Calculators and decision tools
Quick answer
6 decision tools for cookware and kitchen knives. Each one ships a worked answer in the page itself, so it works with JavaScript switched off, and each one refuses to answer rather than guessing when a combination has no honest result.
Each tool shows its worked answer in the page before you touch anything, explains the reasoning it uses, and refuses to answer rather than guessing when a combination has no honest result.
5 toolsPots and pans
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Cookware set builder
Work out which pots and pans are actually worth owning for your household size and the way you cook, with a running total and an explicit list of what to skip.
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What size pan for how many portions
Work out the pan diameter a given number of portions actually needs, using cooking surface area rather than rim diameter, so food browns instead of steaming.
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Will this pan work on induction?
Check whether a pan works on an induction hob from its material and a two second magnet test, including the minimum base diameter most hobs need before they detect a pan at all.
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How hot can this pan go in the oven?
Work out a pan's real oven ceiling from its coating, its handle and its lid, since the limit is always the lowest of the three and it is usually not the metal.
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What size pot do you need?
Work out the pot capacity a job actually needs, from pasta water and stock to braising and deep frying, including the headroom that stops a pot boiling over.
1 toolsKnives
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Which knife steel suits you?
Match a kitchen knife steel to how you actually maintain knives, using published Rockwell hardness and the real trade between edge retention, toughness and ease of sharpening.
Common questions
Do these work without JavaScript?
Yes. Every calculator renders a worked answer using its default values directly into the page, along with an explanation of how it gets there. JavaScript updates the result when you change an input and re-orders the product cards, which are present in the HTML either way. Nothing is fetched and nothing is injected.
What happens when there is no good answer?
The tool says so and tells you what to do instead. The induction checker refuses to answer for a coated pan until you have done the magnet test, because the material alone genuinely cannot settle it. The pan size tool refuses when no single pan is large enough and tells you how many batches to cook. Returning nothing beats inventing a number.
Where do the underlying figures come from?
Published material properties, manufacturer specifications and physical relationships, all labelled as standards. Where a figure is a kitchen rule of thumb, such as how much pan surface one portion needs to brown, it is labelled a convention on the page. The same data feeds the reference tables, so the two can never disagree.
Are the prices in the set builder real?
Yes. They come from live retailer listings at build time, which is also why they move constantly and why every product card carries that warning. Treat the running total as the shape of a budget rather than a quote. The distribution is the useful part: it shows where the money actually goes.