Instruction Manual

A “dream frying pan” that keeps the best parts of iron frying pans while keeping rust away and maintenance easy.

Made in Japan

Dream Iron Frying Pan

Kiwame uses special heat-treated metal to create the ultimate frying pan series.
Special Heat Treatment: By formulating layers of iron nitride and iron oxide on the frying pan’s surface, it makes it highly resistant to rust and incredibly strong and durable.

Kiwame’s Features

*About Uneven Surface Coloring

Using Your Kiwame Frying Pan Before first use... “Oil Acclimatization”

KIWAME Frying Pans do not feature an anti-rust coating because they are already extremely rust-resistant. First, please carefully wash the inside and outside of the frying pan with a neutral detergent, and rinse well. Once you have finished acclimatizing the frying pan to oil, you can use it immediately. Also, there is no need to season (pre-burn) the frying pan before acclimatizing it to oil.

Before anything else, please take care to acclimatize your Kiwame frying pan to oil.

1. Pour in enough oil to fill up about 1/3 of your frying pan’s capacity and heat it on low for about 5 minutes.
2. Turn off the heat and return it to its oil pot or other suitable container.
3. Use paper towels to spread the oil that remains in the pan fully around its inner surface.

Before every use... “Oil Return”

Professional and skilled amateur chefs always conduct “oil returns” on their frying pans before using them. Oil returns helps ensure your cooking will not be burnt and come out delicious.

1. Warm up your frying pan on medium heat.
2. Add a sufficient amount of oil (about a ladle’s worth) of oil to the frying pan and let it acclimatize to the frying pan’s surface.
3. Once the oil has heated up and sufficiently acclimatized to the frying pan’s surface, return it to its oil pot. This is the process known as “oil return”. Once this is done, add the appropriate amount of oil for the dish you will be using your frying pan to prepare and begin cooking.

*The goal is to unify the entire frying pan’s surface temperature and get the surface to fully acclimatize to oil. Doing this lets you use your frying pan to its fullest.

When Finished

Iron pots and pans are not storage containers. When finished cooking, please move any leftovers to an appropriate container.

1. Use a scrub brush or bamboo whisk while the frying pan is still hot to wash it with hot water. (Please do not wash it in a dishwasher.)
2. When done, rinse it off and wipe it dry before putting it away.

Post-Stewing, Steaming, and Boiling Maintenance

When using your frying pan for stewing, steaming, or boiling, the hot water used may remove parts of the pan’s acclimatized oil membrane. To avoid this, please wash and dry the pan thoroughly after use and be sure to lightly reapply oil afterwards.

Caring for Your Frying Pan

If you burn what you’re cooking...

Adding hot water and bring it to a boil will soften the burned food and make it easier to remove. Then use a scrub brush or bamboo whisk to remove any final remnants.

If your frying pan becomes stained...

1. Set a burner on your gas stove to maximum heat, then use it to try and burn the stains off the frying pan directly, until they stop producing smoke.
2. Once the frying pan cools down, use a metal scrub brush or metal spatula to scrape away the stains from both sides of the frying pan.
3. After polishing the entire frying pan with a hard nylon scrub brush or metal scrub brush and cleaner, rinse it with water, then wipe it dry. Next, heat the empty frying pan on medium for about 5 minutes, then when it cools down repeat steps 1, 2, and 3 for oil acclimatization.

What is the key point to creating delicious broiled, stir-fried, and deep-fried foods?

The answer is proper cooking temperature.

Even if you buy great ingredients and properly prepare them, if you don’t get the cooking temperature right, especially if you accidentally make it too high, then all your effort will be wasted. There are no do-overs. Here are the three main reasons why cooking temperature is so important.

1. Sugar.

Whether it’s natural sugar found in ingredients or sugar added for recipes, once sugar is heated to about 170-180°C it starts to smell amazingly good. We call this caramelizing sugar.

2. Oil.

As oil is heated, it begins to release a unique, crisp scent upon reaching temperatures similar to sugar.

3. Protein and sugar, and amino acids and sugar.

When both of these are present and heated together, a chemical reaction occurs that permeates an immensely mouth-watering aroma throughout the house. The source of this aroma is a substance called melanoidin.

All three of these things occur at approximately the same cooking temperature. Whether all three are present or not depends on the ingredients and seasonings being used, but all three of these are the key to making great broiled, stir-fried, and deep-fried dishes. We often use the phrase “golden-brown” to describe the ideal surface color when cooking broiled or deep-fried foods, and in fact it is the above 3 points that come together to make that golden- brown color.

170–180°C.

This is the temperature we would like you to master. If you’ve seen any cooking shows perhaps you’ve heard them say something along the lines of “Heat the frying pan until the oil starts to smoke”,

if your oil is smoking, it means your temperature is far too high.

When your oil is releasing lots of smoke, it means that it’s quickly being damaged. When that happens, your food will not only be less healthy, it won’t taste as good either. Be sure not to let your frying pan and oil get too hot.

Lately, there has been a trend towards cooking temperatures that are too high.

It seems that many households tend to set their cooking temperatures for broiling and stir-frying too high, especially in homes that use fluorine resin-coated frying pans.

Normally, fluorine resin won’t melt until approximately 260°C; however, there are many people who replace their frying pans after 2–3 months because the fluorine resin-coating on their old ones melted. We believe this indicates that these people are regularly cooking their food at temperatures of 260°C or higher, rather than the proper limit of 180°C.

