​If you are willing and able to invest in something that offers a truly exceptional cooking experience, the Fissler M5 Pro-Ply is an excellent choice.. What we loved: There was a noticeable difference in how the Fissler cooked compared with every other pan we recommend. With the burner cranked up to high, this pan maintained a gradual, dispersed heat that practically refused to burn food. It took intentional effort for us to try and get this pan to scorch something. Instead, it imparted a beautiful golden crust onto our chicken thighs and managed to sweat onions faster than other pans.. We attribute the differences here to the pan’s ability to effectively provide indirect heat from its sides in addition to the direct heat from the cooking surface. Indirect heat (heat transferred through the air) is less intense and won’t burn food so readily. When combined with the direct heat, food cooks faster so you can remove it more quickly. The impact of that indirect heat was particularly noticeable in our onion test.. To be clear, the Fissler isn’t the only pan to offer this feature—a greater amount of indirect heat is something you can expect from other thick 5-ply stainless-steel pans— but the Fissler M5 Pro-Ply manages to do it quickly and more efficiently without much added bulk. Five-ply cookware can be hefty to move around and sluggish when warming up, and while the Fissler sauté pan was slower compared to lighter high-end pans we tested, it was the pan that fared high-heat cooking the best. On a strong gas burner, this pan’s heat capacity allowed it to smoothly transition between temperatures, and the radiant heat from the sides of the pan reduced the onions nicely.. Beyond that, the pan has other nice flourishes, including a rivet-free design, volumetric measurements, and a comfortable ergonomically designed handle.. What we’d leave: All this praise aside, this pan heats up on the slower side. It was great on the powerful gas burners in our Test Kitchen, but if you have a weaker electric range (like I do at home), these pans might just be a bit too slow for you to really get the benefits. It’s also quite expensive compared to the already expensive All-Clad D3 line. But if you size up to the larger 5-quart size, the Fissler has a perfect ratio of height and diameter. If you like the idea of a multifunctional, multipurpose pan, and you have a stove that can blast high heat, this is as good as it gets.. We really had to let the onions sit untouched for a while to get them to burn.. Wilder Davies. Thermal conductivity test. We put each pan through a series of controlled tests to observe how they conducted heat. We wanted to know how quickly a pan warms up and cools down and how evenly it heated. We did this by placing each pan over the same burner at the same heat level for two minutes, before removing it from the heat. We took simultaneous temperature readings from the center and edge of the cooking surface (using two Thermoworks surf