Crepe pans, egg poachers, paella pans, tagines – while these types of cookware allow you to cook specialised dishes, they are more suited to those who know their way around the kitchen. Every budding chef should choose to invest in a cookware set that includes the basics; at least one frying pan, a stock pot, casserole dish and a number of different sized sauce pans. Purchase these items and the possibilities in the kitchen are endless.

If you had to choose just one piece of cookware to have in the kitchen, which would be the most suitable and fulfil you master chef dream? Like the members of The Fellowship of the Ring, you’d probably take a larger fry pan. If there had to be a big three of cookware, then they would be the frypan, sauce pan and stockpot—good, old-fashioned pots and pans. All of this is just to create some sort of hierarchy of utility when it comes to cookware.

The frying pan can keep you in all sorts of hot foods in a pinch. Your average person might not have too much a culinary repertoire if a frypan was their only piece of cookware, but everything can be warmed up and basics like scrambled eggs can be made. If you throw in a large enough sauce pan (or what many simply know as a pot), the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can prepare. Sauce pans do a lot of duty associated with everyday life: heating up cans of soup, vegetables, etc. Ironically enough, a sauce pan that being a one- or two-handled vessel with sides proportionately tall compared to its base isn’t the best item for producing sauces (that would be a highly specialised Windsor pan or a saucier, which has sloping and rounded sides, respectively, that better allow evaporation).

This is just a very broad overview of the most basic kitchen gear. As can be imagined, there are a variety of specialised pans out there: chef’s pans, crepe pans, egg poachers, grill pans and sauté pans, to name some of the more well-known ones. The same can be said for sauce pans. Among the special-duty pots are double boilers, mussel pots and woks—which occupy a space somewhere between pot and pan. Knowing the uses of these items will go a long way towards bringing out your inner chef.