Of course that will be a lot more stable than a white wine sauce on actual verdigris.
Will it? Quarts of raspberries will be less reactive than a half cup of white wine?
The pH ranges are very close.
Donāt you coat the berries in sugar before dumping them in?
Sometimes. Iām not sure that would affect the acidity and pH. In any event, starting with a mix of sugar and fruit can remove water by osmosis, which can result in hard unappetizing fruit.
Fruit confitures had been made in Europe without sugar since at east Plinyās time. Sugarcane made it there via trade with Arabia about 1000 AD, but it wasnāt until 1811 that sugar was refined from beets. It took cane refining in the West Indies to bring sugary jams to the masses.
IMO, sugar serves mostly as a preservative.
Can you not remove the verdigris? With Bar-Keeps Friend? A Chore-girl? I am literally āSecond-Hand Roseā and have resurrected many copper pans. Iāve never had or condoned residual verdigris.
Additionally, IMHO it is the reaction of the bare copper with foods that is causing the off-flavor you describe rather than verdigris.
Not at all. Preserves cooked in bare copper taste perfect. I canāt believe I missed the cherry harvest this last season.
I also add lemon juice to fruit going into an unlined copper pan. No off taste whatsoever.
The culprit is probably just a pan that isnāt entirely clean. Tin-lined copper pans I wash with regular dishwashing soap, using the soft side of a scrubbie.
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Do you guys know of this establishment?
I do not, but itās always nice to add another option for tinning.
Itās not easy to tellā¦ Does he make any pans or is it strictly retin/rehab?
Iām not sure.
I think my algorithm was reading this thread along with me.
Came up in my suggestions.
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If the cost of retinning cookware on a regular basis is more than rounding error in your personal budget then please donāt buy it in the first place.
Occasionally all thatās needed is to heat it up and move it around to cover a bare spot, or one thatās becoming bare. Most retinners in the U.S. are hamfisted hacks and put it on twice as thick as it should be. Theyāve simply never seen it done well and properly. I brought a piece from the U.S. to France and showed it to a retinner there and she laughed and said that it wouldnāt need any actual new tin for the next 300 years (hyperbole alert). She was thinking about robbing some out of it and retinning a smaller pot. Yep, it was that bad. And this was a well-known tinnerās work.
A job well done where tin cookware is used regularly is one that needs retinning regularly, not once in a lifetime of cooking. You need (and should want) the bare minimum to make the cookware safe to use. Itās an āif you have to ask, you canāt affordā type of thing.
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Itās fallacious to assert copper cookware needs regular retinning, or that tin linings should be as thin as possible. In fact, gossamer-thin linings pretty much guarantee a need for regular retinnings because they donāt last as long.
āThickā linings arenāt disadvantageous in any meaningful thermal sense. And letās be clear, a āthickā lining is thin, e.g., 1/10 or 1/5 of a millimeter.
It would be more accurate to say that, IF youāre going to regularly retin, then thereās no reason to use more than the minimum amount of tin. If weāre thinking of French restaurants in the Golden Age, that makes some sense, because visting tinners were often on contract. At Fenand Pointās La Pyramide, the tinner visited every fortnight.
Itās also underappreciated that retinning was done not just to cover worn patches, but to clean and assure a consistently bright appearance.
IMO, if there is an aspect of āthinner is betterā tin snobbery, itās vestigal of the time when retinning was cheap and instantly accessible.
As for one tinner robbing anotherās tin, well, thatās ridiculous. Tin is cheap, and you would always want to start with fresh. Even if tin was the price of silver, very little is used.
I got my first piece of really good copper about half a century ago. I had been eyeing it at Yankee kitchen in Bellevue, WA, and one day it was gone. I dropped in a couple of weeks later. The person who bought it had melted the tin, and there was a thicker bit of bubbled tin in the rim on a bit of the pan floor. So I got it for half price. It is a lovely hand hammered 3mm iron handled 24 cm sautĆ© that gets a ton of use. It has never, so far, needed retinning, and I notice no difference in how the thicker portion performs in comparison to the rest. I am not saying that this establishes anything vis a vis Kaleoās and Charlieās POV. It is just one of my little tinning stories. About fifteen years ago I used a guy named Jamie. He did a gorgeous job on two workhorse saucepans but took over half a year to get them back to me (with their job numbers scratched into the copper by the handleā¦kind of quaint). His job has not held up as well, and the pots are getting near needing retinning. Iāll use RMT.
IMO, this experience is less the exception than the rule.
I think there is also something to the idea that the OEM tinningāif done right and wellāwill probably adhere better and hold up longer, use-for-use. To approximate that first tinning, a retinning would have to completely return the substrate to a perfectly clean, bare condition, i.e., not wipe new tin/flux over old.
Yes verdigris can be scrubbed out but in my experience behind it are large defects in tin exposing bare copper. This is probably because the verdigris occurs at bare copper sites, not at sites covered in tin.
Also, the verdigris can be covered by a thin layer of dark greasy grime that covers the entire tin lining. I have received tinned pans with a dark interior, washed with soap and water and used them. Sometimes the food tastes off, and going back to the pan Iāve realized there was verdigris masked by the darkened linkng making it hard to see. Scribing it clean with abrasives revealed it as well as the defect in the tin.
I too have resurrected many old copper pans. If you show me yours Iāll show you mine.
At the moment I am mostly persuaded bare copper doesnāt impart much flavor to pH=7 foods.
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