Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet

Details

A deep-sided skillet for anything that needs held heat: tikka, tawa pulao, a whole roast onion, cornbread. Five millimetres of iron in the base and four in the walls, sand cast in Bihar, cooking face machined smooth, two pour spouts and a cast helper loop so a full pan comes off the flame without drama. Cast iron has one serious integrity question and it is upstream of everything you can inspect: what went into the melt. Cookware iron poured from unsorted scrap can carry lead and antimony out of painted and plated feedstock, and a grey casting hides it completely. The second question is whether the stated thickness is real, and on a skillet you can settle that at home without cutting anything, because the geometry is simple. A 20 cm pan with a 5 mm base and 45 mm walls at 4 mm contains 1.13 kg of base and 0.81 kg of wall at 7.2 grams a cubic centimetre. That is 1.94 kg, and this pan weighs 1.9. The 26 cm works out at 1.91 plus 1.06, which is 2.97 kg of pan plus handles, and it weighs 3.2. Nothing here is rounded in our favour, and a pan that claims 5 mm and weighs 2.2 kg at 26 cm is claiming about 3 mm.

• Every melt spectro-tested before pouring, lead below 10 ppm and cadmium below 5 ppm
• Food-contact metal release measured on the finished, seasoned pan rather than on a bare coupon
• 5 mm base, 4 mm walls, 45 mm wall height, and the weights published so the arithmetic can be checked
• Cooking face machined to Ra 1.6 micrometres or better, so it works from the first week instead of the first year
• Seasoned in three passes of sunflower oil polymerised at 230 C, not sprayed at the packing table
• Long handle and helper loop both cast integral. No rivets, no welds, no bolts
• No enamel and no coating, so there is no upper oven temperature and nothing that can chip into food
• Cast iron cookware carries no ISI mark, because the cookware order covers stainless steel and aluminium utensils and not this. The reports below are the evidence, and there is nothing else pretending to be
• 1.9 kg at 20 cm and 3.2 kg at 26 cm is genuinely heavy, and the 26 cm needs two hands when full. That weight is the whole point and it cannot be had any other way
• It rusts if stored wet, and it is repaired by scrubbing and re-oiling rather than replaced
• Tomato and tamarind are fine in a settled pan. Do not simmer them for an hour in a pan you bought last week, because a young seasoning will strip and you will taste it