Powdered glass fired onto pressed steel at 820 degrees
Dipped, dried and fired in Benoni. Every colour on this page came out of our own kiln this month.
See what we makeWhat frit actually is
Frit is powdered glass. We mill it, mix it with clay and water into a slip about the consistency of thin cream, and dip pressed steel blanks into it by hand — a ground coat, a rack to dry on, then a cover coat. The whole lot goes through the kiln at 820 degrees for nine minutes and comes out as glass, fused to the steel and not going anywhere.
Four of us do this in a shed off Kitchener Avenue in Benoni. Sipho presses and pickles the blanks, Marlize runs the dipping line, I mix the slip and load the kiln, and my mother still writes the invoices out by hand because she does not trust the computer. The recipe has not changed since my father registered the name in 1979, and it is not going to.
A chip is not a fault
Enamel is glass, and glass chips. Drop a plate on a concrete floor and you will take a piece out of the rim, with a dark spot of steel showing where the two coats used to be. That is not a defect, it is not going to spread, and it is not coming back to us. Dry it properly, keep it out of a bucket of standing water, and it will sit in your cupboard for thirty years looking exactly like that.
What it will not do is scratch off, stain, hold the smell of last night’s fish, warp on a fire or leach anything into your food. It goes on gas, on coals, into a 250 degree oven and under a cold tap straight afterwards. Steel wool is fine on it. The only two things that will finish it are a microwave, because there is metal under the glass, and being left wet in a bag for a week.
Six things we have never stopped making
The whole point is that you can throw it in the back of a bakkie
Enamel is the only kitchenware that does not care whether it is on a stoep table, a gas ring in a caravan or a bed of coals at Sodwana. Nothing here needs looking after.
Shop the rangeEight enamel colours, mixed and fired here
