The Best Dutch Ovens of 2023

As our previous overall winner, this Staub Dutch oven is an absolute favorite for anything and everything in the kitchen. The pot has a signature glossy finish, with a smooth-fitting lid adorned with self-basting divots. These little ceramic dots help condensation from the dish drip evenly back into pot, instead of pooling at the edges of the lid and streaming down in one line after removal.

The Staub produced a deeply flavorful broth, evenly roasted chicken pieces, and the tallest sourdough loaf of the bunch. Compared to our other pots, the Staub also remained fairly clean after multiple uses, with minimal stains and spots. The inside was also nicely nonstick, so any bits and pieces were easily removed with little scrubbing.

Every meal that came out of the KitchenAid 6-quart Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven was delicious. Its nonstick and even heating capabilities were impressive, and resulting loaves of bread and pots of soup earned solidly high marks. That's partially thanks to the heavy, well-fitting lid with built-in divots, which made for extra tender short ribs and crusty, doughy bread.

Unfortunately, we ran into a few downsides. First, this Dutch oven is heavy. At over 15 pounds, we found ourselves struggling to wash it in the sink without accidentally dropping it in the process. And the handles weren't helpful: their stubby design meant they got hot quickly and were tough to grab onto.

And since this option only comes in two bright, pastel-like colors, any remnant of a stain will be pretty visible (and sometimes we struggled to scrub those off).

Caraway's Dutch Oven has the same bright and charming aesthetic that the ceramic cookware brand is known for. It also boasts those same impressive nonstick qualities: When testing this Dutch oven, a good rinse was enough to release most tacked-on foods (no scrubbing required). It also performed very well at evenly browning meat and deglazing aromatics.

However, this Dutch oven isn't made from cast iron. And while that might be a plus for its lightweight build, it also means heat retention wasn't as impressive, especially since the lid features a small hole that releases some heat and steam. As a result, our roasted chicken took much longer to cook all the way through, and our sourdough loaf was lacking those characteristic springy holes in the interior. This Dutch oven also lacks any divots in the lid, which are crucial for redispersing moisture back into food as it cooks.

We're pretty sure Amazon took cues from other top-performing brands in order to produce this eerily familiar model. The similarities in look to the Cuisinart were startling. That said, it didn’t perform quite as well.

From picking up mysterious black marks on the outside after cooking bread to the handles instantly becoming too hot to touch on the stove, this product could use a few more years to mature. We'd call it a solid bargain buy for someone who isn’t sure if they’re ever going to use their Dutch oven.

This Cuisinart is a solid Dutch oven. The flat sides offer a wide sautéing base for onions and garlic, and the simple construction means you can’t really go wrong. That said, it just didn’t perform as well in our tests. A few black spots on the bottom of the bread, a bit tougher to clean off the soup, and meat that wasn’t quite perfect knocked it down a few spots in our list.

The Misen Dutch oven is designed quite cleverly with a lid that doubles as a grill pan. This proved useful to sear chicken for a crisp skin before transferring it into the pot to fully roast. However, the lid also detracted from the overall score because it didn’t fit as tightly as others and made handling the pot more awkward. This was most annoying in scenarios like baking bread, where the pot is heated to 500°F so you want to be extra careful when handling.

The pot also comes with a silicone "universal lid" which is helpful in many scenarios, especially since it's also self-basting, but is less convenient to remove since it hugs the pot so tightly (watch out for escaping steam).

Vermicular is a Japanese cast-iron company specializing in beautifully made pots like this one. The Vermicular Dutch oven is quite attractive and does have the self-basting dots we like, but it also managed to stain quite severely after just one use.

Additionally, while its lid has a top knob, it also has two handles, which makes the entire pot more awkward to handle (much like the Misen).

The Great Jones 6.75-quart Dutch oven was the largest one we tested, and one of two in an oval shape (as opposed to a round). The main issue we ran into was precisely due to this—since most stovetops are circular, we found this pot to heat less evenly than the others, resulting in oddly cooked chicken and sourdough bread.

It also lacked a few key features we found useful in the other models, namely the self-basting divots, and a smoothly sealing lid. Whether it was due to the textured, matte finish of the entire pot’s outside or just a function of the pot’s grooves, the lid would make a particularly grating sound when slid on to cover the pot.