BANGALORE: If you want to do a massive kitchen detox, give away certain dishes to the utensil shop near your place in exchange for items you really want. All the non-stick ware can go because when the Teflon coating wears off, it starts leeching dangerous residue into our foods.
What’s the point of buying organic produce if you are going to cook it in stuff that is unstable?
There have been doubts voiced about aluminium and hindalium (derived from aluminium again), so I ran it past a doctor and then a celebrity nutritionist and both sources confirmed that over a prolonged period of use, aluminium is not advisable either.
Maybe, people need to go back to their grandmum’s old iron kadhais.
When the great detox began in my kitchen, these are the things that were trashed:
A ceramic coated aluminium skillet
A non-stick kadhai
A non-stick saucepan
A non-stick, hard anodised milk pan
A sandwich toaster with a non-stick coating
A non-stick dosa pan
Two hindalium kadhais
Here is what was retained:
An iron tawa
One anodised kadhai
One hard anodised tawa for making omelettes and pancakes. You may not wash the iron tawa often — at best, you can wipe it clean. Eggy things leave behind an odour so for eggs in particular, the hard anodised tawa will work.
A small cast iron kadhai
Copper glasses, brassware, a daal serving copper-lined bucket
A cast-iron tawa for rotis, chapatis, dosas and eggless crepes.
You can also invest in a few stainless steel saucepans and use them for pastas, noodles and risottos.
It will take a bit of time to redo one's cooking habits and get used to the fact that one must wipe all ironware clean and dry them over a flame after a wash (or they rust) and wipe the skillets clean with some oil.
One must get used to how foods cook and caramelise much faster. Once you detox your kitchen, it is hard to go back to anything toxic.
You will appreciate also the fact that using ironware to cook greens is advisable because it actually brings out the iron in the leaves.
Eating healthy finally is not just about what you are cooking but how you are cooking it.
Reema Prasanna blogs at http://about.me/reema.prasanna