Swiss Diamond‘s marketing team is excellent. For years, consumers like you and me have associated the brand name with durable, safe non-stick that’s “nearly indestructible.” While they’ve shied away from that particular term in more recent years, their current marketing still touts the incredible longevity and toughness of their non-stick pots and pans. Their diamond-infused coating lasts for many, many times as long as leading competitors, at least if you trust the graphs on their website.
As you might imagine, this is not entirely accurate. While Swiss Diamond’s cookware is certainly fairly high quality, it is not four or five times as durable or long-lasting as “typical” non-stick cookware. Instead, its famed toughness only applies to tests that simply don’t matter in the kitchen. It’s more metal utensil safe than other brands, certainly, and you can literally attack the non-stick coating with steel wool or sandpaper without damaging it, but when it comes to normal kitchen use, you’re still looking at a fairly normal non-stick lifespan of three to five years.
Nevertheless, Swiss Diamond’s quality makes their cookware an attractive choice for many households. If you don’t mind paying a small premium for your non-stick pots and pans, a Swiss Diamond set or a few carefully chosen individual pieces will serve you quite well. The same attributes that don’t matter in a “typical” kitchen might prove vital in an environment with children who like to cook or even just adults who don’t like to pay attention.
Want to find out more?
Here are some detailed reviews of top Swiss Diamond cookware to help you decide whether this brand is right for you.
Product Reviews
✔ Swiss Diamond Pots and Pans
This large cookware set comes with most of the cooking tools you’ll need for typical household cooking. You get 8″ and 9.5″ frying pans, a 9.5″ saute pan and lid (that also fits the big frying pan), and lidded saucepans in 1.4 and 2.2 quarts. Finally, an 8.5-quart lidded stockpot ensures that you can make plenty of soup or stew for the whole family. In other words, you get 6 pots and pans in this 10-piece cookware set, which is fairly nice. Many competing 14 piece sets have fewer actual pieces of cookware. Instead, they pad out the set with lots of cheap nylon utensils.
Speaking of utensils, one of the biggest draws of these diamond pans and pots is the extra-durable non-stick coating. While I’m very skeptical of any claim that this non-stick lasts longer than the competition during normal use conditions (more on this in a minute), I am very impressed with how they hold up to abrasion and scratching.
You can certainly leave a minor scratch or two if you apply a bit of force, but it’s very difficult to actually damage the non-stick coating enough to leave a deep, harmful scar that would impact the cooking performance.
As I said above, that makes this set especially good for households with children and careless adults who like to cook. You definitely have to worry about damage from utensils, improper cleaning, and even actively destructive behavior much less with a set of Swiss Diamond pots and pans than a less expensive generic non-stick set.
Okay, so what about total lifespan? Can’t you scratch off normal Teflon?
Doesn’t this mean that a Swiss Diamond pan will last longer in your kitchen than a T-Fal one?
The answer is simply “no.” While you can scratch modern non-stick coatings, that’s not the usual reason for their failure. Instead, after hundreds of cycles of heating up and cooling off, the coating itself simply flakes off, leaving bare patches of pan that will stick to food. This is pretty normal, although it’s surprisingly poorly documented. You would think that more cookware manufacturers and reviewers would mention that your typical non-stick pot or pan will last for three years or less in a busy kitchen.
Note that by “typical” I mean “virtually all.” Even premium non-stick pans like these Swiss Diamond pieces will typical fail well before the five-year mark. This applies to ceramic coatings, too, as well as the Teflon-style PTFE non-sticks used in this Swiss Diamond set. While the way the pans fail vary (ceramic non-sticks simply become sticky, while PTFE/Teflon flakes off), the lifespan remains fairly constant
To be clear, this is not a BAD thing, but rather a lack of a good one. Swiss Diamond’s non-stick coating is fairly high performance in many respects, including abrasion and scratch resistance and actual non-stick performance. While it’s not particularly better than average as far as total lifespan goes, it’s pretty much impossible to find a non-stick set that will last for more than three to five years in a busy kitchen. No matter which non-stick set you choose, expect to replace it in a couple years.
Note that while these Swiss Diamond pots and pans have a very lengthy warranty, it’s not particularly comprehensive. It’s pretty easy to find tales from consumers who have called Swiss Diamond about their non-stick coating flaking off and received the cold shoulder from this cookware manufacturer. While you might be able to get a clear manufacturing defect fixed, you should not count on Swiss Diamond replacing this set if it fails in two to five years.
