Archive | Tips

As a last gasp perhaps to revive the Revere brand, World Kitchen, shortly before selling or being acquired by Corelle Inc., came out with a new improved Revere Ware lined that seemed to want to bring together the nostalgia of the original Revere Ware cookware, with the more modern look of something like All Clad.  I present to you the Copper Confidence Core cookware line.  Yea, that’s a mouthful.

It must not have worked, because not too long after coming out with these beauties, the Revere Ware brand was discontinued.  That apparently isn’t the end of the story, as, turns out, these pans seem to have the potential to be dangerous. A reader contacted us with this disturbing report:

I have a pan that the rivet cap exploded and hit me in the chest. 10″ pan. Popped off ( sounded like a gun shot). I saw an orange flash.

He also sent us these pictures:

Seems that one of the rivet caps shot off the inside of the pan.  If it happened once, we have to consider that it might happen again.  Please use these cookware pieces with care, and perhaps make sure the rivet caps inside the pan are pointed away from anything living.

In bringing back some of my favorite (and most useful) blog posts from the 12 years we’ve been posting, this one stands out as one of my favorites.

I like Sponge Daddy sponges as they really do a great job and are scratch free for non-stick and other more delicate items.  But they are expensive.

My solution 5 year ago was to buy the bigger Big Daddy sponge, and cut it in to 4, that are roughly the same size as the Scrub Daddy sponges, at a fraction of the cost.  So, with all the inflation we’ve had lately, what does that look like today?

More expensive but almost an equal savings at 30% the cost.

TL;DR to solve the etching of glassware, we are using half as much detergent and running a shorter dishwasher cycle.

For years now we’ve experienced the slow fogging of our drinking glasses.  At one time we thought perhaps it was that we had bought cheap glasses, so we bought some better ones, but experience the same thing.  We thought perhaps it was hard water deposits, even though we have a softener, but soaking in vinegar and scrubbing didn’t make a difference; the glasses are definitely getting etched.

Now, to be sure, it definitely does affect some glasses and not others.  But we can’t seem to figure out why.  Some inexpensive glasses are not affected while other expensive ones are.

Some resources we found identified phosphates as the culprit, but most detergents have been phosphate free for some time. And we were using two of Consumer Reports top detergent brands.

Like many lingering issues, this one nibbled at us, and I just felt that it was somewhat hopeless as the things we had tried didn’t seem to make a difference.

Well, recently I decided to give it another go did some searching.  Something in this article stuck me.

A senior scientist from P&G explained that a perfect glass-etching storm can happen inside a dishwasher if you have these four things: soft water, low soil load, high temperatures, and chelating agents. She went on to say, “Chelating agents, or chelants, are a major part of auto-dishwashing formulations because they form soluble complexes with calcium and other metal ions, enabling them to remove food soils and limescale, soften water, and boost hygienic cleaning action.” When you soften water as I do at my home, you remove the calcium from the water. Uh oh!

To prevent glass etching, she suggested not rinsing dishes and glasses, wash in shorter cycles, not using the pots-and-pans or sanitizing settings, and using a dishwashing product that contains zinc.

Softened water – check
Low soil – check (I’ve been aggressively scraping and rinsing plates after twice having to fix a clogged discharge tube)
High temperatures – check
Chelating agents – check

So I’ve got all the elements there for the problem.  I tried to find a detergent with zinc, but no-one seems to advertise that, or even show an ingredients list for their products.

I did a little more searching and found some very interesting tips

1. Use less detergent
2. Use a shorter cycle

I’d read that due to energy efficiency regulations, dishwashers now run much longer than they used to in order to get the same amount of clean.  Ours typically runs a 2 hours cycle, but does have a 1 hour quick cycle.  It makes sense that a shorter cycle gives less time for the detergent to react with the glass, and there is less detergent so it has more of a chance of reacting with the dirt, rather than the glass.

So our approach now is to cut our detergent tabs in half, and run the quick cycle.  So far, the dishes are coming out just as clean, so I am hopeful that our etching problem is also solved.  I think I am going to zip tie some glasses that have previously etched in our dishwasher like I previously did with a Bakelite dishwasher test, and see what happens.

I have high hopes that this will solve our problem.

Update: After about 9 months of using half the detergent and the quick cycle, I am happy to say the glass etching seems to have stopped.

We’ve previously recommended Revere Ware’s Tri-Ply cookware, because it does a good job of spreading the heat on the bottom of the pan.  The Tri-Ply cookware came in two varieties, one with the aluminum sandwiched between the two layers of stainless steel that are part of the cookware, and one with an aluminum and stainless steel disk attached to the bottom of the cooking vessel.

We were previously aware of rare occurrences where the aluminum disc would fall off, spilling out molten aluminum.  These seemed like on-off rare occurrences.  However, more recently we’ve been receiving more and more reports of this phenomenon.  Here is the latest:

This only seems to affect the aluminum disc types.  Because molten metal pours out when the disk falls off, there is a danger of series burns, and damage to stoves, counters, and flooring.

It isn’t clear why this seems to be happening more now, or whether it has always been a problem and we are just hearing about it more now.  It is possible that as this cookware ages and is exposed to repeated use, something may be happening to the materials that allows this to happen.

In the case above, the use wasn’t extreme in any way:

It was a electric stove on medium/ high heat boiling water. the pot was steaming boiling  when i went to dump the water in the sink  i hear something hit the floor  i thought it was water but it was liquid metal  the melted the flooring.  The bottom was still some what attached.

Given everything we know about this type of failure, I would caution anyone using this type of Revere Ware cookware as it may no longer be safe.

Lately we’ve gotten a number of inquiries about parts for Rena Ware.  Some people seem to assume that it is the same as Revere Ware, and perhaps this is one reason for the high number of returns we experience on Amazon.com.  Despite the similar sounding name, and the fact that some of the pieces do look similar, they are two different brands and the parts for one are generally not interchangeable with parts for the other.

Here are typical post-1968 Revere Ware 6 quart pots, copper bottom and tri-ply.

Here is a similar pot from Rena Ware.

Clearly there are similarities, but a number of stylistic differences.  Google doesn’t help the confusion either.

I don’t have a lot of information about Rena Ware; here is what I’ve been able to findNOT.

• The company was founded in 1941 by Fred Zylstra and was focused on waterless cooking.  It seems to be privately owned by one of his descendants now.
• It is still in business today (renaware.com), and seems to have a tie to multi-level marketing.  I get the impression it isn’t a huge operation, but they do have offices in quite a few countries.  They seem to have a larger presence from Mexico through South America.  Dunn & Bradstreet shows that they have about $50 million in annual revenue.
• There are about 190 pieces available on eBay compared to 15,000 Revere Ware pieces, so this brand was / is much smaller than Revere Ware ever was.
• According to the Wikipedia article on Oneida:

In 1983, the company acquired Rena-Ware, a Bellevue-based kitchenware manufacturer with a majority international operations. Oneida sold Rena-ware three years later

Hopefully this post makes its way up in the Google results for Rena Ware so people can see clearly that Rena Ware is not Revere Ware, and there will be less confusion around replacement parts.