The 2 Best Carbon Steel Pans of 2025
Top pick
This kitchen workhorse can fry an egg without sticking, and it produces a dark, crusty sear on steaks and chops.
The OXO Obsidian Carbon Steel Frypan with Silicone Sleeve impressed us with its nonstick surface, comfortable silicone handle, and ability to heat evenly. For folks who want a long-lasting alternative to nonstick-coated cookware, this carbon steel pan is a great choice because it’s ready to cook eggs and other delicate foods—no seasoning required.
The surface is as slick as Teflon right out of the box. No joke. The first egg we fried, using 1 tablespoon of oil, slid around the surface, enabling us to flip it without a spatula. The only other pan we tested that could pull this off was the near-carbon-copy BK Pre-Seasoned Black Steel Frying Pan (which isn’t a pick because the company offers no warranty or customer service).
The pan maintains even heat. We cooked a stack of fluffy pancakes and gently sautéed golden crisp-tender carrots with little need to adjust the heat. The OXO Obsidian pan also produced chicken breasts with evenly browned and rendered skin.
It’s comfortable and lightweight. The OXO Obsidian pan is the only one we tested that comes with a silicone sleeve on the handle, which we found to be convenient for a couple of reasons. The removable silicone sheath not only acts as a built-in hot mitt but also provides a cushy and secure grip.
And the 10-inch pan weighs just under 2.75 pounds. Although it’s heavier than a similar-size All-Clad tri-ply skillet or an aluminum nonstick pan, it’s significantly lighter than a cast-iron pan.
It’s roomy and well balanced. The 10-inch OXO Obsidian pan has an 8.25-inch cooking surface, which is pretty generous for a midsize skillet with sloped sides. That’s enough room to brown two large-ish bone-in, skin-on chicken breast halves. We also liked its balance, as it didn’t feel awkwardly heavy in either the handle or the body.
It sits flat and works on induction. Even though the center of the pan is slightly raised, that didn’t affect its ability to conduct heat and fry an egg on an induction cooktop in our tests. The slightly convex bottom is hardly noticeable unless you’re looking for it.
It’s available in three sizes. The OXO Obsidian pan comes in 8-, 10-, and 12-inch diameters.
It comes with a limited lifetime warranty. This covers manufacturer and material defects.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
As we mentioned earlier, the OXO Obsidian pan is as slick as nonstick-coated pans when brand-new. We noticed, however, that the slickness faded a bit after we used the pan for other tests. Even so, it was still much more nonstick than most of the other pans when we wrapped up testing.
How the OXO Obsidian Carbon Steel Frypan has held up
Updates writer Abigail Bailey has been using the OXO Carbon Steel Frypan two or three times a week for the past few months and has found it to be sturdy, balanced, and comfortable to hold. Despite an initial scare in which her partner stripped off some of the seasoning (though she doesn’t know how), after some light re-seasoning, it’s slick enough to fry eggs with only the assistance of a small pat of butter. She loves that it’s lightweight enough to flip food easily, and often prefers it to her cast iron skillet, which is so heavy it requires two hands to flip.
