slkinsey

I'm pretty well set on stockpots & fry pans. (Le Creuset & Lodge, respectively.) I was thinking about one saute pan & two or three sauce pots, at least for a start. I'm not really into big sets, etc. I'd rather purchase what I'll use. Thoughts? Well... as you may have guessed, I really like the Sitram Catering saute pan with the 2.5 mm copper disk bottom. The Sitram Profisserie pan with a 7 mm aluminum base is pretty killer as well. If you want a curve-sided saute pan, Paderno Grand Gourmet makes a deep "fry pan" that might fit the bill. I also have what Paderno calls a paella pan for big sauteing jobs. This 14 inch pan wouldn't be my first choice for Paella, but the huge aluminum base really soaks up the heat and allows you to put a lot of food in the pan -- the lack of a long handle saves space on the stove and in storage. In terms of sauce pans, if you think you'll ever be making emulsified sauces or doing big time reductions, you might think of spending bucks on one fully clad pan. Otherwise, all you need is a good conductive base to spread around the heat. I happen to think that the Paderno Grand Gourmet saucepots with a 7 mm aluminum base really kick ass, but the two Sitram lines are also very good.

Whether or not you would get much advantage out of a heavy copper pan really depends on what kind of cooking you do, what food you most often make, what style of pan you like to use the most... that sort of thing. I certainly wouldn't say that I get a huge advantage out of using copper every time I cook, but it's great to have for those times I do want it. Going back to an earlier analogy, it's kind of like having a Ferrari... you may drive it <60 mph most of the time, but for those times when you want to open it up to 120 mph, there is no substitute. Since it is expensive, I was pretty picky and choosey about the copper pans I acquired and only bought pans styles I was sure I would use very often (saute and fry pans) or occasionally-used pans for which copper offered a real advantage (sauce pan for actual sauce making, reduction pan). What cookware pieces were you thinking of getting? Saute pan? Sauce pot? Fry pan? Stock pot?

I haven't used any of it (nor did I know it existed until you mentioned it)... but I did look it up on the web and found the following description from the Calphalon web site: This description strongly indicates to me that the main conductive material is aluminum and that the copper exterior is more or less a thin outer lining for looks, which would make these pans very similar to All-Clad's Cop-R-Chef line. If the Calphalon Tri-Ply Copper really included enough copper to confer a significant thermal advantage, I have to think that they would make a big deal about it in their prommotional materials. The fact that they refer to it as a "copper exterior" makes their claim that it "contributes to the superior conductivity and cooking performance" a little disingenuous, if you ask me, especially when combined with their later claim that "the thicker the aluminum, the more conductive the pan." Basically, it seems to offer all the performance of aluminum with all the maintenance hassle of copper. On the other hand... if one is into this kind of cookware, the prices compare quite favorably with what I believe to be near-identical Cop-R-Chef from All-Clad. A 1 qt Cop-R-Chef saucepot retails at $170 and sells at around $110 as a second. Amazon.com is selling a 1.5 quart Calphalon Tri-Ply Copper for 70 bucks.

Yea... I figured that out as noted in my post above. I wonder whether eGullet would generate enough business for an online retailer to make it worth it for the retailer... I kind of doubt it because, in order to generate enough sales, they would not only have to offer a wide enough range of brands to satisfy the varied preferences (and wallets) of the readership here, but they would also have to beat things like the occasional Amazon.com Calphalon sale. I also wonder how they would react to the users, and especially the leadership, publicizing cookware deals here that were offered by other retailers.

That's Mister Kinsey to you, Trillium! Oh... wait... nevermind.

You backflush with a cleaner like Urnex daily?! Whoa. You are dedicated, my friend. I have been known to do a daily "mini-backflush" using only water once upon a time... but that seemed to still leave some residue and I found it just as effective (if not more so) to wipe out the grouphead with a clean dishcloth.

