• Kitchen
    • How to Choose Cookware
      • A No-Nonsense Guide to Cookware Materials
      • Cladded sidewalls vs. disc-bottomed cookware
      • Cookware Thickness Database
      • Thermal Rankings: Gas
      • Thermal Rankings: Electric and Induction
      • Heat retention myths and facts
      • How to choose an enameled Dutch oven (Le Creuset, Staub, Lodge, etc.)
      • Lids: Glass vs Stainless vs Universal
      • Handles: Rivets vs Welds vs Screw-On
      • What’s the difference between 3-ply (tri-ply) and 5-ply and 7-ply?
    • How to Choose a Knife: In-Depth Product Reviews: Kitchen Knives, Sharpeners, Knife Blocks, and Other Knife Storage
    • How to organize pots and pans (and dishes, cutting boards, and lids) with racks and shelving
    • High-Powered Blenders: An In-Depth Review of Vitamix vs. Blendtec vs. Oster vs. Also-Rans
    • How to Choose Steamer and Pasta Inserts
    • Garlic Presses
    • Induction Stoves
    • How to Choose Sous Vide Equipment
      • In-Depth Product Review: ANOVA Precision Cooker (an Immersion Circulator for Sous Vide Cooking
      • Does pot material matter for sous vide cooking?
    • How To Choose a Cooktop
    • In-Depth Product Reviews: Silicone Spatulas, Turners, and Scrapers Comparison
  • Home
    • A Post-Plastic Home: Known and Unknown Dangers of Plastic, and Alternatives
    • Affordable Water Distillation
    • Sleep
      • Blue Light Special: How to get more sleep in one easy step
      • In-Depth Product Review: White Noise Generators as Sleep Aids
  • Body
    • Eat Poop or Wash Your Hands
    • In-Depth Product Review: A Guide to Feminine Hygiene Products (Menstrual Pads, Diva cups, etc.)
  • Science
    • Does cooking food create toxins and carcinogens?
    • Is Induction More Efficient Than Electric Coil or Gas?
    • Induction Interface Discs: Why They Don’t Work Well
    • Maillard Reactions (Why Food Tastes Good)
    • What’s the healthiest cooking oil?
    • Understanding Imperfect Science
  • Food
    • Emergency Meals – Fast, Easy Cooking for Busy People
    • Fake vs. Real Foods: A Savvy Buyer’s Guide on How to Identify Genuine Food Products and Forgeries
    • Garlic: anti-cancer and cardiovascular health benefits
    • Nutrition
      • The Green Smoothie is the Most Important Meal of the Day
      • Paleo Diet: It’s A Starting But Not Ending Point
    • Food Safety
    • What’s the healthiest cooking oil?
  • Books
    • In-Depth Product Review: Amazon Kindle Fire 7 (2015) Tablet
    • Cookbooks
      • In-Depth Book Review: The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen
  • Baby
    • Food and drink
      • Nutrition: Avoiding Palm Olein in Baby Formula
    • Safe Plastic Breast Milk Storage Bags: A Guide
  • Cleaning
    • Kitchen
      • In-Depth Product Review: Bar Keepers Friend (BKF)
  • Travel/Outdoors
    • In-Depth Product Review: Iwatani ZA-3HP Portable Butane Stove
    • Taking risk out of driving cars
  • Deals

CenturyLife.Org

You are here: Home / How-To Guides / Choose Cookware / Cookware Materials / Cookware Material: Silver

Cookware Material: Silver

Cooking surface: 4/5 Very Good (comparable to stainless steel in stickiness)
Conductive layer: 5/5 Excellent (highest thermal conductivity among all metals)
External surface: 3/5 Good (silver is only about a hard as aluminum, so it scratches easily on stovetop grates)
Examples: Soy Turkiye (Soy Türkiye)
Health safety: 5/5 Excellent (ingesting trace amounts of silver is completely safe, and silver is naturally antimicrobial)

—–

This copper pan is lined with a thin layer of silver
This copper pan is lined with a thin layer of silver

DESCRIPTION AND COMPOSITION

Silver is the most thermally conductive metal in the universe that we know of. It even beats copper by about 10%, depending on metal purity. (In order of highest to lowest thermal conductivity: silver (406 W/m*K), copper (385), gold (314), aluminum (205), typical cookware-grade aluminum alloy (~160), platinum (72), tin (67), cast iron/carbon steel (~50), stainless steel (16), enamel/ceramic/glass (~1), water (0.6), and PTFE such as Teflon (0.25).

