Review: Kuhn Rikon Black Star Pan

It's a niche interest, but I'm always curious about peoples' relationships with their pans, particularly the weight. Some people like or don't mind them heavy, and some need them to be light. Recently, I found myself drawn to a heavy honker from Kuhn Rikon, parking it on the right rear burner of my stove while I tried to figure out where to store the pan before realizing it was already in the perfect spot.

The pan in question is the Swiss manufacturer's Black Star, a 9-pound skillet in the size I tested, with a 24-centimeter cooking surface that's 32 centimeters from rim to rim. It's functional and good-looking, and at just over 9 pounds, it weighs a lot, even compared to the competition. At $250, too, it certainly costs a lot, especially when compared to something like a classic Lodge cast-iron pan, which weighs about a pound less and costs a mere fraction of the import.

Smooth Operator

I should state here that while I love cooking with cast-iron pans, including my Lodge skillet, I don't treat them as fetish objects. Their level of seasoning comes and goes, but I rarely run into issues with sticking. I wash them with soap and water, which often frightens those fetish people. At least they can relax knowing I'm not an animal who runs mine through the dishwasher.

For example, some pan manufacturers recommend a break-in process, where you sizzle up potato peels with salt, in oil that has a high smoke point. This removes a layer of corrosion protection and begins to season the bottom of the pan, and then you're on your way.

One key difference between the Lodge and the Kuhn Rikon is the incredibly smooth cooking surface on the Black Star. I've read that with use, the more nubbly surface of classic Lodge pans becomes seasoned enough that there's little difference between its nonstick-ness and that of smoother models. That said, smoother always feels cleaner and more luxurious to me, and the Black Star was smoother on the day it arrived then my Lodge has become after years. Right out of the box, I stuck it over a burner and scanned the surface with a thermal camera. Everything looked nice and even as the pan heated, with no notable hot or cool spots.

One change from what I'm used to was using a model with two helper handles, Dutch-oven style, instead of the more classic cast-iron skillet style with one helper and one "regular" handle. This freed up a little space on the stove and made it more tidy. Once I got used to it, I didn't miss it. (At this size and weight, the regular handle on the Lodge isn't terribly useful, anyway.) I came to enjoy the Kuhn Rikon's flared sidewalls, which made it a bit easier to access or flip the pan's contents with a spatula. They also gave it a sort of extra cooking surface where I could lean food—bit of a cheat, but not an option at all with a more vertical wall.

Best Practices

Leaving a pan on the stove even when they're not in use has probably been a thing since the invention of pans, stoves, and laziness, but doing it with this good-looking, high-performing pan had a great side effect, which is that I cooked more.

On my induction stove, the pan, which also comes in a slightly smaller size, handled the way all induction pans feel to me on there, like a sports car or precision instrument—fast to heat up, stable, and predictable. The combination works so well that it almost feels futuristic. The only improvement I could think of has to do with the stove, not the pans. It would be nice if the burners went all the way out to the edge of pans this large.

Something I enjoyed noticing was how little I used my traditional nonstick pans while I had this one in for months of testing. With that smooth bottom and a slick of butter or oil, I didn't really need a nonstick. Yes, there are recipes where nonstick is the best option, but not that many, and that industry is in tumult. Teflon is on the outs, and ceramic tends not to work as well and wears out fast. On the Kuhn Rikon, if the scramble (or anything) I was cooking stuck a little, I could lean on my thin-bladed metal spatula and scrape the bottom clean without worrying about harming the surface. Easy peasy, no PFAS-zy.

I came to think of the Black Star as what I might call "functionally nonstick"—not Teflon, but close enough. I even did a bit of stunt cooking where I simultaneously fried two eggs on one side of the pan and scrambled a couple on the other—not something to goof around with if the pan doesn't perform well.

Last summer, I used the pan to make carne asada from the Asada cookbook over a fire, guaranteeing we had the best meal of all the campers in the campground that night. Not a pan to lug into the backcountry, mind you, but lovely to have for breakfast and dinner while car camping.

Back at home, I made Lior Lev Sercarz' take on Persian fesenjan from A Middle Eastern Pantry, taking advantage of the pan's heat retention and conduction to put a hard sear on chicken thighs, then nesting them into caramelized onions, mixed with walnut, pomegranate juice, and pomegranate molasses that had been buzzed together in a blender. I let it all braise away in the oven, flavors mingling, deliciousness increasing.

At the end of summer, I plucked a few handfuls of cherry tomatoes from my garden, halved them along the equator, and sautéed them in olive oil. I added some shallots and basil and just let everything cook away for 15 minutes or so, then added a bunch of eggs for a scramble and served that over toast with really good goat cheese on it. Nothing too complex, but completely divine.

Perhaps my favorite feat with the pan was cooking flattened chicken thighs with gin and sage jus from Amy Thielen's masterful Company cookbook, cooking the meat skinside down for what she terms "an interminably long time" and creating a crackly skin that's a mahogany-colored wonder.

One night I stir-fried in it, making a bit of a mess, and scraped up the bottom a bit with a metal-bladed spatula and then went to town with soapy water while cleaning it. While it might not be the best way to treat pans like this, it was completely fine.

It's also worth noting that Kuhn Rikon seems to be putting its money where its mouth is environmentally, particularly concentrating on carbon sequestration in concrete. It's hard to quantify, but having spoken with other people in the industry (or simply noting how they avoid the subject), the company is clearly taking it more seriously than most of the competition.

This pan is a splurge. In no way is it a better value than the Lodge, but the design is more functional and modern, without tipping over into preciousness, and that smooth surface is divine. It's good-looking, but a tool to be used more than admired. Store it right on top of your stove. It'll be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.