Hi from Harry and Fiona at PodMarket.

What a great gift for the foodie you love – or treat yourself.

We are about good design – useful things, furniture, buildings and life!  Our Limited Edition Gift Pack is available only for a few days in October – expires 30 October at midnight!

Here’s what you’ll open up in your PodMarket Christmas Frypan pack.

Ingredients

• One black iron chef’s frypan 10 inch made in Australia
• One custom made original PodMarket-designed removable blackwood handle made in Australia
• One spare leather handle (for other pots and pans too) from recycled leather offcuts – made in Australia
• One 200mm bottle of Organic Flaxseed Oil – made in Australia
• One pure linen PodMarket teatowel – made in Europe, printed in Australia
• Packed with love in an unbleached cardboard box, made in Australia

We love all our fabulous local makers, by the way, who have put up with us during all our prototype work.  We’re so happy with the finished product!

For a little overview, watch Fiona doing an infomercial on youtube.

Here’s a little more about the frypan

Our PodMarket chef’s frypan is made in Australia by a small company which has been going for decades and supplies chefs in the best restaurants. You can’t get this frypan just anywhere.We have roadtested many black iron frypans including expensive retail products and they just don’t cut it in our view. The others we tested suffer from one or more the following problems: uneven heat, too thin, too heavy, and hard to season.

This carbon steel frypan is the perfect weight – not thin, and not too heavy, just right! The metal used in the pan is great. (Did you know that steel comes in all sorts of combinations?)

The PodMarket frypan heat distribution is nicely even, and it heats up really fast.
Each frypan is made by hand in a process called “metal spinning”, with a resultant organic feel and shape.

No nasty chemicals or residues come out of a traditional black steel frypan. It’s non toxic.  It will likely outlast you. That’s one reason why we love it. We believe that sustainability is about durability. Not replacing things because they wear out or the coating comes off. Quality through and through.

For those who are concerned about sustainability – including in buildings (which we also design, by the way), steel is crucial in certain applications, and is our friend. Which is why we use it in Superpod passive house buildings.

While we adore timber, and have a fantastic timber handle, the frypan must be steel.

Oh yes, and the steel means that induction cooktops are fine!

This little beauty is sustainable, durable, and well designed.  Like everything we do at Podmarket and Superpod.

Here’s a little more about the handles

Once you have seasoned your pan, we expect that you will mostly use it for frying. Of course.
And maybe occasionally you will pop something under the griller to finish it off.
So you’ll be using the handle, and it will get hot.

(By the way, steel conducts heat really well. It’s called a thermal bridge when you use it in buildings. That’s why we make sure to insulate our buildings and avoid steel handles going through the walls. For more about this see our PodMarket ebook No spoons in the walls.)

But I digress. You need to insulate your hand from the steel handle, so we have provided you with a beautiful Tasmanian blackwood timber handle, with an original pivoting design from Harry at PodMarket.
What’s so original about this handle? It’s inspired by the old cabinet maker’s tool, the sliding bevel. Here’s Harry explaining his inspiration from the sliding bevel.

The point being, you want one piece of timber for this handle, to slip over the steel. We thought two separate pieces of timber was a bit clunky.

But at the same time, you might want to use the hole in the end of the handle to hang up the pan. Just loosen the wingnut and rotate the handle to the side, and hang up your pan!

We even paid special attention to the bolted connection. Hand made in Melbourne.  How lovely a detail.

And just for good measure, we got our Melbourne leather worker, who does a fantastic job of all sorts of things from automobiles to shoes, to use some of his leather offcuts and make you a spare recycled leather handle.

Instead of it going into landfill. How’s that for sustainable? The spare can be used on your PodMarket frypan or any other pot or pan you’d like. Goodbye oven mitt!

Method of seasoning frypan

To explain seasoning frypans, we managed to get Harry in front of the camera.  Check out a video on the correct method for seasoning carbon steel frypans by Harry here.

1. First, put on the oven to as hot as it will go (at least 250 degrees celcius).
2. Second, give the pan a good wash with detergent and hot water. Thoroughly rinse and dry.
3. Third, with a paper towel, apply a thin layer of flaxseed oil all around the pan top and bottom, including the handles.
4. Fourth, wipe off all the oil so that there’s just a tiny tiny thin layer of oil left.
5. Fifth, put the pan in the oven for 1 hour, and turn the oven off, leaving the pan in there to gently bake while the oven cools down.

With this method you won’t burn the pan.

Don’t rush, this will teach you patience if you need it! Here’s the thing, you repeat steps 3 to 5 again, and again, and again. At least 3 times. Preferably more.

Start using the pan, and the more you use it, the less it will stick to the food. Each time you use it, just give a quick brush (not with a metal brush), wash and clean and dry quickly, so that you leave the coating intact.

And reapply the flaxseed oil whenever you like.  This is the traditional way to cook.  Not with toxic layers that come off in your food.  But with healthy flaxseed oil on steel.

But there’s a nice explanation of all this by Harry in the video.

Here’s a little about the Flaxseed oil

We hunted around to find an Australian Organic cold Pressed Virgin Flaxseed oil. Nice, huh? I love the label.

There are many uses of flaxseed oil which I’m sure you can research.

We have two uses for you.

The most important is seasoning your pan.  As described above.  But you can also rub a little on the timber handle!

Of course, don’t put the wooden handle back on until all this seasoning is done.

Lastly, here’s a little about the PodMarket pure linen teatowel

To accompany our PodMarket chef’s frypan we supply a pure linen teatowel in a pale natural slubbed texture – think of the colour as Oatmeal.

My mother always taught me that natural materials are the best.

As expected, by and large she is right.

And when it comes to teatowels, she also taught me that linen is the best. Why? Well, one reason is that you don’t get fluff on the dishes. The other reason is the way it absorbs the water. Cheaper teatowels, even cotton teatowels, can tend to push the water around the plate, rather than actually drying the plate.

Finally, linen teatowels last for years, and even decades. Longevity in something that’s used daily is really quite something.

How can a fabric be so strong and so absorbant? Nature knows best.

So I’m always hunting for pure linen teatowels. They are durable, sustainable, beautiful, and a joy to use and look at.

Just like everything we design at PodMarket and Superpod.

And that’s why we include one in our gift pack.

We pride ourselves on our transparency and honesty, so we’d like to explain our delivery options in this same manner. Find out more about our delivery options.

Delivery method: Promotion flat rate
Lead time: Approximately 6 weeks.