Kaleo, there are talented chefs, award-winning chefs, financially successful chefs, who’ve never once cooked a dish in a copper pot or pan. You are somehow going to have to come to grips with this. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m an old guy. I’ve cooked with it plenty. I am well over the ‘shock and awe’ of copper. I still use it, some, in my own kitchen. I could just as easily not, and on most days, don’t.
I remember when you took the position that NONE of the top 50 restaurants in the world cooked in copper. When presented with photographic proof that 7 in 10 of that year’s La Liste were using it… crickets.
It’s only when copper comes up as a question (here, returning) that you feel compelled to show off with “knowledge” that no one else has. Turns out, it’s demonstrably false.
There isn’t a restaurant in the world that cooks every dish it serves to a customer in copper. Not one. And you wouldn’t be able to taste a dish and say “oh, no, I’m not eating this. It wasn’t cooked in copper.” “I can tell, you see, it’s clear the heating pattern was uneven.”
When a video is being shot, or a magazine is coming by to do a story, the copper magically appears. On a slow Tuesday night in August, it is just as magically nowhere to be found.
Fantasize all you want. It is not reality.
But what about Ratatouille?!?
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Ha! … Tim, you may have seen an edited post that I deleted. Yes, that’s the stereotype. Unfortunately it is divorced from reality and has been since Escoffier was running the kitchens at the Ritz.
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There was a time before the ubiquity of stainless and the innovations of cladding and disc bottoms when tinned heavy copper was much more prevalent (and a heck of a lot cheaper). Now I see it chiefly in “showpiece” kitchens and in shows like Downton Abbey. Any savvy restaurateur will know to pass on copper for a lot of reasons. A lot will walk off. If there is a good local tinning service, it may not have the turn around time that could be found in the “good old days.” The stuff will require handwashing, no thirty second trips through the Hobart (and therefore, perhaps, less confidence in sanitation). Restaurant cooking these days relies far more on very high heat than it did a century ago. So it is unavoidable that clad, disc, carbon steel, or aluminum will be required in the kitchen.
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You raise the point no one was making (in an attempt to sidestep the real issue). For those following along, I 'll eleborate.
I’m glad you joined the copper club, I really am. That entitles you to pontificate on your preference for the gossamer-thin lining (that no one puts on, even the pros and OEM manufacturers). Why? The high cost of retinning.
This is especially rich in light of your (busted) claim that no premier restaurant uses it.
The point no one was making is the La Liste restaurants never used copper exclusively. In fact, you’ll find that the only places that do, namely the French kitchens of state, do so as matters of tradition. Perhaps the French Senate kitchen is beneath you, but you agree that it not only turns out superb food, but none of it any less for having been cooked in copper.
Now then, the cost of retinning. Most cooks (and chefs and starred restaurants) do not have access to the itinerant craftspeople who formerly were on schedule to visit the site to ply their trade (La Pyramide was visited twice a fortnight). So it makes money sense for cooks, chefs and the starred to make a lining last as long as possible. That equates to 0.2 mm, the practical maximum. There is no practical downtick in thermal performance between a lining that will last a home cook decades, and your infinitesimally thinner layer.
It’s that you need to make yourself feel special, s’all.
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They use it, Kaleo. When the cameras are rolling.
Copper has become an affectation unfortunately. A rat cooking in a Belle Epoque Parisian ktichen affectation.
I posted a photo a while back in some thread of Eric Ripert tasting sauces before service – all sitting there nice and pretty in disk-bottomed stainless. Maybe somebody can find it. I’ll look when I have a chance. It was a recent photo as well. Could be early in this thread. I can’t remember. If the NYT was coming by, those sauces would probably have been sitting in copper. This looked like a spontaneous iPhone photo or something like it.
Ripert, Boulud, Keller – they couldn’t get through the first 45 minutes of service in all copper if their life depended on it. Keller won his second and third star with a sea of All Clad 3-ply - same scratch-and-dent stuff you can buy at Marshall’s that’s been around for years.
