Ruffoni Copper Polenta Pot: BIG Review and Cooking Feature

In this video we review a tin-lined copper Ruffoni polenta pot.

We start with an overview of the Ruffoni polenta pan, with full stats and details, and compare it to copper cookware from Mauviel and Falk. We also have some cooking tips for tin-lined copper cookware.

To test the pan we cook polenta, of course, but also cook grits, peposo, and show a recipe for farinata al cavolo nero, a Italian polenta dish featuring cannellini beans and black kale.

We tackle the age old question: Are grits the same thing as polenta? And then we cook some peasant food grits in this high-end expensive polenta pot.

We also look at copper cookware and how it develops a patina. Should you let the patina develop or keep your copper polished and shiny?

And finally Uncle Scott reveals his rating for this pan. Is the Ruffoni only beautiful or does it cook delicious food too? Find out if a piece of Ruffoni is a great cookware addition to your kitchen.

Select Gear and Equipment Seen in this Review
La Cucina Toscana cookbook (in Italian): https://amzn.to/3SukYY1
Ruffoni Polenta Pot: https://amzn.to/3w9FuFT
Le Creuset Dutch Oven: https://amzn.to/3SsmwmI
Kramer Carbon Steel Chef Knife: https://amzn.to/3SvREl2
Staub Dutch Oven: https://amzn.to/41M4Pl0
ilve Stove: https://amzn.to/494CxVh

Uncle Scott’s Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/unclescottskitchen

**If you click on our affiliate links, it allows us to earn a small referral commission if you purchase something. It doesn’t make us rich but it allows us to buy more kitchen products to review and make more videos, and is greatly appreciated!! We currently have affiliate and/or influencer links with Amazon, De Buyer, Thermoworks, Le Creuset, Smithey, Pleasant Hill Grain, and others.**

UNCLE SCOTT’S WEBSITE: https://www.unclescottskitchen.com

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Hi guys and welcome to Uncle Scott’s kitchen today we are taking a look at this guy this is a ruon 10 lined copper Penta pot we’re going to do a big in-depth review and cooking feature based on this guy and we’re going to try and answer three questions one is this a

Quality piece of cookware two does it produce delicious food I certainly hope so and three do you need a dedicated fancy Penta pot in your kitchen who knows let’s jump in and get started now okay so let’s start out with kind of a 10,000 foot overview of this guy and

Then we’ll kind of drill down on some details then do some cooking I unboxed this pot in a video a couple of months ago and I got to say first impression right out of the box a fantastic presentation you pull this thing out and it’s just ornate and beautiful and the

Almost wonder is it’s so fancy am I even going to be able to cook in this thing so very very beautiful Pan um it’s got this Acorn design in the handle and it’s a brass handle three rivets on that guy and the rivets seem to be maybe

Stainless steel or some sort of Steel they’re not brass rivets um hand hammered ruon makes these in Italy near the Italian Alps and you see all these little indentations that is hand hammered and then it’s lined with tent now if you know a little bit about copper cookware you know that copper is

A reactive metal and as such for most everyday cooking copper cookwar comes lined with a secondary metal so that your food never actually touches the actual copper copper can leech into the food and if you get too much of that in you that can be dangerous uh for most

Consumer um copper cookware these days it’s often lined with stainless steel for example this is a Faulk and this is a Mel and these are both stainless steel lined the rafon has the more traditional tin lining now 10 there are some advantages and disadvantages to it you

Got to be careful with it if you were to for example preheat a copper pan on a gas stove top empty dry with no liquid or fat or food in it you could actually damage the tin in as little as 30 to 45 seconds now that 10 could start to melt

At 420 to 450° F but thankfully we are mostly going to be around the boiling point of water with this guy and that’s going to keep us out of trouble okay some quick stats and features on this guy it’s a 16in pan tip to tail about 5

And 1/2 in deep so pretty deep pan and you notice the shape kind of conical actually kind of flares out more towards the top nine inches from rim to rim at the top and six inches on the bottom the handle has been very sturdy it does get

Hot when you cook especially on a gas stove made out of brass and if I were to nitpick just a little bit I would like to see just a little bit thicker handle on here it just looks a little thin based on the size of the pot but I had

No trouble with it and it seems to be very sturdily attached so right about 3 lbs for this guy so pretty sturdy not overly heavy when you pick it up it feels just a sco thinner than the ml or the Faulk I think those guys are a little bit

Thicker but those are for different purposes and this is part of Ron’s Historia collection and they mentioned that it works best on a gas cooktop you could also use it on an electric but unfortunately if you have induction you are out of luck there because copper cookwar does not work on induction

Cooktops and in this video I’m going to be throwing out some opinions and they are my own I always point out for products I review I buy with my own money with this one there’s a little bit of a twist my wife actually bought this pan for me for our 10-year wedding

Anniversary now I will point out that my wife and I don’t argue about much but we do squabble from time to time over all the cookwar I have around here where are we going to put it she thinks I have too much but then when it comes time to give

A gift she bought me cookware and then we argue about where to stick it and I don’t want to psychoanalyze that too deeply scared of what that might reveal but if there is such thing as an inverse virtuous circle I think I have achieved it and as far as cost I believe