On the one hand that would be totally cool... but on the other hand, I wonder whether or not it would be terribly ethical. So long as nobody is misrepresenting credentials, I can't see an ethical objection to offering a discount to a group of potentially excellent customers. D'oh! I misunderstood... somehow I got the idea he was suggesting that someone in the restaurant business buy cookware with an industry discount and resell to eGullet members. Upon re-reading, it doesn't seem to be the suggestion he was making.

Isn't Caesar Salad an American salad? I think it was actually invented in Mexico for some visiting Hollywood types, but it certainly achieved its fame in America.

Fairway has several examples of the real thing.

On the one hand that would be totally cool... but on the other hand, I wonder whether or not it would be terribly ethical.

I love Demeyere. I have several pieces of their higher end, copper-core line, Sirocco. The Apollo is great too, but I like the way the Sirocco looks (yes, I know, serious cooks don't care about the looks of their cookware, but I do). It's very expensive, though... Yes, it is very well-made... and very expensive indeed. Dave, I hate to condradict you, but I have to disagree that Demeyere Apollo is comparably priced to Sitram or competitive on a cost/performance basis. I took a few minutes to poke around and get an idea of typical Internet prices for a 1 qt saucepot and came up with something like this (numbers rounded): All-Clad Copper Core:_______$160 Demeyere Sirocco:_________$130 Falk Culinair:_____________$120 All-Clad Stainless:__________$110 All-Clad Copper Core (second):_$110 All-Clad MasterChef:_________$80 Demeyere Apollo:___________$70 All-Clad Stainless (second):____$60 All-Clad MasterChef (second): __$50 Sitram Catering:____________$50 Sitram Profisserie:___________$30 So, really, the only products that Demeyere Sirocco is competitive with in terms of price are Falk Culinair, All-Clad Copper Core seconds and All-Clad Stainless at full retail. The Falk, IMO, should clearly beat the Demeyere in terms of performance, if not ease of maintenance. I'd also be awfully tempted to buy the All-Clad Copper Core over the Demeyere for that price as well, since it has a full internal layer of copper as opposed to Demeyere's copper-plus-other-stuff disk bottom design. Demeyere Apollo is roughly competitive price-wise with All-Clad MasterChef at full retail and All-Clad Stainless at a discounted price. Sirocco, as you can see, is almost three times the price of Sitram Catering, and Apollo costs a good 40% more than Sitram Catering. I would say that Apollo is roughly equal to Sitram Profisserie and Paderno Grand Gourmet in terms of basic design, as these three employ a thick aluminum disk bottom design (Paderno doesn't make a 1 qt saucepot, so I did not include them above). Sitram Profisserie is less than half the price. My feeling about Demeyere is more or less my feeling about All-Clad, only more so: very nice product, but horribly over priced. If I could get the deep discounts that I assume JAZ is able to get, I'd probably give it a try and get a piece or two. I like having cookware from a lot of different manufacturers, so I'd love to have some. But at these prices? No way. Hmmm... maybe JAZ can hook me up?

Assuming you are referring to my remarks earlier in this thread... who ever said anything about a few grams of stale grounds? I just fastidiously swept out all the stale grounds from my (very dirty at the moment) Rocky doser and it came to around 1/4 of a teaspoon. Given the fact that it takes a little over 11 teaspoons to fill my filterbasket, we're talking about something like 2% "old grounds" as a maximum. -- or, a little over 1/3 of a gram per 17 gram double shot (sorry, I don't have a lab scale at home so I will have to estimate from volume). Mind you, this is a maximum amount and does not really reflect actual usage, which I would predict to be below 1%, or .17 grams per double shot. Do I think 1% of old grounds will significantly effect a shot made in a home machine? No way. Picking this kind of nit is like buying a $1000 CD player when you have $300 speakers. Think of all the things that would have to be perfect in order to detect this kind of difference. The beans would have to be at peak freshness. The machine would have to be producing the precisely best temperature. The grind would have to be exactly right. The water would have to be soft and free of any chlorine or other chemicals. The grouphead, filterbasket and portafilter would have to be scrupulously clean with no coffee residue whatsoever but also no trace of degergent. Then maybe we can talk about whether or not one has a palate that is capable of discerning the presence of 1% - 2% old coffee grounds. Now, I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't spend 30 minutes every day backflushing my machine and scrubbing out my portafilter to make sure that no trace of today's espresso remains to potentially taint tomorrow's cup. Commercial establishments do this every day (well... the good ones) and regular citizens do it a lot less often. If you do it daily, well... then you take your espresso making a lot more seriously than just about anyone I know. I should also point out that every place I have bought espresso in Italy used a doser -- typically a kind that automatically fills the doser with grounds whenever the doser drops below a certain level. The fact that these dosers are always full demonstrates that they are not being cleaned of "old grounds" well... ever. And these places produced by far the best espresso I have had. I cannot contradict your experience that sweeping out your doser has improved the consistency of your shots -- especially if you sometimes go weeks between uses of your grinder. But it certainly has not been my experience that I need to do a great deal of that kind of thing. All I do is sweep out the grinder chute using the end of a screwdriver (I keep a small one top of the machine for when I want to unscrew the screen for cleaning) and click the doser until it seems to stop making a difference. I only vacuum out the doser when I take the grinder apart to clean the grinder plates.

