Best cookware for gas stoves

Gas heats in a ring, and that is the whole problem

A gas burner is a circle of flames somewhere between three and six inches across. It heats a band of the pan base, not the whole thing, and it also licks up the sides — which is why gas is the only cooktop where a pan's walls get direct heat.

A pan that conducts and stores heat well spreads that ring into an even base. A thin pan does not: it develops a bright hot annulus over the flames with cooler metal inside and outside it, and if you have ever had a pancake burn in a perfect circle, that is what you were looking at.

So on gas the useful specification is thickness and construction, not brand. Fully clad rather than disc-bottom. Carbon steel at 2.5 to 3 mm rather than 1.5. Cast iron, obviously, which is nearly all mass.

Match the pan to the burner, not the recipe

A 12-inch skillet on a 6-inch burner has three inches of unheated rim on every side. On clad stainless the aluminum core carries some heat outward and it is tolerable. On cast iron, which conducts at only around 50 W/m-K, the rim genuinely stays cooler, and food at the edge cooks visibly more slowly.

If your stove has one large burner and three medium ones, buy your big pan for the large one. If every burner is medium, a 10-inch skillet will serve you far better than a 12, whatever the recipe says. This is the same trade-off worked through in what size cast iron skillet.

Handles get hot on gas in a way they do not elsewhere

Flames wrap. On an electric or induction hob a handle sticking out sideways stays reasonably cool; over a gas ring turned up, it sits in rising hot air, and metal handles conduct that straight into your hand.

This is worth knowing before you buy a pan with a bare steel handle. Matfer's black steel pans use a riveted steel strip with no heat break at all — restaurant cooks keep a towel permanently to hand and think nothing of it, but it is a real daily fact. de Buyer publishes a "Heat Stop" geometry on its MINERAL B PRO handles for exactly this reason, and Tramontina's clad handles are known to run warm on gas.

What gas is genuinely better at

• Visible feedback. You can see the heat level, which is genuinely useful when learning.
• Instant response. Turn it down and it is down, which induction matches and electric coil does not.
• Wok cooking. A round-bottomed wok on a gas ring is the only setup where a wok works as designed, because the flame wraps the curve.
• Tolerance. Warped pans, odd shapes, and non-magnetic materials all work. Nothing is ruled out.

What to avoid on gas

Thin stamped aluminum pans, which warp and then rock. Anything with a plastic handle that extends over an adjacent burner. And glass lids at high heat, since gas heats the lid rim from the sides in a way flat cooktops do not.

One more: do not run a coated pan over a high gas flame. The flames heat the sides well above the base temperature, and coating degradation is a temperature problem. Keep coated pans on medium on gas, always. The reasoning is in is nonstick cookware safe.