Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Update: bumped up to 4 Starr's from 3: the easy fix stayed for 15 months before I sold my pan to a buddy and bought a new one. The new 12" had the hump (about 1/16 inch tall). I put a star back because in practice very few items have a problem with cooking on the hump and though every indication is t-fal is backpeddling on trying to say it's on purpose that is obviously not true if it's not always. "We purposely make SOME of them domed". My 10" is perfectly flat. As promised and only 4mo. after getting my new 12" I developed a new way to flatten the pan: one step and worked like a charm. How'd I do it? Drove over it with my SUV. NOT KIDDING check out the photos. I was trying to figure out a fool proof method somebody could copy using on-hand items. Items: ➀ sawdust or kitty litter etc ➁ sheet of plywood about 18" square ➂ several "drive over boards" (3/4 plywood about the width of your car tire good) ➃ some bricks or 2x limber cut to size ➄ small pieces of plywood cut to size as needed As the last photos show, clips from my movie, I put sawdust down in a circle under the pan, slightly concave in the middle I put the 18" square of 1/2 plywood over the sawdust I put the pan on that sheet I assembled a ramp from bricks and plywood to get car tire over the lip of pan. I put a square of 2x4 on top of a 4" square of 1/2" thick plywood to do the pressing. I drove over using front wheel for more weight. I stopped for a second or two centered on pan and drove off. My dome dropped 58/1000 on one pass and the flat c-channel I used for flat reference shows nearly perfectly flat after and a test with some soapy water shows absolutely zero "moat" effect. 100% solved! For whatever reason my 10" model was perfectly flat out he gate so no fix needed. For naysayers that drank the t-fal koolaid: in addition to the problems of food like crepes and eggs being hard to cook: flat top stoves lose about 80% of their conductive heat transfer when only touching on the outer edges so it makes for uneven cooking which is my primary motivation for fixing my ONE AND ONLY EVER domed pan. Original review: As many have noted: the pan may actually be the holy grail of non stick but the ego stamped on the bottom makes for a mini mountain in the centre of the pan. Wheat happens is that you will get a "moat" of oil around the center island of dry in the center of the pan. Nice if you want to make donut shaped crépes I suppose. Not super nice for anything else. QC so "out of whack" for a top tier vendor like t-fal is inexcusable. Somebody should be fired literally. Is it too much to ask that the flat bottom of a pan is flat without having to fix it yourself? Yeesh! The good news: easy to fix. I've used the trick of standing in a pan on carpet to un-mound a dozen pans in then past, and a similar trick worked on this pan. Then trick: the thick aluminum bottom was more robust than the pans I've fixed in the past so i used a slightly different method: I formed a donut shape with a rolled up towel and set the pan on it, then I stepped inside and while standing on the ball of my foot I lunged up and down "hopping but keping foot On the ground". I checked for flatness with a ruler both outside and inside until I was satisfied. In the end, two teaspoons of water with a tiny bit of dish soap to "wet" the surface spread edge to edge, no island. Also 1 1/2 tbsp. of oil once heated filled the bottom of the pan perfectly. (When cold it puddled in the center and stayed). So, "A" for non stick, "D" for putting a hill in the center of every pan by stamping a logo in without the proper compensation in the blank or the very least a follow up stamp to make the pan flat and some friggin' quality control! Ok, so after 1-2 minutes of hopping up and down, the hump in the middle went from nearly 1mm tall (about 1/4 the thickness of the metal to put that into perspective) down to about a 0.2mm dent in the bottom and darn near perfectly flat inside. (There are a couple areas maybe 0.1mm shallow inside, enough to take maybe 0.1 tsp of liquid but inconsequential. The fact the bottom still has a shallow when the top is flat means the stamping process (for the logo) is making the metal thinner in the center in addition to making the little hill. Love the pan and can't wait to get some cooking done and a follow-up if the fix is relatively permanent. I'll post pics when I get a chance. -awr update: so i got to try it out, and freakeshly non-stick; was so easy to cook crepes in this pan! especially with the thermo-dot. It turns color just a little too hot for perfect crepes but they were amazing and tasty; and just slid out of the pan! I ended up having to re-level my stove before i could really test the flattened out fixed copy, but with only 2 tsp of oil to lightly oil the pan (probably not even remotely needed for these crepes), there were just random spots of oil; it doesn't want to adhere to the pan enough to make a coating. I have a neat picture of 2 tsp of oil just sitting in a puddle in the dead-center of the pan while heating. I also was able to make an 'oil moat' just about 3/8" wide around the entire pan at one point, so there is still a little bit of a 'low spot' or perhaps just the fact there is a bend in the pan gives the oil something to grab onto. Now if i can only get my wife to stop using metal instruments and get the pan to last a while. considering it was 1/3 to 1/4 the price of a decent tri-ply pan the same size, this pan in spite of its hiccups is a home-run. -awr