Yikes! Beer that's flavored like the world's most popular beverage... water.

Ah, Lecce! Not only a cool town but also the birthplace of Tito Schipa, one of the greatest and most legendary operatic tenors of the 20th century.

Why not try Brewsky's on East 7th Street? OK prices. Dive atmosphere. Huge selection. Beer only.

Actually, no... Celis was not originally Belgian. Unless you're talking about Pierre Celis the man. He was (and still is AFAIK) Belgian. What happened is this: Wit beer -- which used to be very big around Leuven, Belgium -- had pretty much died out by the 1960s when Pierre Celis decided to try reviving the style. He bought brewery equipment and founded the De Kluis brewery and began producing a wit beer named Hoegaarden. This basically brought the style back to popularity, and some other brewers started making their own examples in the 1980s. Pierre Celis is, in a very real sense, the father of wit beer today. Anyway, at some point there was a fire in the De Kluis brewery and Celis was forced to sell the brewery to Interbrew (makers of Stella Artois, etc.) in order to keep it in operation. Around that time, his daughter was going to school in Texas (or something like that) and he moved to Austin where he opened the Celis Brewery, making Celis White, the delicious Celis Grand Cru and several other Belgian-style beers. These were the first beers named "Celis" of which I am aware. Also, to my taste, Celis White was in every way a superior beer to Hoegaarden... like maybe he learned something after a decade or two making wit beer. Unfortunately, at some point he entered into a partnership with The American Specialty & Craft Beer Company, which is an arm of Miller Brewing. Before you knew it, Miller had acquired a majority of the company and decided to close it down and auction off the trademark and equipment. AFAIK, the Michigan Brewing Company bought the trademark, equipment (?) and recipes and is re-starting production of Celis. I haven't heard anything as to their results.

If you can find it, give a listen to Dave Van Ronk singing it and playing acoustic. In fact, listen to about anything he did. He was a good dude. I much prefer the baroque-instruments version of Electric Light Orchestra's "Don't bring me down" with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields conducted by Neville Marriner and a haunting pan-flute solo by Zamfir.

