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The first time I ever bought myself a “nice” piece of kitchen equipment was 2010. After spending the cooking portion of my adult life up to that point using some Island of Misfit Toys collection of cookware assembled from yard sales, Ikea, and that one aisle in the grocery store that also sells holiday-themed paper goods, I experienced a piece of All-Clad cookware for the first time when my roommate unboxed a pan his parents gave him. I could control the heat and cook a piece of meat without needing to constantly flip to avoid charring it? Seemed like some dark magic.
I was impressed enough that I took a holiday gift card I got at work that year and bought myself a 3-quart D5 sauté pan. I just used it again last night, and while it might look a little rough around the edges, it works as well as it did 13 years ago.
It’s not just me, of course. All-Clad stainless steel has topped a number of our product tests here at Epicurious, notable for its even heating, heat retention, and all around high performance on simmers, roasts, and sears. It’s also notable for its heft. Generally that’s a trade-off you have to make with cookware: If you want consistency, quality performance, and durability, you need something heavy. But All-Clad’s newest line, the G5 with a graphite core, does away with that notion entirely.
What is All-Clad G5?
All-Clad’s G5 line includes a 2.5-quart saucier, a 4-quart sauce pan, a 3-quart sauté pan, an 8.5-inch skillet, an 10.5-inch skillet, a 12.5-inch skillet, and an 8-quart stock pot. And it looks, at first glance, a lot like its D5 stainless steel lines. Indeed, in some ways it’s quite similar. Both are 5-ply cookware, meaning they have five layers of alternating materials bonded together, making the pans quite thick and allowing even heating and warp resistance. However, for the G5 line, All-Clad replaced the stainless steel core with a graphite one. Though it’s not a metal, graphite is still induction compatible and conducts heat incredibly well–so well that it’s often used to make vessels designed to liquify metal. It’s also light, which you’ll notice as soon as you pick up a piece of G5 cookware. This was the driver behind the G5’s creation according to Bill Groll, All-Clad’s VP of product development and technology: to get “heavy-weight performance with lightweight construction.”
The 10.5-inch G5 skillet, for example, weighs only two pounds. That’s almost 20% less than the smaller 10-inch D5 pan. At less than 4.5 pounds, the (huge for a saucepan) 4-quart saucepan feels light enough that its helper handle almost seems superfluous.
Is the All-Clad G5 line good?
Beyond its weight, the G5 line has a few other features that make it stand out in a world of similar-looking stainless steel cookware. Its fully-clad construction gives it the ability to hold a consistent temperature for long periods of time (I simmered a tomato sauce for half an hour, checking the temperature every five minutes and it didn’t fluctuate more than two degrees), which is great, but is also the case with most fully-clad cookware. The G5’s graphite core gives fast and precise control over the temperature in ways that a pan with a stainless steel core or, say, a cast-iron skillet can’t. The G5 saucepan boiled a quart of water in a little over three minutes, which is incredibly quick (the D5, by comparison, took closer to four minutes) considering how even and consistent the heat is on the pan. G5 gear cools down just as quickly: After searing a chicken breast in the skillet, it was cool enough to begin cleaning in less than five minutes.
Speaking of cleaning up, it was noticeably easier to clean the G5 pieces than other stainless steel we’ve tested, including the D5 line. After the aforementioned searing, the fond left on the pan came off—*entirely—*when the pan was filled with water, a little soap, and scraped with a wooden spoon. I love Bar Keeper’s Friend and I’m sure it would be useful with G5 cookware, but in this particular instance I didn’t need it. The reason for this, according to Groll, is the even way the graphite heats. “If one area of a pan is substantially hotter than another, the liquids or oils from the food become thinner and provide less lubrication in the area of the higher heat. The more effective and even the heat distribution, the easier cleaning will be.”
The last nice feature of the G5 line is its handle design. They’re less sloped than on All-Clad’s D5 (and a number of other stainless brands), which allows you to really take advantage of how light the pieces are. The flatter handles are easier to slide around cooktops or lift to put into the oven, which you’d definitely do because like the rest of All-Clad’s stainless cookware, this is oven safe up to 600℉.
Are there problems with the All-Clad G5?
Though I don’t consider this a serious problem, it was the source of a lawsuit, so it’s worth mentioning. Like other All-Clad cookware, G5 pans have a lip at the top to make pouring easier. However, if placed in the dishwasher, the metal of that lip may deteriorate and become sharp. This happened with several other All-Clad lines and senior writer Emily Farris found it to be true with her own pans. All-Clad doesn’t claim the G5 line is dishwasher safe, though (and I’d never put my own in the dishwasher anyway). As long as you hand wash you should be fine.
The one other obvious drawback is the price. All-Clad cookware is almost always on the pricey side, but G5 pots and pans are some of the priciest. A 10-piece set—the complete set—costs $1,300 at the time of writing. That’s more than $400 more than the D5 set of the same size. The individual pieces are expensive too: The 4-quart saucepan is $330 at the time of writing, the 10.5-inch skillet is $200, and the 8-quart stock pot is $450.
Is All-Clad G5 cookware worth it?
It’s not easy to give a clear cut answer to whether a piece of expensive, high-end cookware is “worth it” because there are lots of affordable options that perform well. But what I can say is that the G5 line feels like a step up from other All-Clad pans I’ve used. Even if you don’t notice the couple minutes you save heating the pans up and cooling them down, their lightness, user-friendly design, and easy clean up set them apart.
