Gotham Steel Pan: A Chef’s Review of this Kitchen Essential

This pan is *chef’s kiss*. (Pun intended.) I love to cook. I actually went to culinary school and worked in a restaurant kitchen for a few years before deciding that lifestyle wasn’t for me. This was in the 1990s when professional kitchen culture was absolutely insane. People screaming at each other, abusive head chefs, no work-life balance — I cut out of that pretty quickly. And I’m glad I did because I still enjoy cooking when it’s not part of a stressful work life. Anyway, I digress. The point is that I know my way around a set of pots and pans, and I HIGHLY recommend the Gotham Steel Pan.

Why? It made my life so much easier. It’s non-stick but with the lasting quality of titanium. I still use butter and oil (for flavor purposes), but with this pan, I actually think you might not need to. All the food seriously slides right off — even sticky sauces, egg residue, everything. The website advertises using this pan to bake s’mores right in the oven, and while I haven’t tried that yet, I 100% believe you can do it.

Can You Use the Gotham Steel Pan in the Oven?

That’s the other thing I really like about this pan — you can use it on the stove, but you can also use it to bake in the oven. It seems super high quality so far, and can withstand oven temperatures of up to 500 degrees (so basically everything you’d need to cook at home).

It’s also non-scratch. I wouldn’t recommend using metal cooking implements on the surface of the plan, because that just feels blasphemous to me, but I’m sure that you could.

All of these qualities make it dishwasher-safe too, which is a huge plus. I HATE hand-washing dishes, and the unfortunate truth is that most chef-grade or professional pots and pans are hand-wash only. The coating on them that makes them so high-quality also makes them vulnerable to scratches or damage in the dishwasher. I thought finding a high-quality, multi-use pan that was ALSO dishwasher safe would be impossible, and I’ve been SO pleasantly surprised! This pan is pretty much everything I want out of a cooking implement.

Is the Gotham Steel Pan Worth It?

It’s also PTFE/PFOA/PFOS free, which you know is a huge deal if you’ve been paying attention to the news. These chemicals (aka “forever chemicals”) get into the environment and into our bodies super easily, and there’s no way to reliably eliminate them aside from phasing them out of use. They’re also a super common ingredient in many aerosol sprays used to make non-stick coatings and non-stick materials. Finding a nonstick pan that doesn’t contain any of these forever chemicals is a huge win.

All of this is to say that I found this pan HUGELY valuable for its price point, which is something like $19.99? Yeah, that’s an insane bargain for the quality of what you actually get here. I also think there’s a deal going on right now where you can buy one and get one free, which is great. You can have one in the dishwasher to be washed and one ready to use at all times. The same deal was going on when I bought mine initially, and I’m so glad it was — I use the heck out of them.

Also, there’s a 90-day money-back guarantee, which personally I love. I hate buying things on the internet without being able to see them and hold them first, so that guarantee was what pushed me over the edge to buy this in the first place. Of course, I will NOT be returning these — in fact, I might be ordering even more — but it was nice to have that option.

Why You Need a Good Quality Pan

Let me tell you a story from my chef days to illustrate just how nice it is to have a good quality nonstick pan. Before I went to culinary school and started working at a nice restaurant kitchen, I worked in a diner. It was eggs, eggs, eggs every day.

During summer — our busy season at this particular diner — I was being scheduled nearly every day, because it also happened to coincide with when a lot of the staff was out of town, taking vacations. During one stretch, I worked 16 days in a row. I ended up having to take a week off work because I got carpal tunnel from the repetitive motion of cutting a piece of butter, laying it on the pan, and swirling it around to coat the surface. The restaurant actually closed one day because there wasn’t enough staff between the vacations and my injury. The point is, we really could’ve used a Gotham pan back then. I know it would’ve made MY life a lot easier!

I’ve made some of my favorite meals on my Gotham pans now. First, a simple and classic Denver omelet (cheddar cheese, ham, peppers and mushrooms) slides right off this pan. I also fry up vegetables in it almost daily, heat sauces, and make pan-seared salmon, which is one of my favorite recipes.

Cleanup is so easy, I almost wish all of my pans — even the ones that cost hundreds of dollars — came from Gotham. Everything slides off, so there’s no scraping necessary. Then I just give it a quick rinse and stick it in the dishwasher to be thoroughly cleaned overnight.

What’s the Gotham Steel Pan Made Of?

Aside from the ease and convenience, what makes me feel so strongly about this pan is the quality. It’s made with a mix of ceramic and titanium, and if you know anything about cookware, you know that those are two of the highest quality materials you can ask for. They allow heat to disperse evenly through the pan’s surface, which cooks food evenly. Few things irritate me more in the kitchen than when a dish cooks unevenly — rubbery eggs, burnt sauce, it’s all a disaster. I was shocked when I started using this pan and realized how well it dispersed heat. Usually pans that are this inexpensive AND nonstick don’t have the best conductivity, but I was amazed by my Gotham pans.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because of the special nonstick coating they use. On the website it says they use “TI-Cerama Nonstick Coating,” which I believe is some sort of patented spray. Unlike other nonstick cookware, this process must allow them to add a nonstick coating to a high-quality titanium and ceramic pan, rather than crafting it around nonstick materials.

However Gotham is able to make such an affordable, high-quality, nonstick pan, it doesn’t matter to me, because their process works. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in higher-quality cookware, anyone who uses the stove at least once or twice a week, or honestly, anyone who cooks and doesn’t want to deal with food sliding off the pan.

I don’t normally get on here and write long, rambling product reviews for things I bought on the internet. But when it comes to Gotham steel pans, it’s well worth it.