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Would you expect the top chefs to use low or high quality cooking equipment? My bet is you answered ‘high’ quality. And you’d be right. The faces of well-known TV chefs are often enough to sell the brand of cooking equipment bearing their name. Jamie Oliver springs to mind straight away. And you wouldn’t be far off the mark in thinking that Jamie’s own brand of cooking equipment is top quality.

His cooking equipment has to be of the highest quality. He is a brand. He sells his shows, his recipes, his cooking style through the quality of what he produces. So the quality of the rest of his brand has to be matched by the quality of his cooking equipment. Chances are, you wouldn’t think much of your Jamie Oliver deep frying pan if the handle came off while you were following Jamie’s show, frying up the perfect English breakfast.

Right, that’s enough about celebrity chefs. Their life depends on preparing food and cooking it, so of course their cooking equipment is going to be good. What about the rest of us? Is it possible to detect a real difference between the cheap cooking equipment and the premium brands? Does the law of diminishing returns apply to kitchenware?

The short answer is: cook a lot? Then buy the best. Good cooking equipment lasts a lifetime. It’s something you forge a relationship with. Your tools are your cooking pots. They can become an extension of your body, even of your self. a high quailty cast iron fying pan, for instance, will never let you down. It is a heavy piece of equipment. It’s solid. You really feel it’s power every time you wield it. And there’s research to suggest that cooking slightly acidic foods such as tomatoes in ironware will have a beneficial effect on your health. Contributing to your daily iron intake, traces of iron are released into your food.

Cheap cooking equipment, on the other hand, can only let you down.

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