Speciality products
The speciality products that few manufacturers make
Most of our range is cookware anyone could buy somewhere. Four items are not, and they are the ones we are asked about most.
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The Journal
Why stainless steel behaves the way it does, how to get the most out of heavy-gauge cookware, and the development work that goes into the range. Written by the people who make it.
50 articles
Storing food
Why stainless steel is the best material for storing cooked food
Storage is where vessel choice quietly decides food safety, taste and shelf life — and it gets far less thought than cooking does.
Speciality products
The Parantha Tawa: why there is a spiral on the underside
A machined rib on the bottom of a 10 mm plate is an unusual thing to find on cookware. It is there for a measurable reason.
Choosing cookware
How to read a cookware size chart
Indian cookware sizes are not inches, not litres and not centimetres. Here is what the numbers actually mean.
Storing food
The passive layer: how stainless steel protects your food
A film a few atoms thick is the reason steel is safe to store food in. Here is how it works, and how to avoid damaging it.
Speciality products
Milk Kadai (Parchi): built for exactly one job
Thirteen sizes, one gauge, no options. A product designed around a single failure mode.
Care & longevity
How to clean stainless steel cookware without damaging it
Steel tolerates far more aggressive cleaning than most cookware. There are still three things worth not doing.
Research & development
How we choose a gauge — and why we do not cut it
The easiest way to reduce the cost of any vessel is to make it thinner. It is also the fastest way to ruin it.
Cooking in steel
Why stainless steel is the safest metal to cook Indian food in
Indian cooking is unusually hard on cookware. Tamarind, tomato, curd and long simmering all attack metal — and stainless steel is the one common material that shrugs it off.
Speciality products
Cook & Carry: the vessel that goes to the venue
A product that solves a logistics problem rather than a cooking one — which is why it is built differently.
Choosing cookware
Gauge guide: which thickness for which job
From 1 mm to 10 mm, every thickness in our range exists for a specific reason. This is the map.
Storing food
Storing dahi, pickles and tamarind: acidity and steel
The most acidic things in an Indian kitchen are exactly the things stored longest. Here is what that means for the container.
Speciality products
The Jalebi Kadai: shallow, wide, and exactly right
Everything about this vessel is the opposite of a deep-frying pan, and every one of those differences is deliberate.
Care & longevity
Removing burnt-on food from a heavy kadai
The instinct is to scrub harder. The method that actually works involves almost no scrubbing at all.
Research & development
Developing the jointless deep-drawn body
Removing the weld from a large vessel is obviously desirable. Doing it at 125 litres is a manufacturing problem.
Cooking in steel
What acidic food does to aluminium — and why steel does not react
Tamarind, tomato, curd and lemon are the backbone of Indian flavour. Here is what they do to the metal underneath them.
Choosing cookware
Sizing a patila for your kitchen output
Buy the vessel for the batch you actually cook, not the one you cooked once at a wedding.
Storing food
Plastic versus stainless steel for food storage in a commercial kitchen
Plastic is lighter and cheaper on day one. Over a year of real service the comparison looks quite different.
Care & longevity
What causes rainbow stains on steel — and how to remove them
Blue and gold patches on a pan look alarming. They are harmless, and they wipe off.
Research & development
Bonding copper to steel: the development story
Two metals that expand at different rates, joined, and then heated and cooled every day for years. The bond is the whole problem.
Cooking in steel
Heat, mass and gauge: why a 6 mm kadai cooks differently from a 3 mm one
The single number that changes how a pan behaves is its thickness. Here is the physics, and where each gauge belongs.
Choosing cookware
Round or square tawa: which to specify
Both are offered in the same sizes and the same 6 mm plate. The choice is about how your station is laid out.
Storing food
Cook and carry: keeping food safe between the kitchen and the venue
Catering food spends hours in transit. That journey is where most temperature control is lost.
Care & longevity
Hard water spots, and how to stop them coming back
The white film on a clean pan is not from the pan. It is what the water left behind.
