Cooking with your copper

Here are some tips and ideas for new copper users and old hands alike.

First time using copper?

Pick a recipe and let’s take your pan for a spin!

Before you start, give your pan a quick visual check. If this is your very first time using this pan, make sure the lining is intact and ready for cooking. (Not sure? Go here for help.)

Preheat your pan with a little oil or butter. Copper heats up quickly and it’s good to keep something in the pan to absorb heat while you’re getting ready to cook.

Don’t turn up the heat past medium, for now. You may find that your copper pan gets hotter than you expected — that is because copper is very efficient at absorbing heat from your stovetop. Everybody’s stove is different — notice how hot your pan gets at a medium (50%) heat setting, and nudge the heat up a little only if needed.

Use wood, silicone, high-heat plastic, or silicone-coated steel utensils. Bare steel utensils may scratch the lining of the pan. (Of course, if you are sure the lining of your pan is stainless steel, then steel utensils are fine.)

Let your pan cool down before you wash it. It’s not good for any pan to be dunked in a sinkful of water while it’s still hot. Your copper pan will cool down quickly, so it will be ready to wash by the time you’ve finished eating.

How did it go? Use what you learned with this first experience to guide you with your next recipe!

Getting used to copper

There’s nothing special or fancy about cooking with copper — if anything, in my experience, copper pans are more straightforward and predictable than other pans. But as you gain experience with your pan, there are a couple of common sense things to keep in mind.

Your copper pan’s lining determines how high a temperature you can take it. My first time instructions above will work for any copper pan, but your pan may be better suited to different types of cooking. (Not sure what lining you have? Go here.) Tin has relatively low melting point, around 450°F (230°C), which means a tin-lined pan should be kept below 400°F (204°C) for cooking; this is not an issue for French and European cuisines, but if your recipe calls for searing, charring, or other high-heat effects, you should reach for a different pan. Copper lined with metals with higher melting points (stainless steel, silver, nickel, and aluminum) can withstand higher cooking temperatures up to 500°F (260°C) or so. That said, Mauviel no longer provides a temperature limit for their steel-lined pans, but instead advise that you use only 60% of your stovetop’s capacity; if your recipe tells you to dial the heat up to max, you are better off with a carbon steel or cast iron pan.

It’s actually fine to use metal utensils with a stainless-lined copper pan. Stainless steel is very resilient. Nickel and aluminum are not quite as hard as steel and are a little more prone to scratches and nicks, so I would be cautious about banging around in them with a sharp-edged steel spoon. But don’t use steel utensils with silver or tin: tin is the softest of the lining types and the most prone to scratches, and silver is a thin electroplated lining and even a minor scratch risks scraping through to the copper below.

Preheating will be a lot faster with your copper than with your other pans. If you’re accustomed to leaving your cast iron or steel pan to preheat for 10 minutes, you will find that your copper pan heats up in half that time (or faster).

And don’t blast your copper pan with heat. If your style of preheating your pan is to crank the heat up all the way to get the thing warmed up as fast as possible, you won’t need to do that (and shouldn’t do that!) with your copper pan. Try this: put your pan on the stove, set the burner to low, and observe how quickly the pan floor begins to warm up.

The exception to the moderate heat rule? Boiling water. It’s fine to dial the heat up under a copper pot full of pasta water — water absorbs so much heat energy that the pan will heat up slowly no matter what. Of course, never let any pan boil dry.

You won’t experience hot spots or cold spots with a copper pan. Less conductive pan materials such as iron and steel heat up first at the contact point with a heat source and then that heat spreads gradually over the floor of the pan. (This is why preheating is so important with those pans!) Copper absorbs heat quickly and spreads that heat rapidly and evenly across the floor and sidewalls. If you’re used to parking a cooked chicken breast off to the side of the pan while another piece finishes cooking, you won’t find a cool spot on a copper pan to do that. (Of course, the benefit of copper’s conductivity is that the entire surface of the pan is evenly heated.)