paulraphael

Sure, some restaurants use them. I don't think you'll find much correlation between the quality of the restaurant the use of copper. You'll see a strong correlation between open kitchens and the use of copper. When the pans become a design element, the criteria change. And obviously you won't find copper at restaurants that use induction, but this technology is still a rarity in restaurants due to costs. Although it's likely more restaurants will start using the El Buli / Alinea model of not having a range at all, and just using little induction hobs that can be stowed when you're not using them. Right now among the Michelin 3-star restaurants in NYC, only one of them with a closed kitchen seems to have any copper cookware (11 Madison Park). Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Masa use shiny stainless whatevers. Jean Georges and Chef's Table have open kitchens and copper pans.

Back in the days when all milk was raw, most recipes called for "scalding" it for various reasons, including killing pathogens, denaturing some of the milk proteins that can interfere with gluten development in bread, and who knows what else. Scalding meant bringing it to a simmer. If you wanted to add eggs right away to make a custard, you had to temper them first so they wouldn't scramble. These steps have long outlived their original purpose. Nowadays there's no need to scald the milk in the first place. Even if you were using raw milk, we know that there are benefits to pasteurizing the ice cream mix as a whole, after everything's been mixed, and that this can be combined with the custard-making process. So you might as well just add the eggs when the milk is cold. Easy peasy. mono- and di-glycerides are emulsifiers that you'd have to buy as a specialty ingredient, like from Modernist Pantry. I haven't used them, but some pastry chefs do when they want to avoid using eggs entirely. Here's a stabilizer / emulsifier blend used by Francisco Migoya, who was Thomas Keller's pastry chef and who will be collaborating with the Modernist Cuisine team on their dessert series. This blend is stored and used as a single ingredient. He recommends using it in eggless ice creams at 0.35% by weight. 100g Xanthan Gum 175g CP Kelco Unflavored Locust Bean Gum 175g TIC Gums Pretested Flavorless Guar Gum 50g Mono-glycerides 50g Di-glycerides FWIW, I've tried using this stabilizer formula in an ice cream with eggs ( minus the emulsifiers), and did not care for the texture. I've eventually come to believe xanthan gum isn't the best choice in ice cream stabilizer blends. But that's just my opinion ... I'd encourage you to start by taking Migoya's advice over mine.

Believe it or not, there is never a reason to temper egg yolks. It's a vestigial tail of old kitchen thinking. It doesn't offer anything. There are many substitutes for eggs as emulsifiers. I haven't heard of people using pure lecithin, although it should work. The preferred non-egg emulsifier is usually a mix of mono-and diglycerides, probably because it's effective in minute quantities. Lecithin probably requires a bigger dose. Some people just use partially denatured milk proteins. This is what they do at Haagen Dazs and at Jeni's Splendid. It usually means having a higher than normal percentage of milk solids (you can just add nonfat dry milk, but the industrial people use reverse osmosis to drive water off of raw milk). Then while cooking / pasteurizing, they keep the temperature at 75°C or a bit lower and cook for a much longer than usual time. I've experimented with this and haven't observed any textural changes, although it's possible that I'm not using as much milk solid content as they are. Most of the ice cream I make uses 2 yolks per quart, which works well for getting the emulsifying benefits of egg without any intrusive egg flavor.

Those look nice, Mitch! Baking this style of pizza (the ONLY style, dammit) is tough, because you've got to manage the heat at the bottom of the pie and at the top of the pie separately. Mitch is hitting the bottom with a very conductive, high-heat-retaining slab of steel, and the top with radiant heat from the broiler. Getting the exact results you want requires a dance between the preheat temperature of steel, the distance from the broiler, and the timing. Fortunately it's a lot easier to get it right in home oven with an oven-broiler and moveable racks than in a wood oven. I believe a wood oven ultimately can give the best results, but getting a wood oven to work at all can take endless trial and error. I lived a few blocks from Roberta's when it opened in Brooklyn, and witnessed their pizzas rise from ok-but-inconsistent to consistently-the-best-I've had. It took about 2 years!

Me too. A lot of comments (fewer here than elsewhere) look at restaurants like this as some exclusive thing for rich people, and so: who cares. Which is understandable, but I think the other side of the story is that this kind of cooking is an art form, which for reasons no one knows how to fix, is expensive. Like giant sculptures. Like opera. Some of the people who buy expensive art are just rich douchebags. Some of them are true lovers and patrons, using their money to support something they value. Others are regular Joes who happen to love it and are willing to save up and indulge once in a blue moon. But if no one patronized these restaurants, this kind of cooking would die out, or at least become diminished. This should be of concern to anyone who cares about cooking, whether you eat at high end restaurants or not. We're in an unprecedented age of information sharing, in which chefs publish their ideas rather than hoarding them. We're all in a position to learn from Thomas Keller. Or to learn from other chefs who have learned from him. I'm willing to bet that everyone here has benefited from his work already, whether knowing it or not. Keller is a titan in this world. And by the accounts of people I know who have worked for him, he's one of the hardest working visionaries in a world practically defined by hard working visionaries. For his restaurant to have slipped like this, something bad has happened with him, either personally or professionally. I don't see this as a cause for schadenfreude, just because I can't afford his tasting menu. I'm wishing Keller and his team the best, and for fair treatment from the press and peanut gallery. I'd like to put Per Se back on my list of restaurants to maybe possibly someday indulge in.