Hmmm... That is a difficult question to answer... there are so many things. For example, when I am making a very delicate emulsified sauce I find that pinpoint temperature control is very useful. Often times when I do this sort of thing I can regulate the temperature by holding the saucepot in the air over the flame and making minute adjustments in the height of the pan over the flame (obviously this is something I would do only with a small pot). I never use a double boiler for things like melting chocolate, making Hollandaise, etc. These are the sorts of things where the super high level responsiveness comes into play. In terms of other things... I have noticed that my copper pans come up to temperature way faster than my other pans. Also, because they are so heavy and have such a large thermal mass, they hold more heat than any other pans I own (I know that cast iron can technically hold more heat, but I have never seen a cast iron pan thick enough to hold more heat than my copper pans -- they really should make 5 mm or 7 mm thick cast iron skillets). As a result, I find that my copper pans are simply more effective than my cast iron and aluminum pans for things like searing steaks. There is also the trade-off between responsiveness and evenness of heat. In order for less conductive pans to provide even heat, they have to be thicker and therefore are all that much less responsive. So... let's say you are trying to deeply caramelize some onions and you are down to the very last bit. One minute more and you might start burning the onions. With a copper pan, you can simply remove the pan from the heat and the temperature will quickly start going down. An aluminum pan that was thick enough to provide a similar evenness of heat might start to burn the onoins before it cooled down. Of course, you can always take the onions out of the pan, but I am only making an example... It's also nice to know that you have a pan that can get screaming hot and hold enough heat to quickly brown off a bunch of chicken thighs, but that will quickly cool down to simmering temperature when the heat is lowered and a little white wine is added (along with juniper berries, garlic and rosemary if it's me doing the cooking) and will thereafter provide perfectly even heat for a braising. Oh, copper is definitely not for everyone, I agree. That said, I don't underdstand why you would be more worried about copper cookware sitting on the stove than anything else. What do you think would happen? Personally, I'd be a lot more worried about leaving that Calphalon Commercial nonstick fry pan or a Le Creuset French oven sitting on the stove. Those pieces can really be damaged if they get too hot. I have been known to leave my Falk saucière on the stove empty for 7 or 8 minutes so it gets screaming hot for stir frying (works infinitely better on my stove than any wok I have ever tried). The next time Falk has a sale or offers an introductory price on a fry pan or a sauté pan, you might think about picking one up. I know they seem expensive, but they last a lifetime and they are really no more expensive than a fancy dinner in Manhattan for two or a DVD player that will be obsolete in 3-5 years. And if you discover than you aren't into using it, you at least have something cool-looking hanging in the kitchen. Heck... I might be willing to buy it off you if you gave me a decent price.

Hmmm.. Yea, that very well may be the case. For my own purposes (and I would guess the purposes of most home cooks) the advantages of the stainless lining (can use high heat, much more durable, doesn't need to be replaced) far outweigh the gain in responsiveness. The one thing I can definitely say from my own experience is that stainless lined heavy copper blows away any other cookware I have tried in terms of responsiveness, and I've tried just about every design but tin-lined copper. Um... in my Manhattan apartment, the dishwasher is named "Kathleen." I'm not so sure she'd be into that...

The stainless lining is only 0.2 mm thick. Given the fact that the conductivity of copper is significantly higher than that of aluminum (4.01 W/cm/K as opposed to 2.37 for aluminum) I am have to think that the 0.2 mm of stainless in a 2.5 mm thick piece of cookware wouldn't tip the balance in favor of anodized aluminum. I also wonder how thick the aluminum is on most pieces of anodized aluminum cookware. If they are any thicker than 2.5 mm (the thickness of stainless lined heavy copper cookware) I don't see how an anodized aluminum pan could possibly be more responsive. My main issues with anodized aluminum are that I have warped several pieces at high temperatures and it is hands-down the hardest cookware to keep clean that I have ever owned. The big advantages of stainless lined as opposed to tin lined copper are that one does not have to spend money on re-tinning and high heat cooking is possible (tin melts at high heats).

Two things here: 1. Did it never occur to you that Eric Clapton may be fervently anti-drug today as a direct result of his own past experiences with drugs, both from taking drugs himself and observing the effects of drug use on his friends and colleagues? This is not hypocricy. 2. That's not the way it works for a musician (or a writer or a painter or whatever). The work is the work. It's out there and that's that. There's no taking it back. I should also point out that the lyrics of "Cocaine" are fairly ambiguous and shouldn't necessarily be taken as a ringing endorsement for cocaine use. Furthermore, you are assuming that Eric Clapton has any control whatsoever over what tracks the recording companies put on his compilation albums. This is absolutely not always the case. What control Clapton can exert over the use of that song is that he can decide whether or not he performs it live, and if he does perform it live he can decide to offer some explanatory comments on the meaning of the song and his personal experiences with drug use. I note, however, that "Cocaine" was not included on his Unplugged album.

