A new direct-to-consumer cookware company is here to compete for your stove, and its secret is in the ceramic.
All four pans in Caraway’s cookware bundle feature non-toxic ceramic cooking surfaces built atop induction-friendly stainless steel bases. If you’ve ever used ceramic cookware before, you’ll know what to expect here: A best-of-most-worlds cooking experience that trades just a smidge of the slipperiness of Teflon for a bundle of other benefits.
Unlike traditional nonstick pans, Caraway cookware is oven-safe up to 650 degrees, can be safely used on your stove at the highest setting for extended periods without leaching chemicals, and even work with induction cooking surfaces. In my experience with the pans they sent me to try out, you won’t quite achieve the Maillard reaction browning that you can get with cast iron or a steel pan (at a certain point, a good fond requires the food to stick to the pan a bit), but they’re overall easier pans to work with than steel and cast iron equivalents, and much easier to clean.
In true DTC branding fashion, Caraway pans are also gorgeous to look at. Featuring muted matte finishes in a handful of trendy colors, they’re designed to feature prominently in your Instagram stories, which is totally fine as long as the pans themselves are good. And they are. Will your Perracotta Pink or Sage Green cookware look dated in a decade? It’s entirely possible...but they look great to my basic eyes now, and they should still cook well long after their design language becomes a relic of this era.
Where Caraway sets itself apart from competitors like Great Jones is in the included accessories. The $395 cookware kit ($50 off at launch with promo code TryCaraway50) includes not only a skillet, a sauté pan, a saucepan, and a dutch oven, but also a set of magnetic pan racks, and a canvas lid holder that you can hang on the back of a cabinet door. If your pan cabinet is half as messy as mine, this is a welcome inclusion.
For now, at least, you can only buy Caraway pans as a complete set, with orders currently expected to ship around the end of November, so just don’t plan on having them for your Thanksgiving dinner prep.