Stainless Steel Pressure Cooker

Details

An inner-lid cooker with an SS 304 body at 0.9 mm and a 5 mm bonded base, 0.9 mm SS 304 inside, 3.2 mm aluminium, 0.9 mm SS 430 outside, so it spreads heat and sits on induction. Say plainly what that base is: it is a bonded sandwich under the bottom, not full-body cladding, and we are stating it because five millimetres of base is exactly the figure a disc-base pan uses to imply triply walls. On a cooker a base sandwich is the correct answer, because the walls never see a flame, and paying for cladding up the sides of a pressure vessel buys nothing. This is the one item on this shelf that can injure someone, so start with the regulator rather than with us. Domestic pressure cookers are covered by IS 2347:2017 and the ISI mark on them is mandatory under a Quality Control Order; selling an unmarked domestic cooker is an offence under the BIS Act 2016. The licence number is stamped on the body and you can look it up. The word stainless with no number after it is the defining cheat of Indian cookware, and it is not even a black-market one. BIS publishes two raw-material standards for utensil steel: 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 legal, both can carry an ISI mark on the finished utensil, and both are sold to you as stainless steel. The low-nickel ones pit, stain and go dull in a year of tamarind and salt. A magnet will not tell you which one you are holding, because they are both austenitic and both nearly non-magnetic; anyone who tells you the magnet test settles 304 against 202 is wrong. What settles it is an alloy check, and ours is run on the finished pan. The third thing the category obscures is the gasket. It is a consumable. It is the part that ends most cookers, because a hardened gasket stops sealing, the cook pushes the flame up to compensate, and the failure that follows is a failure of maintenance dressed up as a failure of the pot. So the gasket has an interval and a price, printed here, and so does every other wear part.

• ISI marked to IS 2347:2017, licence number stamped on the body, and the mark is mandatory rather than decorative
• SS 304 body and lid, verified by alloy check on finished cookers, not accepted on a mill certificate
• Three independent pressure reliefs: the weight valve at 100 kPa gauge, a spring safety valve above it, and the gasket release slot in the lid as the last resort
• 100 kPa gauge is 121 C of saturated steam, which is the number the cooking times are built on
• Gasket is food-grade silicone, replace at 18 months or 400 cooks, whichever comes first, Rs 180, stocked ten years
• Safety valve Rs 220, vent weight Rs 150, handle set Rs 340, all stocked ten years and all fitted with a screwdriver
• Cast SS 304 handles, riveted through, no plastic to crack at the rivet and nothing painted
• It is heavier and slower to heat than an aluminium cooker at a third the price. What you get for that is no pitting from tamarind or tomato, no metal leaching into the dal, and a pot that also works as a plain pot
• Store it with the lid inverted so the gasket is not sitting compressed for a week
• Do not fill past two thirds for grains or past half for dal and pulses. Every pressure incident we have read about starts there