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BEHIND THE SCENES

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ABUSE TESTS: ADAM GETS TOUGH

Adam and our team of equipment experts spend weeks—often months—testing leading brands to see which are worth buying. We start by answering basic performance questions—such as “Does this skillet heat evenly?” or “Is this knife sharp?”—with controlled kitchen tests. We sauté onions in every skillet in the line-up or we slice tomatoes with each knife. Once we’ve evaluated each brand in terms of performance (and design), it’s time to assess durability. Here’s where Adam and our equipment testers can get pretty creative. They devise abuse tests—the kinds of things you might do at home, even though you shouldn’t—to see how products will fare.

Some abuse tests are pretty straightforward. We cut and serve lasagna baked in nonstick baking dishes with a metal spatula to see how the nonstick coating will hold up. Other tests are downright wacky. Here are some favorites over the years:

• Trying to melt rubber spatulas by leaving them in a cast-iron skillet heated to 674 degrees, then simmering the spatulas in a pot of curry for an hour to see if they would stain and absorb odors.

• Dropping sealed food storage bags filled with spaghetti sauce from a height of 3 feet onto a plastic tarp to see which bags would survive without sending sauce all over the kitchen.

• Holding our mitt-covered hands in the gas flame on a cook-top for 5 seconds to see which mitts are truly flame-resistant.

Why are Adam and his team willing to abuse kitchen equipment (and their hands) to see how products will perform during worst-case scenarios? Simple. Because we want to know which items really work, and which ones don’t.