Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

Every page on this site is written and signed by one person. This page says who, how the judgments are reached, and — just as importantly — what he is not.

How I got here

What made me start writing things down was a habit shared by kitchen shops and product pages alike: the figure a piece of equipment is sold on is rarely the figure that decides how it performs, and almost never the one that decides how long it lasts. A frying pan is advertised on the brand of its coating, while what actually decides its life is the thickness of its base and whether it warps on a strong ring. A knife is sold on the pattern folded around its blade, while the steel that meets the board is the core underneath, named in small print if at all. A pressure cooker is sold on capacity, when the figure that decides whether it is still usable in five years is whether its gasket will still be manufactured. Every page I found while looking for an answer had the same shape: a ranked list, a score out of ten, an affiliate button, and not one figure I could check against the manual.

That is the whole subject. Cookware rarely fails outright. It quietly does less than you were told, in a way nobody connects to the purchase. A pan that stopped releasing because it was stacked under a cast iron pot and its surface was ground away in the cupboard. A knife that never cut well because the sharpener bought with it was ground for a different angle. A casserole that cannot go in the oven at the temperature its recipe asks for, because the limit belongs to the knob rather than to the pot. None of that is on the front of the packaging, and all of it decides whether the thing does its job.

So this is the page I wanted and could not find. I read what manufacturers publish, I check every product reference market by market, I follow what things actually cost — including the wearing parts — and I say plainly when a figure is not published at all. That last part matters more than it sounds: most of the disappointment here comes from a number nobody printed.

I keep notes — the honest specification of each family, the place where the manual contradicts the sales page, which lid fits which pot, what a stated hardness does and does not tell you, and the buying mistake each category invites. This site is those notes, put in order, in five languages, because the same question is asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian and gets a far worse answer in four of them.

I am not a chef, a cutler or a food scientist, and I do not pretend to be. What I can do is read carefully, compare honestly, report every manufacturer figure with its source, and tell you which number the maker left out.

What this site covers

Everything listed here is taken from the catalog of this site, and each entry links to its own page. When the catalog changes, this list changes with it. It is a list of what is covered — not a list of what I own.

What I care about

Three beliefs, and they run through the whole site. The number that gets quoted is usually the wrong one — a pan sold on its coating rather than on the base that stops it warping, a Damascus blade sold on its layer count rather than on the core steel that forms its edge, a grill pan sold on its ridges when the space between them is where searing stops, a steamer sold on capacity rather than on the clearance it needs above the water. What the thing costs over three years decides more than what it costs today — gaskets harden, coatings are consumables, felt protectors cost less than the pan they save, and a set whose lids are sold separately is not the set you priced. And the thing that matters most is rarely on the specification sheet at all: whether the object is pleasant enough to reach for, because a heavy pan on a high shelf and a knife that lives loose in a drawer both stop being used.

What I am not

I am not a chef, a cutler, a metallurgist or a toxicologist. I hold no qualification in any of them, I have never worked for a manufacturer or for a retailer, and nothing here rests on any professional title. This site describes a product — its construction, its materials, its published specifications — and stops there. In particular, every hardness in HRC, base thickness, oven limit, coating temperature limit, operating pressure and capacity on this site is reported from the manufacturer with its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker states a blade at 60 HRC or a coating to 260 °C (500 °F), I report that the maker states it — I am not a testing laboratory, and no product here is described as cutting better or heating more evenly than another on the strength of a specification alone.

And I am emphatically not a source of health advice. What a coating may contain, what has been restricted and when, are regulatory and scientific questions — PFOA has been banned in the European Union since 2020, and a wider PFAS restriction is under assessment at ECHA. Where a page here touches that, it describes the rule and links to the authority that publishes it, and goes no further. You will not read the words "safe" or "toxic" about a pan on this site, in either direction: a confident answer from me would be worth nothing, and it is exactly the kind of claim that sells an expensive replacement for a pan that did not need replacing.

Nothing here asks you to take a verdict on trust because of who wrote it; what each judgment rests on is stated on the page it appears on, and you can read how a ranking is arrived at here in full.

How I work

Every figure names its source: a manufacturer specification, a manual, a declared limit, or the weight of long-term owner reports.
No price, product reference or specification is ever invented. Where a figure is missing, the field is left empty and the gap is stated on the page.
Product references are verified against Amazon before publication, per market. Where a model is not sold in that store, you are sent to a local search rather than to a page that does not exist.
Where the cheap option wins, the page says the cheap option wins — and where the honest answer is drying the food and heating the pan you already own rather than buying another, it says that instead.
Nothing here is sold with worry. No page opens with a health scare, and where a product changes very little, the page says so.

Why this site exists

Because cookware is sold on the wrong numbers, to people who are replacing something that disappointed them. A coating brand is printed where a base thickness belongs. A layer count is printed where a core steel belongs. A piece count is printed for a set that is half lids. A casserole is sold on its enamel when the figure that decides everything is the oven limit of its knob. And the parts treated as afterthoughts — the protector, the gasket, the guard, the glove — are usually what decides whether the expensive thing survives its third year.

There is also a part of this that is not about buying anything. The single most useful sentence on this site is that a pan conducts heat, a coating delays sticking, an edge parts fibers, and none of them supplies a technique. Writing it the other way round sells more equipment and leaves a reader disappointed by a perfectly good pan. Plenty of what improves a kitchen here costs nothing at all: drying food before it meets the pan, letting a stainless pan reach temperature before anything goes in, honing an edge weekly instead of sharpening it twice a year, putting felt between stacked pans, washing a grater in the direction its teeth cut. Those things are cheap and almost never written down. That is the subject a page full of new equipment is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and date the correction on the page. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · Paris, France