Not only does this result in unhealthier food, it makes it taste worse too.So why does this happen? The answer seems to lie in fluorine resin’s thermal conductivity. Fluorine resin’s thermal conductivity is 1/217th that of iron. They are clearly so far apart as to be incomparable. Since the resin is applied to the frying pans in a very thin, membrane-like layer, some heat does manage to get through, but clearly it isn’t sufficient. As a result, not enough heat gets conducted into the food, so they naturally end up turning up the stove’s heat. It is another example of each tool having its own time and place. The fundamentals of all cooking are “Proper ingredients, proper tools, proper cooking”. We hope that you and the rest of your family will get to enjoy wonderful food.

Cautionary Notes on Using Kiwame with Electromagnetic Cookers

Gas stoves produce flames that envelop the frying pan to heat it up, including the sides. In contrast, electromagnetic cookers only heat the frying pan’s bottom surface where it comes into contact with the top plate, and even then it doesn’t heat the entire bottom surface, but instead heats it in a donut-ring shape. Naturally this means that the part of the frying pan in the donut-ring area is heated directly, and the part that isn’t is not, which sometimes results in the frying pan’s bottom surface warping (usually by causing the frying pan’s outer surface to swell) over time due to heat expansion.

Using It Well

First, set the cooker to weak heat and let it heat up for a while, then set it to medium heat and slowly start to turn it up. Once it reaches the right temperature, you can then begin cooking. By using your frying pan with your electromagnetic cooker this way, you can help keep your frying pan’s bottom surface from warping as much.

What if my frying pan’s bottom surface does get warped?

If your frying pan’s bottom surface becomes warped, oil will start to build up in the indentations. In addition, your frying pan will start to wobble and shake instead of laying flat and steady on your electromagnetic cooker. However, you will still be able to use it for cooking in almost exactly the same way as you were before, so please feel free to continue using it.

*Unfortunately, it is not possible to make a warped frying pan’s bottom surface flat again.

On Loose Handles

The wooden handle on your frying pan may come loose and start to rattle over time. If it does, you can use a screwdriver or other firm object to tighten the handle’s bolt by turning it clockwise until the handle no longer rattles.

Handles can be exchanged

If your handle gets burnt, breaks, or won’t stop rattling, you can have it and its bolt exchanged for a nominal cost. Please inquire about replacement parts at participating retailers.

There may be times when the ingredients you cook turn blackish.

When cooking thin burdock root strips or making stir-fried lotus root with iron cooking tools, they may end up looking blacker than they do when made with aluminum etc. pots. This is because foods like burdock root, lotus root, udo, and eggplant absorb a lot of iron. Rest assured that this blackish color has no effect on taste, nor does it pose any sort of harm by being consumed.

But please be aware that if these ingredients are left in your frying pan for a long time, they may absorb too much iron and start to release an unpleasant iron-y smell.

Sometimes your frying pan may change color during use.

If you use your frying pan to make tomato sauce, fruit jam, or other dishes that involve boiling sour ingredients for long periods of time, your frying pan’s surface may change to a more white-ish color.

When finished cooking, the food will contain a lot of iron. Rest assured that consuming it has no ill effects on your body.

Even circumstances like this have almost no effect on the heat treatment-produced iron nitride. Simply reheat your frying pan and its regular oxidized layer surface color should reappear. Although this is a different shade than the initial black-ish color, acclimatizing your frying pan to oil produces the same effect. Even if your frying pan changes color, please rest assured that it is perfectly safe to continue to use it.

As you continue to cook with oil, the inner surface will gradually return to its original condition.

Dear customers: “regarding the quality of our Kiwame frying pan”

1. “A utensil that allows you to cook exquisite food with ease” is without doubt the most important requirement for a cooking utensil.

2. In order to fulfil this requirement, the two most important qualities for our steel-plated frying pans are, “resistance to rust” and “ease of oil absorption”.

At Riverlight, we believe that our number one priority and duty is to pursue and successfully implement these qualities, more so than anyone else, to create the perfect utensil.

The utmost effort has been put in to meet the above requirements in the Kiwame frying pan you now hold in your hands. As a result, we have created a cooking utensil you can truly be satisfied with.

※Due to our efforts in Kiwame frying pan the above qualities, there may be slight uneven colouring on the surface of the frying pan. This has absolutely no effect on the use or function of the frying pan so please use it with peace of mind.

Quality Label

Pan Materials: Cold Rolled Steel

Plate Bottom Thickness:

• Plate Thickness 1.6mm (applies to all products except those listed below)
• Plate Thickness 1.2mm Asian Pot
• Plate Thickness 2.0mm Large Tamago Yaki, Frying Pan 28cm，Sauté Pan 24cm, 26cm, Crêpe Pan 26cm
• Plate Thickness 3.0 Tempura Pot S (20cm), M (24cm)
• Plate Thickness 3.2mm

Tempura Pot L (28cm), Sukiyaki Pot， Thick-Plate Frying Pan 24cm, 26cm, 28 cm

Handle Materials:

Kiwame Series... Wood (Urethane Coating)

Kiwame PREMIUM Series...Wood (Uncoated) Kiwame / Kiwame Japan Series

“Tempura Pot, Sukiyaki Pot, Two-Handed Wok”, Peking Pot, Steak Pan Sub-Handles Common...Made from iron

Official Site
https://www.riverlight.co.jp/

Thank you for your purchase.
Please store this instruction manual somewhere safe in order to keep happily using your new frying pan for many years to come.

Riverlight Co., Inc.

261 Kawarago, Shiroi, Chiba 270-1403