In the comment thread there's some interesting speculation by a former Keller bar manager.

That copper wok has got to be someone's incredibly cynical joke on tourists. But more on point, you'd be wise to read Myhrvold's full text on the topic before arguing with him. You've got no reason to take my word for anything, but if your knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss the findings of Myhrvold's team, you'll make a monkey of yourself.

The Bowery shops aren't the bargain they used to be (the Bowery isn't the street it used to be ... ) Definitely still worth visiting, and still a convenient repository of all-things-pro-kitchen in a walkable radius. If you're looking for the very best values, there are enclaves of restaurant supply stores in Brooklyn (Flatbush Ave) and, I believe also in Queens.

One thing I liked about Pyrex (back when I had a self-cleaning oven) is that you can restore it to brand new condition by leaving it in the oven on the self-clean cycle. Completely effortless. And very much not recommended for most metal pans. The other issue with Pyrex is that it browns the surfaces that face pan very rapidly. This is probably why it's popular for things like cornbread, where people go for extra crisp edges. For other things this can be a problem.

Nathan Myhrvold and company, in Modernist Cuisine, Vol. 2: Contrary to what cooking-store marketers would have you believe, the least important component in sautéing is the pan itself. Only a few general features matter for making great sautéed food easily, and they are widely available in pans of modest cost. Yes, it is undeniable that copper heats and cools faster than aluminum, which in turn is more responsive to heat than the iron-based metals. but does it really matter if one pan responds twice as fast as another to an adjusted burner? We don’t think so. An expensive copper pan doesn’t save you if your burner is underpowered for the amount of food you’re trying to cook. And a cheap steel pan heats more than fast enough if your burner is up for the job. As proof, consider what happens when you use a wok to stir-fry, which arguably represents the ultimate form of sautéing. Woks are made from inexpensive, thin, uncoated iron or steel. Put one in a race for the quickest sear against a $400 pan if you like. Our bets are firmly on the humble wok. There's much more on the topic in these books; I'm quoting the section on sauté pans as an example. For anyone not yet familiar, this 7-volume collection is the most thoroughly researched body of work on cooking and food science ever assembled. It doesn't flinch from recommending a $15,000 piece of equipment, if nothing else will do as well.

Yeah, that can be an issue with a lot of these pans. My favorite cast iron skillet was a gift ... my godmother bought it at a flea market upstate, took it home, and realized she couldn't lift it. One of my friends has an 8-quart 2.5mm copper saucepan. He weighs 250 lbs. No one else in the house goes near that thing. I think that's the main reason he like it.

How? I've owned every kind of pan in question. I've used them side-by-side. And I've done the math (which supports my experience). I still use heavy copper, and I still think it's awesome. My point is that its real world benefits over other materials—when they exist—are wildly overstated. And that the benefits of tin over stainless are nonexistent. If anyone wants to contact me offline about this, I'm happy to chat their ear off. Anyone in NYC ... come by with some food. We can do a comparison with some controls..

That's an interesting approach, but why would you get a teflon coating if you're going to layer polymerized oil on top? You can "season" bare aluminum just fine. The oil won't adhere as well as it does to iron, but it should make a more even and durable layer than it would over over a commercial nonstick coating.

Rate of conduction will be lower with thicker metal. Thicker metal will heat more evenly, which is a non-issue. See post on evenness. I'm going to stop responding here, boilsover, because I'm just seeing a miasma of cognitive biasses*. We all want to feel good about our purchases, but there's no need to take this anxiety public. Your pans are awesome and they make you happy. They just don't happen to objectively better in the ways you're claiming. No amount of pushing information around can change that. *See 1, 2, 3

Yeah, evenness is rarely an issue in the real world unless you're trying to make esthetically perfect crepes. Most good pans, with the exception of cast iron and its variations, heat pretty evenly. My heavy aluminum aluminum cookware is the most even, followed by heavy copper, followed by thin clad aluminum. But these are differences observed during tests, not cooking. The cast iron / spun steel / enameled iron are the only ones that require any kind of consideration. Copper is about a mix of responsiveness and heat retention ... two qualities that are at odds, but that allow for surprisingly good compromise if you have the conductivity, high mass, and low specific heat of copper. The reason this benefit doesn't make more real world difference is that there aren't many cooking situations that require both responsiveness and retained heat. Retained heat is for searing. Responsiveness is for fine temperature control. The stock answer is sauteeing a lot of meat and making a pan sauce ... but you don't need fine temperature control to make a pan sauce. You'll have every bit as easy a time with a heavy aluminum pan, or a disk-bottom pan, or whatever. This stuff just isn't rocket science. I love my copper saucepans, but to be perfectly honest, I find my friends' all-clad saucepans to be equally responsive. They won't heat as evenly, but you'd need to conduct tests to prove it. There's no task in saucemaking that benefits from greater evenness than what these offer.

