How a Former Rocket Scientist Makes the Best Copper Pots in America — Handmade

I've been making copper cookware for 15 years it's a passion for the process of creation and the tools of creation choosing a high-performance tool that have soul and have meaning behind it it changes kind of how you think about cooking copper has a great heat conductivity the heat from that flame is going to be spread very quickly around the pan such that you've got a nice evenly heated cooking surface I cook at the same rate all around the pan a great high-performance tool the copper that we're using here is pure copper it's a great electrical conductor as well as a great heat conductor so it's used in wiring it's a very important metal in in how we are existing these days the big copper producers in the world are Chile there's a lot of volcanic activity around there so they do have a lot of Mines and a lot of minerals our blank disk which has been trimmed cut out from the sheet of copper so here we've got a spinning lathe we need to make this piece of copper push it over the tool so that the tool becomes the inside every pan that we make has a different shaped tools this tool is heavy heavy heavy steel and is only going to make that one pan [Music] so the first thing I want to do is Center the piece of copper we'll get it roughly centered here the tooling itself is a two-man job the first person is putting the pressure the second man has a roller is going back and forth on the work it's very much a dance you have to be in each other's heads to be able to spin this perfectly Fernando has been working with me for about 10 years now well entrenched in copper cookware I'm a mechanical engineer undergrad a master's degree in aerospace engineering so realized rocket scientist I love to build stuff I love to create certainly the mechanical engineering is is front and center gonna move down one more set of holes continuing the same process but moving it closer and closer to the tool [Music] last little bit here very nice hold it hold it slope all right good let's change for the other roller those that was good these tools were all made specifically for spinning these very thick copper pans very hard steel can will polish that because any little nick in there is going to mark the copper every single time it goes around we're eight feet away from what we're working on over time we added some extra strength here to really hold it nice and firm nice the other roller is more pointy and it wants to move the metal the batter roller will get rid of some of these lines and make it more smooth [Music] nice and down excellent nice little practice makes perfect [Music] being that it's handmade that those spinning lines aren't like a press where it was just pressed into this shape with hydraulic press very different way of manufacturing so this tool here is going to be locked in with this bolt has a little knife on the edge to cut the pan to height and we need a little cutting oil on the tool to help keep it cool [Music] we'll usually finish the outside of the pan we'll use a number of different sandpaper in an artisan fashion every piece is going to be slightly different than the next I was on a vacation in France my wife and I found this huge stockpot and she looked at it and said I love it but look at the inside and it was green she said I'm not gonna cook in that if we buy you're gonna have to fix it that was the pan that started the whole thing I brought it home and read about what I needed to do tried fixing it and I think I tried that thing 78 times and finally the art of it kind of clicked in I put a little ad out there people started sending me their pans and I started finding these amazing pieces coming back and I really didn't expect to find such history in it and I said I I want to be able to make stuff and sell stuff that is of this same quality this is what it should be this is what it was cast iron is a very poor conductor of heat the heat from the pan is going to travel up the handle very slowly what we're going to do next here is take our cast iron handle which has been poured at a local foundry and we're gonna attach it with these rivets we're using the piece of wood as a gauge to know that that's where the handle goes we've got a rivet three rivets the first rivet is the middle one we're gonna take that over to the anvil so we're gonna heat the tails of the rivets [Music] so from here we've got nice even shapes on all three rivets they're laying nice and flat up against the pan so no leaking the genesis of my business being du parquet really came out of the restoration I started learning about the brands that were coming back to me the biggest player of the day was D H and M - parquet a gentleman named whoa hu ot and mo news D H and M that business began about 1855 the big start for these guys was getting one of their ranges into Delmonico's in New York City back in the day with the depression coming on in the early 30s almost all of these guys went out of business that mark had been abandoned I went out and I rear edge' stirred that trademark making pieces in the same vein and same quality as they did this is an old du parquet D H and M piece that says the Ambassador Hotel ambassador New York I put this at about 1920 gorgeously big rivets about the size of a quarter classic American cookware from that era the teardrop this was a very French style of end of the handle for for hanging it up all of those elements inspired my designs it was definitely to honor the original brand restorations we'll start out looking something something like this having this relined with fresh tin polished up on the outside brings it back to be able to use again these are all individual clients that have sent in their their pieces everybody's got a story about where they got their copper from look at this fish poacher the fish would be sitting on this insert and you'd be able to lift the entire fish this is a American early 1900s wonderful large saucepan here's another great piece this is from the Waldorf Astoria when the Waldorf existed where the Empire State Building presently is and it was torn down and probably the 30s this is a great piece with a lot of history and a great stamp on it to find something like this to have in your own kitchen spectacular the next step is to line the pan I need to coat it on the outside with a little bit of whiting and this whiting is just ground marble so this is just protection on the outside tin is a very soft metal it can be bent very easily and it melts at a very low temperature so it melts at about four hundred and seventy degrees the lining is there to separate the acidic foods from the copper acidic foods in raw copper are going to leach the copper off of the pan if we took white vinegar and wiped it on the inside of a raw piece of copper let it sit for 24 hours and came back the next day is gonna give you that green verdigris that you know about copper he wanted to last a long time so he want to get a thick layer of tin that looks great and it takes a lot of heart and a lot of practice the back sides have gotten a little tarnished throughout the process gonna give him a little wash and then we're gonna be off to a polish we've got two different polishing compounds very similar to sandpaper this stronger wheel here is gonna be first and we're gonna be able to take off all of the little micro scratches that we had the compound is more important than the brushes themselves a low grit sandpaper takes the material off the pan and then the final polish and these are softer the white one here is a higher grit sandpaper takes all the little micro scratches off this really brightens it up after a final wash we'll put a put a logo on it and we'll have a pan ready to cook when I started getting some press early on in doing this a couple of the family members contact me and they were thrilled that I was I was making pieces again under essentially the the name of their ancestors I was thrilled to be able to put that together and and learn a little bit more about the business from them you wish that this thing could tell the stories of who cooked in it and what did they cook in it what was life like in these times it's a really special pan I don't know if if these gentlemen thought that we'd be doing this 100 years later and we are which is great I hope a hundred years from now there's somebody out there finding my piece and passed down from generation to generation that's to me what these pans should be [Music]