Like most non-stick cookware on the market, these pots and pans are made from treated aluminum with several layers of non-stick coating in between this metal and your food. The aluminum core is lightweight, tough, and inexpensive, making it an ideal material in many key ways. Additionally, it’s an especially good conductor of heat. This means that this cookware set will heat up very quickly when you put it on a hot burner.
This particular cookware set will not work on induction. While Swiss Diamond does include magnetic discs for better induction compatibility in many of their sets, this is not one of them.
There’s another big draw to this set other than the abrasion resistance of the non-stick. It’s oven safe to a colossal 500 degrees Fahrenheit. This number is frankly difficult to believe, as typical PTFE-style non-stick coatings begin to break down at temperatures as low as 350 F. It’s also somewhat contradicted by the language that Swiss Diamond uses to respond to warranty claims, since they say that overheating these pots and pans voids the warranty. While I’ll certainly concede that an oven applies heat in a different way than a gas burner on high, I would imagine that resistance to one form of heat would make these pots and pans quite resistant to the other.
In any case, even if the exact 500 F number is inaccurate, you can easily throw the lids and handles of this cookware set in the oven at pretty high temperatures. Browning a steak on the stove and then finishing it in the oven (or vice versa) becomes much easier when you can do it in one pan. It’s nice to be able to trust the lids, too, since many non-stick sets have glass lids that simply can’t withstand oven temperatures above 400F or so.
Overall, I think that this cookware set is quite nice, although it’s somewhat pricey. I would certainly consider it for my own kitchen if I had kids, I knew I would use metal utensils on my non-stick pans, or I simply was willing to spend a little bit of extra money for a set that won’t scratch. On the other hand, if you take careful care of your non-stick pots and pans, I don’t think that Swiss Diamond is worth the extra money over a brand like T-fal. Pretty much any brand of non-stick cookware you choose is going to die after a few years, so it’s usually a good idea to stick to a mid-range set that you won’t feel bad about replacing.
✔ Swiss Diamond Frying Pan
While I’m normally keen to recommend non-stick frying pans in sets of two or more, the high price of this set makes me balk a little bit.
I understand that you get two fairly large frying pans with Swiss Diamond’s signature scratch-resistant non-stick, but I can’t help but look at this set through the eyes of a professional chef.
Used in a busy professional kitchen for many hours each day, I would be surprised if these pans lasted for more than a year. While you might get three to five years in a typical home kitchen, this set is still very pricey for not a lot of upside over a basic PTFE nonstick set from a cheaper brand.
That said, these are very nice pans. You could certainly make an argument that the increased oven safety, scratch resistance, and overall solid construction makes these Swiss Diamond frying pans worth the price. They might very well be among the nicest non-stick frying pans on the market. If there’s room in your budget, give them a try — you’ll love cooking on them. You just might not love the price.
✔ Swiss Diamond Skillet
You can certainly find a square grill pan from Swiss Diamond, but if you’re looking for a skillet, I’d strongly consider this “refurbished” round frying pan. This is because you get a lot more pan for a lot less money.
I’m normally somewhat hesitant to buy (or worse, recommend) a refurbished product, but in this case, I feel like an exception is warranted. A non-stick skillet like this one tends to fail when the non-stick coating wears out after several years of use.
When this happens, you’re left with a perfectly functional and serviceable frame that simply needs a new non-stick coat. In other words, if Swiss Diamond simply collects the pans that customers would more-or-less need to replace, scrubs off the old PTFE, and applies three fresh new layers, the result is something that’s functionally identical to a brand-new pan.
My primary beef with Swiss Diamond is not the quality of their pots and pans but instead the price. This means that a steeply discounted product like this one is much more likely to earn my seal of unqualified approval. The price on this pan is much more palatable for the average household than a “new” Swiss Diamond frying pan of similar size. As a result, you’ll have more money left over to actually spend on food to cook.
Of course, this refurbished pan will still die after a few years of use. It’s even possible that it might die sooner than a “new” pan, although that’s difficult to measure or prove. That said, the lower price makes it much easier to replace after several years.
If you’re looking to try Swiss Diamond’s high-quality non-stick cookware without committing as much money, give this refurbished frying pan a try. It’s cheaper and very, very similar in all the ways that count. You still get a sturdy aluminum frame, a comfortable, oven safe handle, and the signature Swiss Diamond non-stick that’s both scratch and abrasion resistant. These features make this a very easy pan to get used to.
Swiss Diamond: A Pricey, Durable Brand
Whether it’s the diamonds or the multi-layer construction, Swiss Diamond’s unique non-stick coating is especially resistant to scratches and abrasion. These traits don’t necessarily make their pans last longer, however. In kitchens with kids or careless adults, these pots and pans are perfect. Otherwise, be sure to consider other brands.
