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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Cookware: Pan of action
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Cookware: Pan of action

A bit of what we eat comes from the pot we use to cook our food. Clay and stone, steel and irontake your pick

Sandeep Sreedharan cooking in a Japanese clay pot in his Bandra kitchen. Photo: Sameer Joshi/MintPremium
Sandeep Sreedharan cooking in a Japanese clay pot in his Bandra kitchen. Photo: Sameer Joshi/Mint

The first time I placed my clay pot on the gas stove, I could sense my grandmum, bless her soul, standing by me and rolling her eyes. In her time, I recall earthenware being used only on ceremonial occasions: to let boiling milk overflow as a new bride entered the house or during the period of mourning, when bereaved family members ate a one-pot meal of rice and vegetables. And here was I, Instagramming my Moroccan tagine, simmering away in a Longpi pot sourced from the North-East, for scores of “likes".

Call it back to basics. Or the logical progression of the ongoing urban home-food revolution. After making place for organic, discovering home-grown substitutes for quinoa and buying every non-essential unitasker, upscale home cooks are waking up to the fact that what they cook in is at least as important as what they cook. It’s a significant shift, possibly the first one since families became smaller, kitchens shrunk and well-worn iron kadhais (woks) and mixed-metal handis (pots) were put away in storage.

The biggest casualty of the change, ironically, is non-stick, the material that nudged out the old-style cookware and crept into the kitchen sometime in the late-1970s. “Non-stick has many pros, but there are also cons," says Prasanna John, who was the vice-president of sales for a leading non-stickware brand till he quit his job last year to launch a business that draws on natural materials.

The pros, as any kitchen amateur will also know, are primarily two: The synthetic polymer—polytetrafluoroethylene (PFTE), trademarked by American chemical company DuPont as Teflon—that transforms metal pans into non-stickware helps cut back the use of fats in cooking and makes cleaning-up easy. Both factors were hugely relevant to the US of the 1960s: Cooking and kitchen chores were regarded as a hindrance to women’s emancipation, even as people of both sexes embraced the American Heart Association advisory that reducing dietary fats lessened the chances of heart disease.

Forty-odd years would elapse, however, before anyone thought of investigating the constituents of PFTE. One of them was perfluorooctanoic acid, PFOA, which was found “likely to be carcinogenic" by a review panel of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 2005. The current official stand, though, is that nonstickware is safe—especially those that show no cracks or warping—since the suspect ingredient is PFOA, not PFTE.

View Full Image
Tagine from Earthita

“The volumes are small, but the growth is steady," says Bangalore-based John. Earthita, his brand, has two all-clay, glaze-free earthenware options: A casserole with a lid ( 600) and, interestingly, a tagine ( 800), the North African cookware which, he is convinced, will work very well in Indian kitchens. Both are gas-hob-friendly and low-maintenance, following some essential pre-use seasoning.

Hobby chefs swear that once you get used to clay-pot cooking, you will never use anything else for stews and curries. I am a newbie at the art, but I’ve noticed that my Longpi pot—fashioned out of a mix of stone and clay, and hand-polished—asks for just a splash of fat, heats up evenly and retains that heat, and introduces a rare succulence even in industrially produced meats.

Much of the cookware diversification can be attributed to greater awareness about various cooking methods. Slow-cooking, for instance, finds favour not only among adherents of Carlo Petrini’s slow-food movement, but also with the home chef convinced that a leisurely simmer brings out the best in food. “I never use a pressure cooker, not even for dal," says Sandeep Sreedharan, 41, a management consultant with Nihilent Technologies, who is to be found in his Bandra, Mumbai, kitchen on most weekends. “A rapid boil, such as that produced in a pressure cooker, completely destroys the texture of dal. It is 10 times tastier when cooked slowly, till just the point when individual grains begin to disintegrate."

Sreedharan’s choice of cookware ranges from bronze and brass alloys to cast iron and Japanese-made clay pots. “For fish and seafood, I swear by my Tanyu pot. These are fired at extremely high temperatures, around 1,260 degrees Celsius, which helps heat conduction and retention and also makes it a breeze to clean."

Purists, however, insist that food-grade, lead-free glazing undermines the natural benefits of clay, including its porous nature (which allows moisture to circulate) and its alkaline quality, which neutralizes the acid content in foods—something we experience when we drink tea, a mildly acidic beverage, out of a kulhar. However, the uncertainty over the provenance of clay may not make unglazed, unbranded earthenware the safest bet for the kitchen.

Because all stovetop-friendly materials—like clay—leach into food once heated, it underlines the fact that the cookware is as much part of the dish as the food that cooks in it. “If someone tells me a recipe is not working, my first question always is, ‘What kind of pan did you use?’" says Sreedharan, who enjoys sharing his food experiments on his website Escabrahma.com.

If you want your pot to share the good stuff, the best bet would be cast iron of the kind synonymous with Le Creuset, or even your grandma’s well-loved ironware. The minimal quantities of iron released by good-quality iron cookware are actually beneficial for health, especially in India, where anaemia cuts across socio-economic divisions.

Besides, a seasoned iron pan can mimic the advantages of a non-stick pan, without any of the drawbacks. An all-cast iron pan also has the distinct advantage of being able to travel from the stove to the oven, thereby allowing a cook to sear a piece of meat and then put it in to roast without fear of losing the initial juices. On the flip side, ironware doesn’t handle acids very well, so it would be inadvisable to cook a tomato sauce, for instance, in such a pan.

For a less reactive surface, though, home cooks need look no further than thick-gauge steel, usually sold as professional cookware. Less heavy than a similarly sized cast-iron pan and far more tolerant to acids, it is also resistant to everyday kitchen abuse. However, steel is a poor conductor of heat, so pots and pans with a sandwiched layer of aluminium or copper would be more fuel-efficient.

It’s a good way to ensure you don’t bite off more than you can chew.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Heavy metal

Avoid materials that yield to high heat, and surfaces that show obvious signs of wear and tear.

uUncoated aluminium can succumb to high temperatures. Anodized aluminium is a much better bet.

u Copper is best used as a base coat for steel utensils, since it heats evenly.

uThe jury’s out on non-stick cookware, literally. If you can’t do without it, make sure there are no scratches or warping on the surface.

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Published: 30 Aug 2014, 12:20 AM IST
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