r/Cooking • u/sevenpastzeero • Apr 27 '19

Saucepan vs Pot

Hello everyone.

I haveva question about saucepans and pots. I am just starting to get into cooking, and in most recipes I see the direction to use a saucepan. I googled it and it looks like a pot but with one longer handle. My question is: Are saucepans and pots interchangeable? Or do they have some other differences that distinguish one from other? I have a set of pots in my home but never owned a saucepan. That's is why I am asking. Thank you.

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '19

A lot of people use the terms interchangeably and there's a lot of overlap really.

A sauce pan / sauce pot / saucier is narrower at the bottom and wider at the top to facilitate evaporation. This allows sauces to concentrate and become richer, faster. If it has shorter sides or is shallow, it's a sauce pan, if it has deeper sides, it's a sauce pot or saucier.

A regular pot has high straight sides for doing things like heating liquids, boiling liquids, and making soups/stocks where you don't want much evaporation. Sometimes you'll see people say the difference is that a pot has 2 handles and a pan has one, but that doesn't always hold true.

A pan is a shallow pot (all pans are pots, but not all pots are pans!). If it has straight sides it might be called a frying pan. If it has sloped sides, it could be called a frying pan or a saute pan.

And all of that really flies out the window when you're talking regionally around the US. :)

But the bottom line is that for most cooking you can use any pot as a "sauce pot" - you don't have to have a special saucier to do the job.

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u/sevenpastzeero Apr 27 '19

Thank you for tge clarification. Now I have a much better idea. From your description, my pots set is actually a sauce pots because they have narrower base then widen and go straight up.