seryn

I have a favorite pan. It's a Calphalon "everyday" pan with a glass lid and loop handles on both sides (no stick handle at all) in the 12" size. It's a non-stick pan and unfortunately, those only last a few years before the non-stick coating has taken too much abuse and it not only begins sticking but there starts to be a concern about the coating flaking up into the food.

Calphalon no longer makes exactly this pan. They have frou-frou names for their different apparent qualities of series, but most of them have long stick-arm panhandle-shaped panhandles. These are often 10-12" in and of themselves. I have no idea how people with apartments can use these. It would not fit in my cupboard. It will not fit on my stovetop unless I have no other pans out and even then the long handle would merely be in the way. No one is going to flip food in a 5" deep 12" wide pan. The long handles are superfluous to the point of inconvenience.

We talked about what parameters we need. We need the wide surface area and that medium depth. It's shorter than a pot, but tall enough to hold, say a spaghetti sauce. It does not need to be non-stick, but the handle style is crucial. It needs to have a tight fitting lid and we like the glass lid idea, although if it were the same size, we would be willing to swap in the lid to the current pan which has no endurance issues. It needs to be rounded interior corners but without the wide slope of an omelet pan.

We don't have a brand preference, but the pan should either be cheap (but non-sucky) or enduring.

I would have ordered the Simply Calphalon "everyday" pan but it's got shipping charges when I found it on Amazon. I looked at Williams Sonoma's collection of All-Clad and their pretty copper version doesn't have the loop handles. Amazon has a 13" "brazier" pan that's very similar to the "everyday" shape I like but the lid is metal and 13" means the current glass lid will not fit... and it's $215.

Target doesn't have these "everyday" pans anymore. (That is where I bought the current one, and I got that one on clearance.)

So:

1) What are those pans called officially? What is the cross-brand terminology for that shape of pan? The word that will automatically translate if I find a knowledgeable clerk? The word that search engines understand.

2) Why is anodized aluminum popular? It doesn't seem to help compared to powder coated aluminum and is a giant hassle to keep clean.

3) Are there people who want a 12" handle on a 12" pan?

4) Why is it so hard to find a non-nonstick pan? What is that called? I've been using -nonstick but that doesn't seem to be an effective search parameter, probably because most store search utilities aren't full-featured.

5) Brand recommendations? Is it worth 7 times the price to get All-Clad?

6) In person store shopping recommendations?

I was not thrilled with the selection when I went to Sur La Table. I had been looking at Le Creuset French ovens but they do not stock the largest size in person at their stores, not in any color, so one must order sight unseen and if one is going to do that, the price is better elsewhere. They also favor the long-arm handles on their larger skillets as well. It seems really odd to me that they would favor itty bitty pots but skillets that have a footprint over 28".

Macy's is right out because they have horrible prices and mistreated me personally... supposedly one can get a tolerable price from them during a sale, but during the sales, they're astonishingly understaffed and understocked--- it is pointless to bother when they make everything in the store out to be the last Cabbage Patch Furbie Elmo doll 2 days before Christmas.

So where do people buy cookware?

I read that cookie dough is vastly improved by aging for 24-48 hours in the refrigerator. So I made some "Toll House" cookie dough, minus the chocolate. I used my ancient cookbook. It's over 50 years old.

And the Nestle people lie. The recipe really has changed.

The current recipe on the bag of chocolate chips says 2 sticks of butter and 2 eggs. My recipe says 2/3C shortening and 1 egg. Eggs in both recipes are marked "large". But in reality a modern large egg is bigger than a large egg from 25 years ago. The version of the recipe I have wants 1 cup of chocolate chips. The current version wants a "whole bag" of chips. With that much chocolate, it oozes out and burns to the tray.

I buy pound blocks of Plugra butter when I'm going to be doing baking. There was a lot of math involved.

I had 194g butter. The butter wrapper says 1lb butter=454g. 2 sticks is 1/2lb or 227g. 2 sticks is 1C. So I needed 2/3 of 227g. I almost had it worked out when I was interrupted and asked if something was wrong. 72g is 1/3C butter. So I put in 3/4ths of the butter I had previously weighed, by eye.

There's a secret to making cookies that no one seems to know. You cannot use a mixer. It's a some effort to cream butter and sugar, but mixers incorporate too much air. Also you can always taste the effort in food. I really believe that.

So anyway. I've got cookie dough chilling in the 'fridge. I'll press some chocolate chips into the batter after I slice the cookies.

Start to finish, including several minutes of math and cleaning up after. 19 minutes.

I made ricotta cheese.

(I need a cooking icon.) Fixed.

A friend posted links to recipes using 2 methods, I used the buttermilk method. (The friend used the vinegar method to great success.)

Basically a mixture of 1 part buttermilk, 4 parts milk is heated until it curdles, which is well below boiling. The recommended salt concentration was 2t per gallon. These curds are strained. I used a coffee filter, but cheesecloth is recommended and the coffee filter did not work very fast.

I used 1/2 cup buttermilk and 1.5 cups milk. I realize this is skewed from the official ratio. It still worked just fine. It took me about 6 minutes to cook the milk into curds and I let it strain for an hour undisturbed, but finally started hurrying it because I was frustrated.

I got about 1/2 cup cheese from this.