Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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The Cuisinart Electric gives superior performance and is elegant enough to use for dinner parties. It excels at maintaining a steady simmer at a medium-low heat setting. Read More
In appearance, this workhorse of an electric skillet is utilitarian, but it’s large enough to easily accommodate eight chicken pieces or hamburgers and it will cook them evenly. Read More
This luxury appliance is beautiful, holds lots of food, and cooks exceptionally evenly. It’s easy to care for both the base and the lid are dishwasher safe. Read More
This is a relatively small electric skillet, but it makes a great choice for small families. It has a high-quality feel and some unique features that make it convenient to use. Read More
If you’re cooking for a crowd, this is a great choice. With its black plastic base, it won’t dress up your buffet table, but it will keep party dishes warm until guests come back for seconds. Read More
An electric skillet can be a lifesaver when company is coming and you don’t have enough room on your stovetop to cook a meal. Most are generously sized, so they’re useful for entertaining, bringing a family-sized meal straight to the table, or keeping food hot on a buffet.
An electric skillet is also a convenient way to toss a hot meal together when you don’t have access to a stove but do have an electric outlet. (Think in an RV, school, church, or community rec room.) You can think of them as a pan with a built-in heating element.
After putting popular models through a battery of cooking tests, we found that the best electric skillet is the beautiful stainless-steel Cuisinart Electric Skillet (available at Amazon for $139.95) . If you don’t want to spend much and aren’t too concerned about looks, our best value pick is the Black and Decker 12-by-15-inch (available at Amazon).
The Cuisinart Electric Skillet is our top pick thanks to its superior performance and elegant design.
Not only is this electric skillet from Black and Decker great to cook family-sized meals, but it's also our Best Value choice.
The All-Clad Electric Nonstick Skillet is our pick for the best upgrade.
The Zojirushi Gourmet d'Expert Electric Skillet performs well, particularly when cooking small servings.
The Presto 16-inch Electric Skillet is great for feeding a crowd.
Handles fold in for easy storage
Generous capacity
Dishwasher safe
Utilitarian looking
Long preheat time
Slick nonstick finish
Dishwasher safe
Utilitarian looking
Difficult to read temperatures on control
Hi, I'm Sharon Franke, and I test kitchen equipment for a living, putting everything from apple corers to zoodle makers through their paces. I use my experience as a former professional chef in considering how well tools perform and how easy they are to use.
When I’m not scientifically evaluating gadgets, cookware, or appliances, you can find me cooking for family and friends on my vintage stove. And too often, especially around the holidays, my range top can’t accommodate all the pieces of cookware I want to use at once. That’s when I pull out an electric skillet.
I tested seven electric skillets. In each, I heated flour to see the skillet’s cooking pattern. Next, I made hamburgers to see how well the skillet pan-grilled them, and then potatoes to check for even cooking and crispy surfaces. Lastly, I cooked up chicken cacciatore in each skillet, to evaluate how it browned chicken pieces, sautéed onions and mushrooms, and simmered tomato sauce.
As I cooked, I noted how easy it was to use the controls, the amount of food that each skillet could hold, whether the handles became hot, and how easy it was to serve from each one. Not least importantly, I also considered how much effort was needed to clean each model and how much space it would require in a cabinet or closet.
An electric skillet is a great tool when you don’t have room on your stove for all the pots and pans you need to cook a meal. It can also be a lifesaver when you don’t have access to another cooking method.
An electric skillet can be particularly useful during the holidays or any time you’re entertaining. That's because it gives you a nice wide cooking surface for pan-frying, sautéing, or stir-frying items like eggs, pancakes, vegetables, steaks, and chops.
On the highest setting, it produces the kind of browning that gives lots of flavor; and as it cycles the temperature on and off, it doesn’t easily overheat and burn foods.
While these small kitchen appliances can handle a large volume of food for simmering chili, stew, or pot roast, our tests showed that even at lower temperature settings, most tend to cook food at higher-than-ideal temperatures for simmering. This means that food is ready quickly, but maybe less tender than if it was cooked in a Dutch oven on the stovetop or oven.
Most of our test samples came with a tempered glass lid, and all of them had a nonstick surface, making the products easy to clean. Even though some manufacturers claim their skillets are dishwasher safe, these are large products that don’t easily fit into a machine. Their size also means they require a lot of storage space, so if your cabinets and closets are already cluttered, make sure this is something you really need.
You will see many recipes for deep frying in an electric skillet and many casually call these appliances electric frying pans. However, the user manual for every model we tested warned against this, and we don’t recommend it either.
Electric skillets are wide and shallow. If you heat a significant amount of oil in one, the oil can easily spatter and boil over when you add something like battered chicken pieces. In addition, a skillet’s interior finishes may not be formulated to withstand the high heat of deep-frying.
There are an abundance of recipes for using an electric skillet to bake a cake. In several trials, all of our cakes came out with wet and gooey underbaked tops and thick crusty bottoms. Therefore, we don’t suggest using these appliances for baking.
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Sharon Franke
Contributor
Sharon has been testing kitchen equipment for the past 30 years. Before becoming a cooking tools maven, she worked as a professional chef in New York City restaurants for seven years.
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