Looking after enamel: it is tougher than it looks, and simpler

Enamel is a skin of coloured glass fused to steel at 820 °C. That tells you almost everything about how to look after it. Glass does not stain, does not hold a smell and does not care what you cook in it. Steel rusts if you give it the chance. The care is the meeting of those two facts.

The five habits

• Let it cool before it meets water. A kettle straight off the flame, plunged into a cold sink, asks the glass and the steel to shrink at different rates. Over years that is how a chip starts. Give it a minute.
• Wooden or silicone tools inside. Metal on enamel will not scratch the colour off — it is glass, it is harder than your spoon — but a hard knock on a rim can chip it. Soft tools, soft habits.
• Dishwasher is fine; drying is better. Every piece we make is dishwasher safe. But enamel dries in seconds if you wipe it, and a dry piece never rusts at a chip.
• A soak beats a scrub. Burnt-on anything lifts off glass with ten minutes of warm water. You almost never need to scour, and you never need anything abrasive.
• Store it dry, not stacked wet. Two damp mugs nested overnight trap water at the rim. Nest them dry and they will outlive the shelf.

The one thing never to do

Do not use a chipped piece on an induction hob or over a flame with the chip in the heat. The exposed steel will rust, and worse, the temperature difference across the chip will grow it. A chipped mug is a fine pen pot for the rest of its life. A chipped kettle is done — send it back and we will tell you honestly whether it can be re-fired.

Why a chip is honest

Plastic hides its age; it goes cloudy and brittle and you throw it out without ever seeing why. Enamel chips, and when it does it shows you the steel — a grey eye in the colour. It is not pretty, but it is honest, and it is repairable in a way almost nothing else in your kitchen is. That is the trade you make when you buy glass fired onto metal instead of a coat of paint.