I am absolutely not here to defend IKEA cookware; but here's how we have it. We bought it to put into a rental condo. I doubted anyone would use it, but we had to have a certain number of pots to get the condo into the rental pool. Later we found some other cookware for the condo and we took the unused IKEA home with us. It has sat on the top shelf of a cabinet in our utility room for years. Now that we have an induction hot plate, I scrambled to find anything that a magnet would stick to. My 40 year old stainless set was out. Newer aluminum non stick was out. I have a T-Fal pan and the pan that came with the Nuwave but no pots at all. Down came the IKEA and Bob's your uncle. The IKEA keeps water inside, has a glass top, welded handles, and also has quart and liter measurements etched inside. The walls are thin and give it a cheap feel, but again, magnetic. I think for induction the IKEA might be just fine. Heavier steel, dutch oven, or cast iron might be nice, but for the volume we're talking about, the increased weight is not necessary.

First, I'm going to go against conventional wisdom and make the claim that a good even heating burner will allow you to use more "cheap" pans rather than require more expensive cookware. I see so many posts asking, "now I have my XYZ high power range, what kind of high-end cookware do I need." From my personal experience, I've found that a good burner will make more use out of old non-clad cookware because you don't need your cookware to do as much to distribute and/or hold heat. Pots and pans that I pretty much wrote off and was ready to take to Goodwill when I had my sealed Viking are now back in use with the Bluestar. Second, to add a bit to the "thick" vs "thin" discussion.. I do a lot of wok cooking. Let's just say I've made spaghetti sauce in a wok. :) I've used standard machine pressed, hand hammered, cast iron, and even stainless (gack!). My favorite is the hand hammered high iron steel even though I love cast iron and use cast iron skillets almost exclusively. I know many argue that cast iron is better for stir frying because of better heat retention. There is some truth to this and I would probably prefer cast iron on a lower power or electric burner but a 22k burner with a traditional hand hammered wok gives me so much more control. When I shut off the burner, the heat dissipates almost immediately. I can go from searing to simmer quickly which is necessary for many dishes with harder to cook veggies. Then when I need to go back on high to burn off excess liquid, that takes seconds instead of minutes. Also, if I'm making several dishes, I can go from dish to dish very quickly and simply rinse the wok in between. No way can you stick a hot cast iron wok under water without it cracking. One of these days, I'm going to put in one of those wok ranges with a faucet and drainage. Bluestar needs to offer that next. :) So with a good even heating high power burner, you can use a much wider range of cookware and decide what works best for you. We have a plain very thin stainless steel pot that was part of my wife's college cookware set that we are still using. We've almost gotten rid of it several times but with the more even heating burners, we're using it all the time to make boil pasta or steam veggies.

For the hash browns, heat your skillet on medium-high for a couple minutes with NOTHING in it. Then, add whatever fat you are using and allow another few seconds for it to come up to temp (because your pan is already very hot this will happen quickly)...then, after the fat is hot ONLY then add the potatoes. You can tell if the pan is ready by dropping a small piece of whatever your cooking into the pan...it should immediately sizzle...if it doesn't the pan was not hot enough when you added the fat. When the potatoes are in the pan, lower your heat slightly to medium-low. Then, and this is important....DO NOT TOUCH THOSE POTATOES. You mentioned you had "stirred" your hash browns and that's, probably, why they stuck. You have to let them sit until a crust forms. This is the same technique used for searing a steak or roast, etc. Do NOT touch whatever is in that pan until the caramalization has occurred. When the crust has formed on the potatoes they will let go from the pan and then are ready for turning. For me, I cut my potatoes in about 1" dice for hash browns and they can take a full 5-8 minutes before they are ready for me to touch. For a piece of meat, you will know when caramalization has happened because the previously stuck like glue steak has loosened itself from the pan and you can turn it easily...if it's still sticking it's simply not ready to be turned. Back to the potatoes...at most you might have to turn your spatula upside down and lightly loosen the potatoes in order to turn them but they WILL come right up and certainly not be glued to the pan. The key is learning to keep "hands-off" until the correct time to turn and starting with a properly pre-heated pan. For me, the instinct to fuss with food in the skillet was 'cause I didn't want it to burn. Unless you just walk away and completely forget what's cooking that won't happen. Be sure to use enough fat also...for, say, an 8" skillet filled with hash-browns cut in 1" dice and piled in the skillet 1-2" deep...go around your skillet 3-4 times with the oil. If there's not enough fat...then food could burn. In my weekend cooking class for home cooks at CIA, we practiced for an hour on this technique using hamburger patties. It took me quite a while to "get it" that my instincts to fiddle with the food in the pan were causing my problems. I've taken several of CIA's home-cook classes and they're wonderful...it's an advantage to living just 9 miles from the campsus which, BTW, is georgous...all old brick buildings set on a hilly site...very picturesque. I've taken 3 courses there....knife handling (excellent); artisan bread (too elementary & not enough time to practice); and a general technique class (excellent). But the parking lot is huge and I hated hiking with my cane and cooking stuff up to the buildings...I digress, sorry. Unfortunately, the one time DH and I coughed up the $200 or so to eat at the school's French restaurant it was ghastly and I do mean GHASTLY. It must have been truffle week in class and/or the school got a real deal from their produce supplier 'cause truffles were in everything...way too much of a good thing. Dinner was so horrible, we passed on desert. I couldn't bear the thought of truffle chocolate something-or-other. Now, with all that said...you WILL get some pieces of food that stick to a SS pan. But, you want that to happen...that's where we get the wonderful stuff to make sauces, gravies, etc. from. And, why a non-stick pan is not the best for searing. Quickly deglaze your skillet with a liquid of your choice and again...DO NOT STIR that pan. Just allow the liquid to quickly heat up and all the stuck pieces will loosen all by themselves with little or no assistance from the cook. Once that happens, lower the heat dramatically and stir away to blend any additional ingredients into your sauce. As for the high heat issue...there will be times when you want to do that such as searing meat, however, much of that flames shooting a foot in the air around the pan stuff you see on the Food Network and the chef tossing the skillets around is for show. They can shake that pan and move it all around the burner but what you WON'T see them doing is poking at the food with an implement of destruction until caramalization has happened. Then, with great fanfare they will toss the pan and flip.

I generally use cast iron. Gotta be deep enough to hold a decent amount of oil, and the thermal retention properties of cast iron keeps the temp of the oil from dipping too quickly when you add the fish. (But don't fill the pan up at once with fish; add the fish a few at a time so the temperature doesn't plummet. If the temperature goes down too much, the crust won't 'set' and it will instead become a sponge for all the oil. Yuck.) And as an added bonus, deep frying stuff is a great way to season (or enhance the seasoning on) cast iron. Another very good way to fry fish is to use an electric frypan, if it's deep enough. These have a thermostat that makes keeping the right temperature a snap. Just thinking: you don't see those electric skillets as much as you used to. In the sixties, everybody seemed to have one on the counter.