Research & development
Getting an induction base truly flat
Induction is unforgiving of a base that is nearly flat. Holding flatness through heat is harder than achieving it cold.
Cooking in steel
Magnetic stainless steel and induction: what actually makes a pan work
Induction does not heat the hob. It heats the pan — and only if the pan is made of the right kind of steel.
Choosing cookware
Buying for a new hotel kitchen: a starter list
What to order first when you are equipping from nothing, and what can wait.
Storing food
Refrigerating in steel: temperature, condensation and hygiene
Steel cools food faster than plastic. That single fact has real food-safety consequences.
Care & longevity
Why you should never use steel wool on a mirror finish
Ordinary steel wool does two kinds of damage to stainless steel, and one of them looks like rust.
Research & development
Testing: how a new product earns its place in the range
We make thirteen product lines. Rather more than thirteen have been tried.
Cooking in steel
Why a copper base changes how a wide vessel cooks
Copper moves heat sideways roughly twenty times faster than steel. On a narrow pot that hardly matters. On a wide, shallow one it decides the dish.
Choosing cookware
Why weight is the most honest specification on the sheet
Finishes can flatter and claims can stretch. Weight is arithmetic.
Storing food
Storing dry goods — atta, dal and masala — in stainless steel
Dry storage is not the obvious case for steel, but for pest control and oil-heavy ingredients it is the right answer.
Care & longevity
Passivation: restoring stainless steel corrosion resistance
If a vessel has started spotting or staining, it can almost always be brought back. The process is simple and it is not a repair.
Cooking in steel
The science of a jointless body: where cookware actually fails
Commercial pots almost never fail in the middle of the metal. They fail at the joins — which is why we build without any.
Choosing cookware
Induction-ready: what to check before you buy
The label on the box is not the test. A magnet and a straight edge are.
Storing food
Why steel does not hold odours or stains the way plastic does
The difference is not cleaning technique. It is what happens at the surface of the material itself.
Care & longevity
Salt pitting: the one thing that will genuinely damage your steel
Stainless steel shrugs off acid, heat and abrasion. Chlorides are the exception, and the damage they do is permanent.
Cooking in steel
Cooking dum biryani at volume: what the vessel has to do
Dum is a sealed, undisturbed technique. That removes every tool the cook normally uses to correct an uneven pan.
Choosing cookware
Total cost of ownership: why cheap cookware is expensive
The purchase price is the smallest number in the calculation. Here is the rest of it.
Storing food
Food safety and the danger zone: how vessel choice affects holding time
The 5–60 °C window is where food becomes unsafe. Your cookware is part of how long you spend in it.
Care & longevity
How long should commercial cookware actually last?
A fair question with an uncomfortable answer: it depends far more on construction than on how carefully anyone treats it.
Cooking in steel
Milk, khoya and the problem of scorching
Milk sugars caramelise and stick at a temperature well below boiling. The only real defence is metal thick enough to have no hot spots.
Storing food
Steel for water storage: an Indian tradition with a reason behind it
Steel water vessels are in almost every Indian home. The habit long predates the explanation, but the explanation holds up.
Research & development
What we are working on next
An honest note on the problems we have not solved yet.
Cooking in steel
Deep frying at scale: oil temperature and thermal mass
Every failure in commercial frying traces back to the same thing — the oil temperature dropped and did not come back fast enough.
Cooking in steel
Why roti and paratha counters need heavy plate
A tawa that drops temperature every time dough hits it will never produce consistent bread. Mass is the whole answer.
Cooking in steel
No coating, no flaking: cooking without non-stick
Non-stick has a place. A commercial kitchen running eight hours a day is not it.
Cooking in steel
Searing, sticking and the myth that steel is hard to cook on
Cooks who move to steel from non-stick usually have the same complaint for about a week. Then it stops.
Have a question we have not answered?
If your kitchen has a problem with a vessel, tell us. Most of what is written here started as somebody’s specific complaint.