in the hand. Unlike All-Clad, Fissler cookware has a welded construction instead of riveted handles, which makes it easier to clean up. It’s also got cool to the touch handles and sealed edges. This is definitely a premium cookware set, but it’s one that will stick with you for life.

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All-Clad

D3 5-Piece Cookware Set

$560 $450 (20% off)

All-Clad

I know not everyone has space for extra cookware. There are folks are using kitchenettes or similar reduced setups to prepare their meals at home; I’m talking efficiency apartment renters, van life people, tiny home dwellers, and steadfast minimalists. The question is then, what is the smallest arrangement of pans that allows for the greatest variety of meal preparations? Or in other words: What’s a set that takes up little space, but is versatile enough that you never feel like you’re missing a tool when cooking a typical meal?

“Typical” is obviously relative here, but for this exercise, I’ll use the classic tripartite assemblage of a protein plus carb plus vegetable. In order to execute this genre of meal with a great deal of versatility in preparation, you need three pieces of cookware. A decent-sized skillet, a saucepan, and a high-sided pot like a stockpot.

• The skillet has you covered for searing, sautéeing, and shallow-frying, and it will be the most frequently used pan out of the bunch. Its only limitations are when a large amount of liquid gets involved.
• The stockpot or similar high-sided pot will serve you well for so much more than stock. This is what you’ll use to boil pasta, make rice, cook stews, or mash potatoes. It can serve as the “one pot” in one-pot meal recipes and is practical for any high-volume, high-liquid project. For super small setups, a stockpot might be too bulky, so sometimes a larger volume saucier works here as well.
• You might think the saucepan is the third wheel here, but I disagree. Principally, a saucepan is useful for preparing side dishes and sauces. Its size helps those restricted to small cooktops or stand-alone burners. I’d argue that the saucepan is actually the most important piece of minimal cookware, because it is the go-to tool for so many types of solo meals. Think about it— ramen, boxed mac and cheese, reheated soup that your auntie froze for you—for so many people, the saucepan is the first piece of cookware (on the stove top) that they cook with.

You’ll get all three of those pans (plus lids for the pot and saucepan) in All-Clad’s 5-piece set, which is a smaller version of our top pick.

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All-Clad D3 3-Ply Stainless Steel 10-Piece Cookware Set

$800

Amazon

This is a larger set that we know will deliver on quality and performance, and is still practical for larger kitchens. If you’re going to add pieces on top of the 7-piece sets we recommend, we’d say having two saucepans and two skillets of different sizes, as you get in this All-Clad set, is useful for less intensive cooking projects.

And if you're itching for a copper set: Mauviel M'Heritage or Ruffoni Historia

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Mauviel

M'Heritage M'150 B 5-Piece Copper Cookware Set

$1,335 $850 (36% off)

Mauviel

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Ruffoni

Historia Hammered Copper 7-Piece Cookware Set with Acorn Knobs

$1,715 $1,200 (30% off)

Williams Sonoma

Copper cookware is synonymous with luxury and classic French cuisine. Beyond its undeniably eye-catching luster, copper has superior thermal conductivity and heat capacity. This means that copper pans will heat faster and more evenly than stainless-steel—however not all copper pans are created equally.

Traditional copper cookware is lined with tin, as opposed to stainless steel. Tin has a much higher rate of conductivity compared to stainless-steel, but due to its low melting point (450°F) it is not suitable for high-heat searing. This is why most copper cookware you'll find these days has a layer of stainless-steel instead. There are also the cookware lines that feature a partial layer or layers of copper cladding, like All-Clad Copper Core and Hestan Copperbond, but with an exterior layer of induction compatible steel (copper is not induction compatible).

We don't recommend those more hybrid pans because, after testing the thermal conductivity of several copper cookware lines, we found that a majority of these copper/stainless-steel pans do not perform any better than their stainless-steel counterparts, which cost quite a bit less. This is because the stainless steel cladding diminishes the copper's responsiveness. They may heat up a bit faster, but they won't do so evenly, leaving you with greater temperature variation on the surface of the pan (not ideal).

In terms of thermal conductivity, tin lined copper is the undeniable winner. These pans heat up and cool down fast, yet the temperature across their cooking surface remains remarkably even. This is that reputation for precise control in action. We'd recommend the Historia line from Ruffoni for tin-lined copper pans. Not only are they beautiful, they exhibited quantitatively superior performance in how they responded to changes in heat.

Cooking with tin is not as scary as it sounds, but if you don't want to play that game, Mauviel's M'150 line is the next best thing. Consisting of 90% copper and only 10% stainless steel, these pans heat faster and more evenly than stainless-steel cookware (just not as well as a tin lined pan.) Copper cookware enthusiasts will tell you that the more copper the better with a pan, and put a lot emphasis on the thickness of a pan. The thing is, copper is also quite heavy, and maneuverability is just as important a factor in a pan as how well it heats. That's why we prefer Mauviel's 1.5 mm thick pans opposed to their heavier stock. We'd say you should only consider the thicker 2.0 or 2.5mm cookware if you plan on having the pan over heat for a really long time—like if you're making stock on the regular.

We had a big conversation on staff about what the most necessary components of a cookware set are. There were a lot of opinions and hot takes, many of which resulted in fantasy cookware sets that aren’t actually available anywhere (much to a couple of enthusiastic staff members’ chagrin, there are no stainless-steel cookware sets that feature rondeaus or Dutch ovens). We analyzed the available assortment of cookware sets online, taking note of the most common assemblages, and tried to identify redundant or unnecessary pieces. We came to the conclusion that it would be best to start with the fundamental pieces of cookware you’d most likely use, and encourage expanding a collection based on your needs on a piece-by-piece basis.

For selecting specific lines of cookware, we used our testing data for previous product tests to inform our recommendation choices, as well as the industry expertise of the professionals in our Test Kitchen. For the tests and the methodologies we used to select our winners, check out our tests for the best stainless-steel skillets, saucepans, and stockpots.

• Dependable, reliable, and virtually indestructible, these are the best cast-iron skillets for a lifetime of cooking.
• Carbon steel is tough and durable, compatible with induction cooktops, and can withstand high heat. (They're all over professional kitchens for a reason.) These carbon steel pans are our favorites.
• Nonstick pans are an indispensable cooking tool for making omelets, browning salmon skin, and reheating leftovers.