Jennifer and I bought a teflon pan a year or two ago at Target. It worked well, but recently I noticed that it had started to show chipping and scratching (even though we use only silicone spatulas). That teflon is wearing off somewhere, either in the wash or in the cooking, and I’m not sure I want to be eating it. Plus, everybody we’ve talked with says teflon wears out eventually with any pan, and we didn’t want to keep buying new pans every year or two.
So we bought a stainless steel All-Clad fourteen inch deep-dish pan. It was pricy, but it performed well for an onion-beef-tomato dish I made. Unfortunately, it did not perform well as a griddle.
So we first bought an All-Clad double burner cast-iron griddle. But I didn’t like it for two reasons. It didn’t fit our stove’s burners well, and my egg immediately ran into the “grease” gutter. So we returned it. I bought two Calphalon 10.5 inch cast-iron griddles at Target, and they work spectacularly. I made the best pancakes of my life in them. (Plus, the two round griddles cost less than the single double-burner one.)
So we now have cookware that works well and that should last the rest of our lives and beyond.