We Tried It: Caraway Squareware Set

In general, the construction of the Caraway pans, particularly the handles, seems excellent. All of them are well-balanced, with long handles that provide extra leverage compared with many other pans. 

Get the heel of your palm out on the very tip of either handle of the Square Pan Duo pans and you could have an easy action for flipping a grilled cheese, and excellent control for quickly moving a pan off one burner to make room for another. There’s a small bump at the base of each handle near where it attaches to the pan, which is a physical mark to indicate where heat transfer could cause your hand to get singed, but farther up the handle there was very little heat travel, so these were easy to use without a towel or oven mitt. 

Lastly, the handle shapes are palm-friendly (same goes for the roasting and double-burner griddle), because they’re ovalized, which, when you think about it, is the form your palm curves into when you grip anything sideways, from a steering wheel to a sautéing pan. 

Caraway says the ceramic coating that makes their wares nonstick will wear off faster if you scrub the pans roughly. But everything we cooked slid right off, even cheese that melted on for quite a while when I cooked some veggie burgers topped with cheddar. Ditto for the fat from roasting two chickens side by side for Thanksgiving. 

I did put that roasting pan in the dishwasher, just to see how it cleaned up (Caraway says that will shorten the life of the coating), but from what I can tell, you’d never have to because a sponge and soap were literally all it took to wash any of these.

Why are pots round? Well, one reason is that food can collect in the corners of a square pan. But experiencing sautéing greens in a square pan was a kind of a revelation because there was less wasted space and it was easier to spread out and separate pancakes, burgers, and veggies to maximize the surface area and minimize cooking time. Naturally, having a square pan also meant making the most of our now-vintage four-burner stovetop, which always seems too tiny during complex meal construction. 

My wife and I tested all four pans (shout out to my mother-in-law for prepping the entire Thanksgiving meal!) and found they distributed heat very evenly. I also tested the two grill/griddle pans using a Duxtop portable induction cooktop and for that application, heat transfer and consistency matched my favorite cast iron, which was eye-opening.

Caraway sells the griddle and grill pans as a set and if there’s any question about buying all four vs. just purchasing the elements you need, it might come down to this pair. I didn’t always get consistent grill lines on the burgers I tested, though the veggie burgers more consistently showed these telltale sear marks.

The griddle pan, meanwhile, yielded superb grilled cheese, which we served up to family and friends the night after Thanksgiving as a meat-fest break. The results were delicious, with the homemade King Arthur sandwich bread my wife baked for the meal toasting and beautifully browning, delivering a kind of buttery, melty goodness with a just-right nutty exterior. 

Likewise, I sautéed a lot of veggies in this pan over the course of a few weeks (mostly kale and mustard greens) and also toasted almond slivers to add texture to the greens. The long handles and perfect angle of this lever give a cook greater control for this kind of task, so it’s easier to feel secure working ingredients around the pan while you hold a spatula with your other hand. Plus, because they’re square, you get a little more of a working area per burner than a round sauté pan would offer. 

Back to the question above—do you really need both pans in the duo? I ask that because both release food with zero effort, so there’s no question of even melted cheese gluing itself to either, and if you can live without grill lines, I wonder whether you’d need to have both.

It’s subtle, but one of the first features my mother-in-law noticed on Thanksgiving morning was how high and open the side handles were. When you’re wrestling a really large roast out of the oven it’s easy to burn a finger (even with oven mitts on) when pan handles are too short to offer steady purchase. Not here, where the handles are very tall, curved, and relatively wide on top, for superior grip—which was all the better when we were jostling two piping hot chickens out of the oven to cool and inserting the dressing about 45 minutes later than the Thanksgiving-eve script called for. (Blame the cabernet.) 

Also, the rack that’s included is no throwaway—it’s very sturdy. And while we didn’t roast turkey (because our family has given up on the battle for making that meat moist), the rack shape would be perfect for that, or for a standing rib roast, since it wraps low in the pan and nests near the edge rather than protruding high in a V-shape, which tends to get wobbly. The only concern is that the pan’s fairly heavy, though that seemed a welcome trade-off for very even heating. 

This has the same very tall side handles as the roasting pan and they’re really useful for keeping your hands well above the cooking surface, so they don’t transfer much heat, making them safer to touch as we cooked. Our big test was to make a batch of flapjacks on the griddle and these cooked beautifully, with ideal exterior crispiness and a lovely, moist interior. Not one stuck to the pan surface.

One issue, however, is that my wife kept finding oil pooling in the corners of the griddle pan, so she would have to jigger the pan to get it to redistribute. It’s not a deal-breaker because in general, we both could use a lot less oil while cooking with the Caraways because food just doesn’t adhere to them, but for certain dishes, oil adds flavor, and ideally, you want it to stay evenly distributed across a pan’s surface.

As mentioned, we cooked most of our Thanksgiving meal using this set. We also used the griddle and grill pans for making several other dishes, from pancakes to grilled cheese to sautéed greens, plus both veggie and beef burgers. The roasting pan was put to work for Thanksgiving chicken and later we saved the pan drippings to make gravy in that as well. 

I tested these pans using multiple types of appliances, including an electric Duxtop induction unit, a gas stovetop, and an electric oven for roasting. I compared the pans making dishes we prepare regularly, with ranges I know, so I’d have a good measure of performance vs. pans we already own, from Le Creuset enameled cast iron to All-Clad stainless.

You can get a much deeper dive from CR on PTFE hazards in cookware, but in-house food safety expert Eric Boring says, “The good news is that when we tested ceramic-coated non-stick pans we didn’t find any PTFEs.” Boring explained that PTFEs are a kind of chemical that, in some non-stick pans can contain another chemical class, called PFAS, known as forever chemicals, because they persist in the environment and in us. PFAS are used because they’re oleophobic—they repel oil—but unfortunately, they’re also linked to many diseases, and wherever you can, you want to avoid exposure if at all possible, including through cookware.

As mentioned above, Caraway says washing its pans in the dishwasher reduces the life of the nonstick coating. But again, I didn’t find they’d ever need anything but a gentle wiping with a soapy sponge. 

However, a bigger issue for us was that they also don’t want you to use anything but wood utensils on the surface of their pans, and while we have some wooden spoons and a Japanese shamoji (a scoop for serving sticky rice), we don’t own a wooden spatula. The ideal, too, is to avoid using plastic for stirring or manipulating food in a pan since you risk contamination from those tools melting. 

Caraway sells its own utensils set, which includes a set of knives—but they charge more than $300 for it. Depending on your own home setup, too, know that you may not want to use Caraway pans on the grill because temperatures higher than 550 degrees could damage them. 

And even though, yes, it’s nice that the four-pan set comes with its own organizer system, at least in our home it would eat too much capacity in our pan cupboard. And I’d suspect, in many households with other pots, etc., you’d struggle to incorporate the felted structure into your cabinets as well. 

Probably. I hedge, because as mentioned, if you priced all these individually they’ll cost more—but what do you actually need? 

Are you ditching all the non-stick in your house? Want to cook with less oil? Then the Caraway 4-piece would make a very nice replacement option. That said, lids are a lovely thing, and this cookset doesn’t have them. So probably the ideal setup would be some Caraway saucepans and just one of the square pans and perhaps the roasting pan or griddle.

I’d say get one Caraway ceramic-coated pan and give it a thorough test drive; oh, and there’s a 30-day return policy, so you could literally try before you commit. Or ask for the 4-piece set from some kind person on your gifting list and see if a very nice surprise appears for whatever holidays you celebrate.