I have around 5 pieces of Falk Culinair, and I continue to use them on a daily basis. My 11-inch "Saucière" (which is basically a high-sided saute pan with a curved transition from the base to the sides) is by far the pan that I use the most often. A few things about Falk: - I don't work for them or have any other relationshop other than as a customer - Personally, I think you are better off choosing the "without lid" option and buyind stainless covers that fit. Who needs a copper lid? It doesn't add any functionality and it's hard to clean - Falk is the company that developed the copper/stainless bimetal technology, and AFAIK they make all of it. If you get a Mauviel or Bourgeat copper/stainless pan, they made it out of metal they purchased (or possibly licensed) from Falk - Falk makes what I have observed to be the least expensve heavy copper/stainless lined cookware. They do have occasional sales, which are wort waiting for. I will post here the next time there is a sale. - If you do decide to buy some copper, make sure it is a type of pan where you will really be able to feel the difference. As the corpulent one says, why have a Ferrari that you only drive around the block? That $75 pan is a good deal, but you probably won't experience much of the benefits of copper using that pan unless you do a lot of reductions or make a lot of delicate emulsified sauces. If you want to really notice the difference and have a high caliber pan that you use every day, I think it makes the most sense to splurge and get an 11-inch sauté pan, saucière or frypan. I know these are hella expensive (although you can wait for a sale or try to get a second) but they will give you a lifetime and more of use. I waited for the right time and got great deals on all of mine. - The negatives: First, they are very heavy. Second, there is the cleaning issue. They must be cleaned by hand, and every time you put them on the heat, the copper will discolor. Now, you can always decide not to clean the outside of the pan at all, and the copper will build up a natural patina. Or, if you do decide that you like your copper shiny, Falk makes it much easier to clean by virtue of having a brushed (as opposed to polished) exterior. We use Barkeeper's Friend and a Scotch Brite pad on ours, and it taked me no longer to clean one of my copper pans than it does to clean one od my stainless pans. Falk has some info about maintenance here.

Come ha detto il tipo grasso... They are all perfectly good cookware. I own some All-Clad and some Calphalon -- and I'll be getting more Calphalon when the Commercial Nonstick fry pans go on sale at Amazon.com. I just think that they are way over-hyped. Many people have spend huge bucks putting together a kitchen full of nothing but All-Clad Stainless or Calphalon Professional or whatever because they have bought in to the marketing hype that these are the "best kind of cookware." And they are, indeed, very good. But they are far from the best and they are far from the best value. That said, when the price is right and the piece of cookware is one that lends itself to the design... I'll totally line up to buy Calphalon, All-Clad, Demeyere, whatever. And, okay, I'll admit it. I am a little biased against any product that self-promotes as much as they do. You don't see huge double page ads for Sitram or Paderno or Straub or Falk Culinair or Mauviel or F. Dick every time you open up an issue of Gourmet. I also have the philosophy that it makes the most sense to build up a battery of cookware slowly, saving up for really good pieces and waiting for the occasional sales. That way you spend maybe a couple hundred bucks a year and before you know it you have some really kick-ass stuff. Buying things one piece at a time also gives you the opportunity to ask the significant questions of 1. how do you really intend to use this piece; 2. what materials and design lend themselves best to accomplishing these tasks; and 3. do you really need it. When one is buying a zillion pieces at once, it is easy to end up with a big expensive All-Clad pot that you mostly use to boil water.

Yay! We will, of course, expect a full report!

Sometimes when I am roasting capon or duck or some other fatty bird, I will shred cabbage very finely and toss it into the hot roasting pan on the stovetop to soak up the fat and wilt down a little. Throw in a little dry riesling and a scattering of caraway seeds. Take it off the heat while it is barely wilted and still crunchy. Great contrast to the fattiness of the meat. Of course, it may be too hot for roasting... I would also think that some kind of shredded/wilted cabbage salad would be good in bibimbap.