I’m setting up a new kitchen after downsizing. What are the three most important and/or useful pots and pans, and the same for bakeware?
Kate, Des Moines, Iowa
A great question, and one that everyone will have a slightly different answer to depending on how they cook, how many they’re cooking for and possibly even the season. Assuming that downsizing means you’re now mostly cooking for one or two, I’d say there are three must-haves: a small saucepan (to boil or poach eggs, say, or to heat up soup or to make a small amount of pasta sauce); a medium, roughly 22cm saute pan or skillet (for frying eggs, making crepes and to give onions space to sweat down in properly before becoming the base of all sorts of stews, curries and stir-fries) and a larger, high-sided casserole pot or dutch oven (for longer braises, searing meat and batch cooking). Make sure they all have a lid and, crucially, that they’re ovenproof, too. Whether they’re nonstick or non-nonstick as well is up to you: cast iron is the dream for many, but it doesn’t work for everyone, it can be expensive, and you need to look after and treat it. And buy only what you will definitely use and find practical in everyday reality rather than in the film version of your life.
Baking-wise – and I’m assuming we’re off the stove and into the oven now – I’d say a 20cm round springform tin (ie where the sides release from the base), a square brownie tin (which can double up as a cake tin or be used for making American-style biscuits), a standard loaf tin for banana and regular bread, and a quarter baking tray or sheet pan for swiss rolls (AKA jelly rolls), cookies and slab pies.
Once you have your pans, don’t hold back on using them even if a recipe calls for a different shape or a slightly different size (baking doesn’t allow for too much variability, though, so only do that if it’s 1cm-2cm different). Again, be practical – go with what you can see yourself using regularly – rather than aspirational. It’s like shopping for clothes: how often do we wear that “bold” outfit we bought on a whim imagining a day when we’d be feeling fly?
