Cop * R * Chef Cookware

20 years ago

OK, so I admit it... I love trolling the thrift stores for hidden treasures.

This week I stumbled accross a small selection of cookware. At first glance I wasn't too impressed and almost whent right on by, but the weight and heft of the pots changed my mind the moment my hand touched metal. Quickly I flipped over the skillet to see the handle inscribed with the name "Cop R Chef" with no other name or brand. Price was $8. Not bad I thought. Another 4 pots here too, two with lids and.. oh well, some one just picked up the 8" skillet, but I got the 10" beastie of a pan here and quickly scooped up the remaining three and headed for the check out.

So for my $28 dollars I left with a 10" skillet, small sauce pot (1 qt?), large sauce pot (2 qt?), what appars to be a butter warmer, plus the two lids.

After doing a little google search I see that All-Clad sells a copper line under the name Cop-R-Chef. I know these aren't All-Clad, but can anyone out there tell me what I've found? They most definatly are copper as they were so pathetic looking I bought a tub of Wrights Copper Cream and the transformation is amazing.

Thanks,

Shannon

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Comments (3)

Melic
20 years ago
The original Cop*R*Chef (with the ***asterisks***), made by All-Clad, has brass handles - and the long handles are embossed with the Cop*R*Chef logo, not All-Clad. I have a few pieces - a frypan, a small, small saute pan, an oval gratin pan, and a casserole -- that were given to me in the early 80s.

Handles aside, they are indistinguishable, I think, from the current Cop R Chef made by All-Clad - except that All-Clad may now - or at some time in the past, but not now - have substituted stainless lids for copper ones. Oh, and the newer ones have stainless handles, although I did see a site somewhere recently selling Cop R Chef "original" pieces with the brass handles.

By the way, I once emailed All-Clad asking about the history of my brass-handled Cop*R*Chef pans, and all they did was email me back some irrelevant cut and paste from their website. Maybe you'll have better luck if you ask them .... nahhh :)

They're nice pans, and you really got a deal, but the copper layer is in fact quite thin - the "core" of the pans is aluminum, just like All Clad stainless. In this respect they're not in the same league as Bourgeat or Falk or Mauviel 2.5 mm stainless-lined copper, but what you got for the money are some really nice All-Clad pans that you'll have to polish :)
roadtrip
Original Author
20 years ago
Yea, I did notice that the pans only had a thin layer of copper on the outside and hadn't really thought of the other "true" copper pots had a MUCH greater copper content... an aluminum pan with copper jacket versus a copper pan with an aluminum liner. So far I'm pretty happy with the way they've preformed at a not bad price.

Thanks!!
Shannon
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Melic
20 years ago
You got a great deal, and they'll cook well, like the all-clads they are.

I personally don't mind polishing copper - BarKeeper's Friend makes both a liquid version of its powder product *and* a special copper cleaning liquid (I haven't compared but I'll bet they contain the same magic ingredient - oxalic acid) - if you don't mind losing a mirror finish on your copper (for Falk it doesn't matter anyway), the powdered BarKeeper's Friend will take off the tarnish with no effort at all. I use BKF on all my pans anyway (water here is a real discolorer, and long heat, even at medium = rainbows), so it never takes me any longer to clean a copper pan than a stainless pan. I just don't put the copper in the dishwasher (although in my youth I was known to occasionally "forget" and was left with a clean, very very tarnished, pan to deal with).