How to Pick Stock Pans

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you what to look for when buying yourself a set of pots and pans. Next, we'll discuss stock pots. I've got two different sizes here. I have an eight quart and this is a twenty two quart. To be honest I've had this twenty two quart for I don't know, ten, twelve years and I've used it three or four times. It's good if you want to do something like fried turkey. It's good if you want to make a whole lot of soup. I'm talking four of five gallons of soup. Other than that it doesn't see a whole lot of use. It is nice for cooking crab legs and cooking lobster in, but other than that, it s not exactly what I would..., I could find better ways to spend my two hundred bucks if I went back ten years in time. That being said, I've since replaced it, well not replaced it, but supplanted it I would say, with a smaller eight and a half quart. Which you can see is still plenty big to cook; I can cook enough soup for several people. I can cook two and a half gallons of soup in this thing or two gallons of soup rather. It's also good for steaming crab legs or steaming lobsters in. I can boil enough potatoes in this for mashed potatoes for eight or ten people if not more. This is more the size I would go with from a manageability standpoint; this is more the size I would go with for a larger family or industrial applications. See my problem is being a professional chef, I saw this and thought" I use these everyday at work, this is great. Well everyday at work I'm cooking for one hundred people or so. Not at home. At home I'm cooking for two, maybe four tops, Maybe six, sometimes at Christmas or something. What you want to look for in a good stock pot is nice riveted on handles. Make sure the handles are nice and tight. Make sure the walls on your stock pot should be nice and thin up here at the top and at the bottom they should get a lot thicker. You can t really tell on these because you can t see how thick the bottoms are. Trust me when I tell you the bottoms on these are significantly thicker than the sides. Something else you can do which I always recommend is the pasta insert, which can also be used as a steamer insert. Much like, in a regular pot. So, if you're steaming something that s larger, like if your steaming a lobster for example or a couple of lobsters or steam a whole lot of crab legs or a whole lot of shrimp, this is a good way to go and you want to always want to make sure that your lid fits on there very, very well as well. I have trouble speaking sometimes. So, that being said, all about stock pots their great for making soups. Their great for making large amounts of vegetables, potatoes, large amounts of carrots and things like that. Their also great for cooking large amounts of food, like a whole chicken or a whole turkey or a couple of chickens as the case may be. But, like I said, I would tailor the size around what you're using it for. So let s move on."