Chemically, silver (element 47) is in the same extended “noble metal” family as copper and gold (elements 29 and 79, which sit directly underneath copper on the periodic table). Gold is incredibly corrosion-resistant, silver less so, and copper still less. That’s why gold can survive centuries buried along with shipwrecks in the ocean, whereas silver slowly turns black from tarnish thanks to reacting with trace amounts of atmospheric sulfur, and copper turns green, such as the Statute of Liberty which used to be copper-colored and is now green due to chemical reactions with the air.

Solid-silver cookware heats up extremely quickly and evenly–slightly better than copper, which is the gold standard for kitchen cookware. (Sorry, I couldn’t figure out a way to work platinum into that sentence.)

But since copper costs far less than silver and is almost as good at transmitting heat, it is very unusual to see solid silver cookware.

Where you are more likely to see silver used in cookware is as a cooking surface: an electroplated lining on copper pans. That’s because silver is relatively nonreactive and also won’t kill you unless you ingest epic amounts of it. In contrast, copper is toxic when ingested in large quantities, large meaning, don’t cook on bare copper or on copper that has lost more than a square inch or so of its lining.

Copper cookware may also be lined with tin instead of silver, but in melts at about 450F whereas silver melts at 1750F, so silver can survive accidental overheating better than tin can.

Physically, silver is about as hard as aluminum, meaning it’s not that hard at all. Do not drag bones across silver. Do not use metal utensils on silver. Use silicone or plastic utensils instead.

COOKING

In my experience, cooking on silver is like cooking on stainless steel. Sticky foods like eggs will stick, so use sufficient cooking oil/butter/etc. to lubricate the pan.

CARE

You can’t resort to using BKF or some other abrasive on silver, because that will scratch it. And if you have a silver-lined copper pan (typically 15 microns, or 0.015 mm thick silver lining), those scratches may eventually cut down to the bare copper underneath.

Instead, you will need to use nonabrasive cleaning techniques:

  • Deglaze pans. Deglazing means pouring an ounce or more (depending on the pan size) of water, wine, or some other thin fluid into the pan while it’s hot, but not so much that it warps the pan. Pour just enough to get the pan to bubble off most of the stuck-on bits (called the fond in French); use silicone/plastic spatulas/tongs/etc. to help scrape off the fond. If you do this with the remnants of proteins like steaks, you can make a delicious pan sauce to pour over the steak.
  • If that doesn’t work, pour a larger amount of water into the pan and boil it off. You can also soak the pan overnight before doing so.
  • It’s safe to swish vinegar around the interior of the pan and to let it sit for a while. You can even deglaze the pan with vinegar. The acidic vinegar can pry some stubborn stains off.
  • Scrubbing with a soft sponge (rated nonstick-safe) and soap and water is safe.
  • It’s okay to leave tiny traces of food in the pan that simply won’t come off. Those don’t really pose a threat because a) microbes can’t grow on silver 1, and b) even if microbes could grow on silver, they will die the next time you preheat the pan, anyway.

Avoid using baking soda, BKF, metal polish, steel wool, or even the rough side of a scrubbie to clean this pan. Treat it like a Teflon pan. Abrasives, even mild ones like baking soda, can wear away silver linings, which can be very thin at 0.015 mm thick (which is actually pretty thick as far as silver plating goes, but a far cry from the typical 0.5 mm of rugged stainless steel found on a lot of cookware).

Back to A No-Nonsense Guide to Cookware Materials.

Show 1 footnote

  1. Silver is toxic to microbes but safe for humans to ingest in small amounts. If you eat a lot of silver, it will turn your skin blue. But the amount necessary to do that is way, way above the occasional atom of silver you ingest by cooking on this pan, since you are cooking on the pan, not eating the pan) ↩

Copyright © 2013-2023 CenturyLife.Org · All Rights Reserved. We're independent. We don't have sponsors or get free/discounted stuff, so we don't get pressure to say nice things about bad products. We buy and use stuff ourselves. To pay for website maintenance, we link to sites which pay us a small referral fee, at no cost to you. To support this site, you can shop by clicking on links to retailers. CenturyLife.Org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Questions? Contact us here.

Popular Posts

• How to Choose Cookware

• How to choose a portable induction cooker

• How to choose an enameled dutch oven

• How to choose clad/tri-ply stainless (Is All-Clad Worth it?)

• Even heating rankings: gas and electric

Copyright © 2013-2023 CenturyLife.Org · All Rights Reserved. Disclaimers