This cost roughly $250 or so and this particular model I believe is only available at Williams Sonoma and it comes with this little guy too which is kind of a nice touch little wooden um palenta spatula included in the kit at a high level what is palenta

And is it the exact same thing as grits um I grew up in Alabama I have eaten a ton of grits as a matter of fact I had them for breakfast this morning are they the same thing as palenta now palenta is uh traditionally an Italian dish from the northern region of Italy

And I guess back in the day it was made with different grains but after corn was introduced from the new world it has traditionally been made with corn uh palenta and grits are both ground up dried corn and without trying to start um an in an internet debate palenta and

Grits are pretty darn near the exact same thing on some packaging you will see a package that says palenta corn grits other times there are nuances but they are almost the exact same thing this pose is for me a little bit of a philosophical food dilemma after all

Shakespeare once said a rose by any other name would still smell just as sweet uh grits kind of a harsh guttural type word grits palenta is often described as a corn porridge corn porridge well ly dah but doesn’t it sound so much nicer and more delicious and more hearty

Almost like something out of a Dickens novel to have corn porridge versus grits and no offense to anyone else in Alabama but I thought I was moving up just a little bit in life when I realized I could have been eating corn porridge all these years and I had been

Eating grits made me feel like a little bit of an Alabama hick palenta also typically not a main it’s usually a side dish one of the dishes it is traditionally a side dish for that’s a mouthful is poo this ruon palenta pot inspired me to make poo three or four

Times this month just for an excuse to use the palenta pot and make some palenta so for the first cooking test let’s make some poo first then we’ll make some basic palenta to go along with it and then go from there now I’ll do a full video want some poo at some point

But in a nutshell it’s an Italian peppered beef dish you take a cut of meat like a chuck roast something with some marbling some connective tissue and you Cube that up and get some salt on there very important uh lots of pepper and I got out the old mortar and pestle

Kind of trying to do the real deal version here and you take some olive oil and brown that beef in the olive oil you get some garlic in there and you add a bunch bunch of Kean red wine and you slow cook that in a heavy dish like a

Dutch oven uh I cook mine in the oven for about 3 hours 3 and 1 half hours at 3:25 and it turns out absolutely fantastically and it’s traditionally served with or actually usually on top of palenta so let’s get that basic palenta going um I’m adding water to the

Pot first I not preheating the pot or even turning the burner on before I have the water in there because I want to be very careful with that tin and while that water is coming up to boil I measure out my Penta and a little trick

Here you don’t want to add salt to uh cold water in a pan before it’s warm you can get some pitting you can damage the surface of your cookwar so what I like to do is just add the salt to the dry palenta and when the water is up to a

Boil I stir that in now I’m using a coated whisk here the directions from ruon say that you are not supposed to use metal utensils in a tinline copper pot like this you could damage the surface so I am only using either the wood traditional spatula that came with

The pan or pot and um and coated or silicone uh other utensils so this is a coated whisk and when you add anything like palenta or grits to hot water what you want to do is make sure you are whisking and stirring those vigorously so that you don’t get any clumps or

Lumps in your Penta and in the proverbial overabundance of caution what I am doing as this spanta Cooks is taking my um thermal Works surface probe thermometer and kind of checking and taking some readings around the pan just making sure that it’s not overheating anywhere on the pan and in a couple of

Places it might have gotten up a little over 300° up the sides of the pan but nowhere near that 420 to 450 range we’re boiling water here and that’s going to keep things relatively well regulated and for a basic palenta which serves as a foundation for some delicious peposo I

Think we are of and cooking here and the raon is doing a great job next up let’s try some grits or corn porridge and same basic procedure here I’m using the 5 minute quick grits here and once they’ve gone about 5 minutes then I add some

Cheddar cheese and what I want to show here is that this ruon does not come with a lid uh traditionally when you cook grits you cook them covered uh these because they are kind of the 5 minute quick grits going to cook these uncovered and it’s no big deal on the

Weekends if we’re cooking more of the traditional grits that take 15 20 minutes or longer to cook those typically are cooked covered and The Simple Solution there is for the longer cooking items you want to just monitor your liquid level and if they start looking a little dry add more water

Second Point here with the grip grits normally I would cook grits in a stingless steel saucepan and if you’ve ever cooked grits in a stingless steel saucepan you know that when it comes time to clean up you have to soak the pan because the Grits really fused to that stainless

Steel I found that with the ruon with that tin lining it was much easier to clean up I thought the Grits released um significantly better with the tin lining versus the stainless steel now let’s cook a little fancier palenta here here I’m using some Bob’s Redmill palenta and

They have several recipes on the back they’ve got the basic they’ve got a Cheesy they’ve got a Parmesan and they’ve got a creamy recipe what I’m doing here is combining the creamy palenta recipe and the parmesan cheesy recipe and I’m also going to add some

Butter we got two cups of water two cups of milk that’s where some of the creaminess comes from I’m also adding some butter a good couple of tablespoons of butter in there bring that liquid and butter up to a boil whisk in my palenta and here I’m cooking this one

