Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Tawa

Details

A one-piece grey cast iron tawa, sand cast in Bihar and then machined across the cooking face so a roti slides instead of catching in the casting texture. Four millimetres of iron at the centre, 1.65 kg at 25 cm rising to 2.60 kg at 30 cm, which is the mass that carries a stack of phulkas without the pan going cold between them. The cheat in Indian cast iron is not the shape and it is not the seasoning. It is the charge. A foundry melting unsorted scrap gets its iron cheap, and painted, plated and bearing scrap brings lead, antimony and arsenic in with it, none of which announces itself in a grey casting and none of which you can see, smell or wash off. So the number that matters on a tawa is not the thickness printed on the box, it is what came out of the spectrometer before the metal was poured. The second cheat is the phrase pre-seasoned meaning a wipe of oil at the packing table: real seasoning is oil polymerised onto the iron at 230 C and it will not come off on a paper towel, while a sprayed one is gone in the first wash and you are then told you maintained it wrong. The third is thickness, a 3 mm tawa sold as 4 mm, which the weight gives away every time, because iron is 7.2 grams per cubic centimetre and the arithmetic does not negotiate.

• Charge is pig iron plus foundry returns of known provenance, and every melt is spectro-tested before it is poured
• Lead below 10 ppm and cadmium below 5 ppm in the metal, with food-contact release then measured on the finished pan rather than on a test coupon
• Grey cast iron at about 3.4 percent carbon and 2.2 percent silicon, the composition that makes iron pourable and machinable instead of brittle
• 4 mm at the centre, and the weight of each size is published so a kitchen scale can check the claim
• Cooking face machined to Ra 1.6 micrometres or better, then seasoned in three passes of sunflower oil polymerised at 230 C
• Handle cast integral with the body: no rivet, no weld, no bolt that can work loose
• No enamel, no non-stick, no coating of any kind. The black is polymerised oil and nothing else
• There is no ISI mark to look for on a tawa. The cookware order covers stainless steel and aluminium utensils and cast iron cookware is not in it, so the two reports below are the whole of the evidence
• It will rust if you put it away wet. That is not a defect, it is what bare iron does. Scrub it back to grey, dry it on the flame, oil it warm and it is new again
• It is heavy and it takes four to five minutes to come up to heat. A thin pressed tawa does neither, and also cannot hold a temperature through six rotis
• A new pan is not non-stick. It gets there over a few weeks of use and it keeps improving after that, which is the opposite of how a coating behaves