Copper cookware can be compared to a luxury sports car: They’re both expensive and fast. Copper is renowned for its responsiveness, meaning it both heats up and loses heat quickly. In other words, it can turn on a dime, keeping pace as you adjust. For skilled, serious cooks, there’s little cookware more pleasurable to use. But which pans are worth the price tag? And how do you make the most of them?

Copper Pans 101

What Is Copper Cookware?

Copper is renowned for both its brassy gleam and its heat conductivity. Serious Eats

Copper was the first metal to be worked by human hands, and that history goes back a long, long time—about 11,000 years. That makes the human relationship with copper about as old as agriculture—though for several millennia, we didn’t do much with it beyond shaping it into decorative objects. Several thousand years later (but still sometime before the Egyptians raised their pyramids), our ancestors figured out how to hammer copper sheets into bowls and other vessels.…