CHENNAI: My fascination with cast iron cookware began with that BuzzFeed video that was just about everywhere all at once. Watching a cast-iron skillet being seasoned and used to cook some of the most pretty looking food I can only dream of making in my kitchen — baby carrots and cherry tomato roast, a full-bodied steak and scallops! — was strangely hypnotizing.
Depending on where you live and how long you’ve been cooking, this fascination might be termed a little too late in the making or a smidge ahead of the curve. However you put it, I seem to be just a speckin this wave of popularity that has surrounded the traditional cookware revival movement over the past few years.
Ask Meera Ramakrishnan, co-founder of Zishta, if they can vouch for this trend and she responds with an enthusiastic yes. “The minute somebody decides to shift to natural cookware from non-stick, the only thing they think of is iron and cast iron. It’s a good start,” she opines. There is plenty of demand for their cast iron kadai, skillets, aappa kal and tawa. Faiza AN of Earth and Ethics reports a similar interest. The fact that she offers her cast iron products with the initial seasoning works even well with her new customers, she points out.
Of traditions and taste
While this fascination might be new-found for many like me, cast iron associations go back to years of personal experience and generations of tradition for some men and women. Sanjeeta KK of OGMO Foods grew up in Rajasthan watching her mother cook in it. Married a Tamizh man, moved to Chennai and transitioned to the familiarity of her mother-in-law’s meals on cast iron. The mother-in-law herself had grown up watching her mother bring in the process.
It was on this inheritance that she started her cast iron journey and there’s been no turning back. Her earliest memories with it are that of broken down dosas. “I kept the tawa unused for months till I got confident and went back to it. Initially, it’s not a good experience. But then, the crispiness of the dosa is really different when you make it with cast iron. The taste also changes,” she shares.
For Apoorva Mohan, an ardent cook, cast iron came into her kitchen tales with the restoration of her grandmother’s tawa and kadai. “It was passed down from my maternal grandmother. We found them on her loft and decided to keep them in her memory. It was in a bad condition, having collected years of rust; so amma put it away, saying it would be too much work to clean and season it. Earlier last year, I was cleaning our kitchen and came across it again. Then, I decided to take up the project and get it done.”
Working off the basics she was already familiar with and poring over many a YouTube video and a bunch of blogs, it took her a good month to get them fully cleaned, seasoned and ready to use. The restoration journey, aesthetically documented on her Instagram page, found quite the following too. Now, they cook like a dream, she says. “They are just perfect. We get perfectly crispy dosais and nicely roasted veggies every time. Maintenance is also simple enough,” she reports.
Faiza assures that her cooking has improved drastically with the shift to cast iron. What more, she had the pleasure of teaching her mother to cook in it — from seasoning to maintenance. “For someone like me who had never ventured into cooking, non-stick was so appealing (in the early stages). I was very scared to switch to cast iron. It also came with my entrepreneurial journey and it just happened. Now, it’s completely different. I also restored my mother-in-law’s aappa kal which is older than her!” she recounts, adding that if she can do it, anyone can.
The iron criterion
All these journeys of transition were influenced by the many benefits cast iron had to offer. Be it greater heat retention or the enhanced taste. But, the chief among them is the iron content it adds to the food. “Anything you cook in, the vessel or the properties inside it will leech into the food. It happens with any metal. With iron and cast iron, you get ions of iron in the food,” explains Meera.
Maria Jenita, a food technician and teaching fellow at Anna Univesity, has the numbers to prove the significant increase in iron content in the food cooked on these utensils. “A few years ago, fish-shaped cast-iron ingots were used in curries to address the severe problem of anaemia in a community in Cambodia. The study (called The Lucky Iron FishProject) gave great results. But, we don’t have similar studies in India. So we tested it in our lab and found a significant difference between food cooked on iron/cast iron utensils and that from stainless steel and non-stick cookware.
For example, when we cooked tomato curry (half kilogram) in stainless steel and non-stick utensils, the iron content was much lower than it’s original amount of 4.5 mg. On cast iron, it increased to 5-6 mg. On beaten iron cookware, the iron content remained the same, the vessel only supplementing what gets degrading during the cooking process. These results will vary depending on what the vegetable or meat is, how you cook it and for how long,” she details.
The reason behind this is that cast iron products use molten iron, combining its different forms (ferrous, ferric, etc.). This molten iron is cast in sand. Regular iron products are iron sheets beaten to form. Both kinds of cookware have heme iron, which is well absorbed by the body. It is the same as in meat, fish and poultry food, which are often recommended to address anaemia; whereas the iron in plant-based foods are non-heme iron and need a precursor to be absorbed well, explains Maria.
Need-to-know basis
While this can be a significant advantage, too much of iron in the food can be toxic, they warn. That is why it is generally not advisable to cook citric or acidic foods in cast iron cookware; while you can saute tomatoes as long as your seasoning is good, you may not want to do any slow cooking with it. These foods tend to absorb more iron and consuming as much regularly can lead to health problems.
Meera advises that you don’t use cast iron for every dish and every meal; instead, you should mix and match a variety of materials like stoneware, earthenware and bronze and brass to make the best of them all. “For someone making the transition to natural cookware, the first we recommend is to change the tawa to iron and their kadai to cast iron. Except for idlis, it takes care of most of your breakfast and dinner,” she points out. Besides all this, there is reason to lookout for the quality of the products you buy, warns Meera.
For 90 per cent of the products in the market are stuff they usually reject, she adds. “At Zishta, all our products are tested for RoHS — Restriction of Hazardous Substances. We check for lead, cadmium, mercury and such. These are the contaminants and they can be harmful in excess This awareness is not there. We have rejected products from six places but these are the ones that are predominantly available in the market. People should ask if the quality check has been done, what was it tested for and where. The more people question it, the more it will change at the production level. This is something customers will have to push, companies like ours have to do and eventually, it will reflect at the start of the chain,” she suggests.
The BuzzFeed video had its host jokingly say that the cast iron is “like loving a good woman; the more you give, the more it gives back.” Well, that may have been in good humour but what she had to say just before sums it all up for the newbie enthusiast and the one still on the wall: “Cast iron skillets may seem like a lot of work but follow these simple rules of seasoning and cleaning, and these pans will last you a lifetime.” There are too many who will vouch for that!
Path to perfection