Quality cookware can’t make bad food taste good

We’ve frequently posted swoon-inducing photos of the latest offerings from cookware manufacturers like Le Creuset and Staub. They make tremendous products that can make cooking easier and help you create better meals. However, the mere presence of a gorgeous enameled cast iron pot is not sufficient to conjure deliciousness from bad ingredients or a bad recipe. Case in point: my recent hotel breakfast and dinner.

I’m not going to name names, but I recently stayed at a Minnesota location of a well-known worldwide hotel chain that served almost all of the food at its bar/restaurant in Le Creuset cookware. Order the pasta? It comes in a small LC Dutch oven. Same for the salad (?). I ordered my burger to go, but sadly they did not provide me with a pot to take up to my room. Oh well, it was worth a try.

The breakfast buffet also featured a trove of Le Creuset Dutch ovens, brasiers, and skillets in various hues. As attractive as this display was, it did not make the soggy French toast, limp home fries, or dry scrambled eggs taste good. The food was, in a word, awful. The best thing the buffet had to offer – hot oatmeal – was served in a bog standard chafing dish, proving that the pan doesn’t make the meal.

This is not to say that cookware makes no difference at all in how your food will turn out: the only time my toffee has ever failed is when when I made it in a thin aluminum saucepan instead of the heavy tri-ply stainless steel pot that I normally use. High quality pans make it easier to maintain consistent heat levels and provide other benefits as well. And I cannot deny that I love the way the Sea Salt Le Creuset and copper Mauviel pans look sitting on my cooktop, which in turn inspires me to make delicious food.

Despite my affinity for high end cookware, some of my favorite meals have been made in beat up, cheap pans. I’ve pumped out amazing dishes in kitchens with minimum equipment and erratic ovens. Once I had a few really nice pans in my arsenal, however, I realized how much easier it was to cook with them – which is different than making my cooking better. Quality cookware can make meal prep more pleasurable, and it can allow you to avoid some pitfalls. For instance, a thin pan will scorch in an instant, but you have more leeway with a pan that has thicker walls. But in the end, even a beautiful, well-made pan isn’t going to make rubbery eggs taste good. Much credit goes to the ingredients and to the cook.