Channel: Eater

Views: 3,069,216

Rating: 4.9084439 out of 5

Keywords: copper pots, making copper pots, how copper pots are made, how to make copper pots, coppersmith, copper, working with copper, best copper pots, handmade copper pots, copper pans, making copper pans, Jim Hamann, vintage copper, vintage copper pots, restoring copper pots, restoring copper pans, Duparquet, Duparquet Copper Cookwear, handmade copper pans, handcrafted copper pots, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dish, care for copper pots, copper cookware, handmade copper cookware

Id: mTztlpAcips

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BushWeedCornTrash]

So these copper pots are lined with tin. The tin melts at 475 degrees or so... if I was to sear a steak on a pan... how hot is the surface of the pan? Or are copper pots not meant for searing, and only for braising and sauces and soups?

[u/Mr_Smartypants]

Camera man needs to lay off the coffee.

[u/CaptainDingoMD]

Am I crazy that a 450 degree melting point for the coating (tin) on cookware designed for stoves seems super low?

[u/YMK1234]

So what does being a former rocket engineer have to do with any of this? Not like making pots the way he is is rocket science by any stretch.

[u/MorrisM]

...so, I've found this brand and I've re-registered it

[u/Richard-Cheese]

Interesting. Wonder why they don't stamp the pans and instead do this rolling process

[u/dma1965]

Wow, I looked up his pans online. I am a former chef and own several Mauviel French copper pans (the choice of pros in France). I thought they were expensive at $200 to $400 each. His pans cost around $1500.

I guess rocket scientist made pans don’t come cheap.

[u/DonutChucka]

Awesome and informative.