About 20 minutes and I’m stirring about once a minute if not more often so I am on it and then I’m stirring in a cup of grated Parmesan cheese and again I am serving this underneath yet another batch of poo I thought the cheese flavor

Was really bold in this and one way to look at palenta is it’s kind of a base to which you can add other ingredients when I made the breakfast grits I used cheddar cheese and much more B breakfast oriented flavor there with this Benta added parmesan cheese and I thought that

Gave it a little bit of an Italian type bent there and it went really well with more poo and for the grand finale cooking test I want to make some ferata Al cavalo Nero a leveled up palenta Dish which we’re going to serve with some more

Poo and I got the recipe the base recipe from this book one of my favorite cook books laucha Toscana it’s uh actually in Italian bought that in Italy but if you have Google translate you can do a pretty good job if you don’t read any Italian but fantastic recipes in that

Book and this is a palenta dish that’s going to start out with a Sofrito And then we’re going to add some uh white calini beans and some black kale Don’t Fear The kale cavalon Nero means black kale in Italian black Cabbage and what I’ve got here is a safo and I’m going to start out by putting the oil and the

Onion into the rafon palena pot before I turn the flame on because we’re cooking in T I don’t want to preheat this here let the onion cooked for a couple minutes then I get my celery and carrot in there let everything soften up in the meantime I have washed a bunch of black

Kale and if you’ve ever used black kale you know there is a very thick rib down the middle of the kale now you can cut that rib out or what I like to do just for the heck of it it’s a little more Rusty I think is tear the kale off of

That rib and get rid of that rib you would not want anything like this in your bowl of Penta and after my seito is softened up just a little bit I’m going to add that kale and let that Wilt down a little Bit I’m also going to add some white Italian kidney beans calini beans bonus points here if you started out with dry fried beans as I did so I’ve had these cooking for a couple of hours inle my beans I’m going to get my water in for

My palenta and I’ve heated this water up a little bit I don’t like adding cold water to anything that’s cooking it stops the cooking and I don’t want to shock the pan so I’ve heated my water also in goes my palenta stir That An absolutely fantastic ferata Al cavalo Nero um I really do like the colors of this dish you’ve got the yellow of the palenta with a few little orange chunks from the carrots you get the green from the kale get the the proposal on top of

There and then I reserved a few of the white beans to add as a garnish on top and a little something green and absolutely delicious the rafon did a fantastic job at making this ferata Al cavalo Nero leveled up Penta now let’s talk a little bit about patina and

Whether you want to keep your copper shiny or not typically I don’t polish my copper and I let it develop a patina and this pan is several years old I don’t think it’s ever been polished and I like the kind of rustic look it looks like the one on the front

Of the Italian cookbook however this ruon is so shiny and beautiful and nice I’m going to make an exception for this one and I am keeping this one shined and Polished so let me show you how that works here’s what it looked like after

Cooking in it a month or two so I got a little bit of patina developing there here I just used some I believe it’s copper Brill by Mel there are a bunch of different copper polishes and went all around the bottom of that pan and it shined right up so it’s a

Matter of personal preference do you go rustic and not worry about it if you go shiny it’s really not that much maintenance uh just a couple of minutes but you got to stay on it now at the top of the video we posed three questions the first question is the rafon a

Highquality piece of cookwar this is my first piece of raon and I am impressed with it I really do like it um it’s beautiful and it’s functional and I think it is a high quality piece I like the hand hammered indentations I like the ornate decorative nature of the

Handle I’m not sure I would equip an entire kitchen with stuff like this but I do like having one piece and I’m going to to display this proudly in my kitchen um it’s sturdy I wish the handle were just a little bit bigger but that’s kind of a first world uh nitpick second

Question does it produce delicious food absolutely with the penta we made with the grits with the ferata AL cavalo Nero produce some absolutely delicious food and especially good food uh good palenta side dishes with other fancier dishes like that poo now the Third question was do you need a fancy Italian palenta pot

In your kitchen the answer here is absolutely not you do not need a pan like this however you may want a pan like this and that’s where I think the ruon comes in when it comes to functionality that ruon is not going to be a daily driver um this is my trusty

3Q stainless steel quein artart that has been producing grits and Penta for decades now and it does a fine job however look at this guy look how beautiful it is I like dedicated cookwar this pot has a singular purpose I don’t need it but boy I sure do like having it

And I want to add here that to the extent cookwear can be inspirational I find this ruon palenta pot to be inspirational after all if I just had the old 3 quein art sitting around there is no way I would have made boso three times this month and learned

Farinata Al cavalo Nero I did that because I had a fancy new ruon palenta pot and that inspired me to do some real deal cooking so it’s beautiful it’s functional it produces a lot of good food I’m going to proudly display this in my kitchen and I would not hesitate

To get another piece of ruoni so the ruon italian-made tinline copper p the pot gets a thumbs up you probably don’t need it but boy it sure would be nice to have now let me know what you guys think in the comments section below thank you for watching and we’ll see you again

Next time on Uncle scottt kitchen