Updating your kitchen cookware can seem like a momentous task, specifically for your wallet — especially when you look at the prices at home goods retailer Williams Sonoma. If you’re in the market for a stainless steel stockpot, for example, a 12-quart Cuisinart version will set you back $90. Yikes! Many of us have a much more modest budget, and that’s where Aldi, home of the highest-rated $3 snack of the year and ridiculously cheap bread, taps in. The Germany-based grocery store chain sells a pretty close dupe of the Williams Sonoma stock pot — and it’s only $23.
About 90% of Aldi’s inventory includes house brands, and this 12-quart stainless steel stockpot is no different, sold under the Crofton brand (which encompasses much of its cookware and kitchen gadgets). And while the price tag might indicate that the pot is of lower quality than the $90 version, the reviews from customers suggest otherwise. On the Aldi subreddit, one person wrote that the stockpot “does awesome. Bottom is quite thick, so no burning” (via Reddit).
There is one major downside, though. The Crofton stockpot is an Aldi Find, so each store only gets one shipment of them for the week that it’s released, and they might sell out quickly.
Aldi makes quality cookware of all kinds affordable – and stylish
Aldi has developed a bit of a reputation for making high-quality dupes of more expensive products (see: Aldi dupes of Girl Scout cookies), and that extends to many of its Aldi Finds cookware items. Customers went wild in 2022 when it first released its cast-iron Crofton-branded Awesome pan, a veritable twin for the Always pan by Our Place, but costing over seven times less ($25 versus $180), and they continue to scoop it up when the supermarket chain re-releases it each year. For those who are only cooking for one or two, Aldi also continues to re-release its Mini Awesome pan, which is two inches smaller in diameter than the full-size version (clocking in at 10.25 inches).
If Le Creuset is out of your budget range, you’ll definitely want to keep an eye out for the Crofton dutch ovens, which cost just $30 — compared to the name brand’s similar offering, at over $400. Not only are the cast-iron dutch ovens super-functional, perfect for making a soup for a crowd or baking up gorgeous sourdough loaves, like the name-brand cookware, they tend to be absolutely beautiful; the most recent release featured a glossy and rich forest green color. In recent years, Aldi has also released bread baking domes that mimic Le Creuset, too. Should Aldi release them again this year, who knows what hue they’ll make them.
