Stainless Steel Dinner Set

Details

The thali set that gets used every day rather than kept for guests: deep-drawn SS 304, 0.8 mm on the thali and 0.7 on the rest, mirror polished bare metal with nothing plated over it. Stainless steel with no number after it is the defining cheat in this whole department, and it is a legal one. BIS runs two raw-material standards for utensil steel side by side: IS 5522, which covers the austenitic grades including 304, and IS 15997, which covers six low-nickel austenitic grades carrying 0.2 to 6 percent nickel where 304 carries 8 to 10.5, with manganese raised to make up the difference. Both are legitimate, both can end up under an ISI mark on the finished article, and both reach you described as stainless steel. The low-nickel ones dull, stain and pit after a year of salt and tamarind. A magnet will not separate them, because both are austenitic and both are nearly non-magnetic, so the magnet test that everyone repeats does not answer this question at all. An alloy check does, and ours runs on finished pieces. Tableware is where this bites twice, because the cutlery is bought separately from the holloware and is graded separately too. Spoons that come with a steel set are routinely 18/0, which is ferritic 430 with no nickel at all: it is cheap, it stains, it dulls, and it is sold inside the same box as stainless steel. On cutlery the magnet does work, because 430 is strongly magnetic and SS 304 is not, and so is the other tableware cheat, a nickel-chrome plated mild steel thali that looks like a mirror for a year and then lifts in flakes into the dal. Carry a fridge magnet. Nothing in this set should stick to it.

• SS 304 on every piece including both spoons, alloy-checked on finished pieces
• Nothing plated. No chrome, no nickel flash, no lacquer, no printed pattern and no decal to wear through
• Magnet check: nothing here should stick. Plated mild steel and 18/0 cutlery both will
• Alloy check for the rest, because a magnet cannot separate 304 from a low-nickel IS 15997 grade
• 0.8 mm thali with a raised rim that actually holds dal in place, 0.7 mm on the katori, plate and glass, 2.0 mm cutlery stock
• Single-piece drawn bodies. No seams, no glue, no welded rims
• Rolled edges everywhere, safe for a child to carry to the table
• ISI marked to IS 14756, the stainless steel utensils standard
• Weights published and they add up: a setting is 1.05 kg, being 447 g of thali, 226 g of katori, 140 g of plate, 122 g of glass and 75 g of cutlery
• Open stock, so a lost katori is a katori and not a new set
• Steel does not hold heat, so a roti goes cold on it faster than on stoneware, and it is noisy against a hard table
• In hard water it spots if you let it drip dry. That is the water and not the steel, and bicarbonate paste takes off the grey cutlery marks