Authentic Copper Kettle Set

Copper inverts these rules. It heats quickly and evenly, but it loses that heat just as fast. This responsiveness gives it a nimbleness and agility that can be very useful for delicate proteins like fish and seafood, as well as sauces, caramel, and chocolate—remove a copper saucepan holding a delicate sauce from the heat and its temperature will drop rapidly, reducing the chances the sauce overcooks or breaks from exposure to the retained heat in the metal.

If you’ll allow this automobile-ignoramus to return once more to my car analogy, you can think of copper as the sports car of the cookware world, and cast iron as the pickup truck. They’re both useful for certain—often very different—tasks.

That’s the simple explanation, anyway. Put a handful of cooking geeks in a room and the conversation heats up faster than copper on a flame. Arguments erupt over whether copper is good enough to justify its cost, and whether its relative merits really set it far enough apart from the crowd of more affordable cookware.

Someone from the Modernist Cuisine team might point out that copper’s unrivalled conduction isn’t the full picture. They’d argue that burner size and the thickness of the metal are factors that are just as critical, noting that a 7mm-thick piece of aluminum heats just as evenly as a 2.5mm-thick piece of copper.