Copper in the Kitchen
This metal shines when it comes to cooking, cleanliness and
class.
While studying at Le Cordon Bleu, the world’s premiere culinary school, and later working at some of the finest restaurants in France, Eric Eisenberg learned to appreciate the copper cookware top chefs use to prepare exquisite gourmet dishes.
“I used a lot of copper during my training in France,” said Eisenberg, now executive chef at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, WA. “And we used a lot of copper cookware at the different restaurants I worked at, including Michel Rostang in Paris and Chateau D’Artigny in the Loire Valley. I later bought a huge set of copper cookware for my own restaurant.” That establishment, Relais, was a French restaurant with a Northwest flair in Bothell, WA.
While many American cooks and kitchens have copper cookware, it is often hung on the wall and used for display rather than for cooking. Eisenberg’s training taught him a valuable lesson about this cookware’s unique attributes beyond its elegance and durability. The copper cookware he used played an important role in how meals were prepared.
“Those pots were pretty old but they held up very well,” Eisenberg recalled. “They didn’t warp or bend and they kept a nice, flat even bottom. What’s more, the copper conducted heat well and distributed it evenly throughout the pot.”
