FAQs

Warping is typically caused by two things:

• Overheating – heating a pot or pan for an extended period of time with nothing in it
• Cooling too quickly – dousing a hot pan in cold water.

Unfortunately once a pot or pan has been warped, there is no way we are aware of that it can be fixed, and we’ve tried quite a few methods.

Heating cookware with nothing in it for an extended period of time should be avoided, as it can damage the copper coating or warp the pan.

If you somehow avoided warping your pan when you overheated it, the discoloration can easily be fixed.

A greyish dull coating is typically caused by minerals from hard water (if you were boiling water and boiled it dry) getting baked onto the stainless steel finish. The iridescent sheen on the stainless steel finish is due to the finish getting damaged. Luckily both of these can be reversed. The surface of stainless steel is self healing from exposure to heat and oxygen and once you remove the offending finish your cookware will be as good as new.

To repair the finish, first scrub the inside of the pot or pan with a Scotch Brite pad. Note that you should never use a Scotch Brite pad on the outside of your cookware as it will dull the stainless steel shine. As the inside of cookware gets naturally dull from use anyways, using a Scotch Brite pad will not change the already dulled look. After using a Scotch Brite pad, polish the inside of the cookware with Bar Keepers Friend cleaner, which will remove any of the discoloration remaining and help polish the stainless steel.

Overheating a stainless steel pan will not cause any ill health affects. While stainless steel does contain chromium, it is in a form, chromium III, that is harmless and is actually required by the body in trace amounts. The dangerous form of chromium made popular by the film Erin Brockovich is hexavalent chromium, or chromium six, and is unrelated to the chromium used to make stainless steel.

Pitting on the bottom inside of your cookwar can happen for a number of reasons:

1. From cooking acidic foods such as tomatoes
2. From cleaning with oven cleaner
3. From contact with metal utensils

It is worth mentioning that you should never use oven cleaner to clean burned off food from your cookware as it has a pretty harsh affect on stainless steel, especially the polished outside and the copper bottom, and will likely cause pits.

The pits on the inside of your cookware may make food more likely to stick, but other than that shouldn’t be of concern, aren’t a health risk, and pose minimal risk to your cookware, as the finish on stainless steel is self-healing from exposure to heat and oxygen.

If the screw permanently attached to your Revere Ware lid is stripped, even a new knob won’t stay on properly.

If the screw is stripped then you will likely have problems.

There are two ways you could fix this problem.

A simple fix would be to use some epoxy glue to hold the knob on, such as JB Weld (or anything heat safe).
A more permanent fix us to pull off the welded on screw (they actually don’t take that much force to remove), drill a hole in the lid, and use a separate screw that you can purchase from any hardware store. The entire process is demonstrated here.

Sometimes the metal insert inside the knob will rust to the screw, and when you attempt to remove the screw, the insert will come out of the knob and remain on the screw.

It usually just takes a pair of pliers and a little twisting to unscrew the insert from the screw so that you can screw on a new knob.