I ran the thermal calculations on equivalent stainless-clad, tin-coated, and uncoated copper cookware. My Mauviel/Falk/Bougeat clad material measures 2.4mm copper, 0.1mm stainless steel. I assumed the same dimensions for the tin, but the math shows that even a difference of plus or minus 100% in the plating thickness is inconsequential. The tin-lined laminate is one half of 1% more conductive than the stainless-clad. An unlined 2.4mm copper pan is 1.6% more conductive. If you think you notice these differences, I don't want your pans, I want what you're smoking.

Now you're just making stuff up. Only suggestibility would lead someone to believe there's a perceptible differenc in conductivity of a lining that's 1/10 mm thick. It doesn't matter to me what stories someone tells themselves to feel good about a purchase, but people come here for information. It's not fair to clutter the airwaves with superstitions.

That's what you do when you preheat a pan. It's the whole point. Push a pan with food in it to 450° you have a different kind of trouble: burned food. The point of the preheat is so the pan drops to the right temperature when the food hits it. There's a reason that even in old kitchens equipped with copper pans, cooks seared food on spun steel.

I'd urge anyone to stay away from nonstick bakeware. The coatings are impermanent and unnecessary, and the dark ones cause overbrowning. The best material, in terms of browning evenly on the air side and on the pan-side, is light-colored, unpolished bare aluminum. Like all the commercial pans. I like the Magic Line pans most. They're welded, so the corners are all perfect right angles. This makes cleaning a little harder, but you don't get odd shaped pieces on the sides and corners. If easy cleaning is more important than perfect edges, there are other brands that are press-moulded, but made with the same heavy aluminum. These have rounded corners. For sheet pans any commercial aluminum half and quarter-sheets work well. I also like the Chicago Metallic aluminized steel ones. They brown things a bit more slowly. For everything, get parchment. You can find sellers on ebay who have it pre-cut to half-sheet size.

Rats. I liked this place. I think the best brick and mortar shop now is the one at Chelsea Market. They're kind of semi-pro. They have things like commercial sheet pans at commercial prices, along with the usual home cookin' stuff.

According to Myhrvold, Food scientists have found that the smoke produced by hardwoods smoldering at temperatures around 400 "C I 750 "F yields the most flavorful foods. That temperature seems ideal not only because of what then goes into the smoke—the phenols and other aromatic compounds—but also because of what doesn't: namely, excessive amounts of vaporizing acids that taste terrible. Regarding soaking the wood: Most of these liquids react when heated to form vapors with an entirely different composition than the liquid. By dousing your wood with them, all you're really doing is lowering the smoldering temperature of the wood - and likely damaging the quality of the smoke.

It's not funny, it's true. The point about BTUs is that the more you have, the less important it is to preheat the pan far above cooking temperature. I have a fairly low output range ... probably under 12,000 BTU/hr. With this kind of output it's always critical to preheat to a high temperature if browning a significant quantity of food. If you don't, the food will drop the pan temperature and just stew. It's true with heavy cooper, with heavier cast iron, with spun steel, with a 7mm disk of aluminum. And sure, you can easily go to 480F and above in tinned copper. You will simply melt the lining into puddles. Every time. If you do not experience this, then you're mistaken about the temperature, or about the lining material. You cannot have fat in the pan if you are preheating to these temperatures. You must preheat a dry pan, add the oil, and then immediately add the food before the oil burns. You probably do not want to add oil or food to melted tin. That's just messy. I wouldn't pay extra for the privilege.

I usually see "Saucier" applied to a windsor / evassee pan that has a curve in the bottom to accommodate a whisk. I don't have one, but it looks like a reasonable update to the classic design. Probably less likely to get curdled egg or other skank in the corners.

My thesis should probably be, if the stuff makes you happy, and you can afford it, go for it. Esthetics and good vibes might matter to you. The question is what price and what other tradeoffs you're willing to suffer. I've cooked plenty on the materials and thicknesses mentioned. And I've worked out the physics. And I've been in the kitchens of some of the best chefs working today (the only top-end kitchen in NYC where they use copper is Jean George, and his kitchen is on display from the street). My conclusions are exactly what I've said before. If your concern is performance, and you make a lot of sauces, then maybe there's an argument for a copper windsor pan. A stainless lined one is more practical. Otherwise copper doesn't offer real world advantages. I sold off my tin-lined copper years ago because it was a pain in the ass. I still use and love the stainless-lined copper, but would probably only replace one of these pans with more copper if they were lost. Re: sauté temperature: don't mistake the cooking temperature with the preheat temperature. Unless you have a very high BTU range, you have to get the pan surface way higher than the cooking temperature before adding the food. If you DO have a very high BTU range, then you'll be dancing a delicate dance with tin. For searing larger batches of food, I typically get a pan surface up to about 480°F. 30 degrees higher than tin's melting point. Also remember that etals soften and lose strength well before their melting points.