Aluminum Pot Turning Gray? It Is Not the Burnt Rice (The Filipino Way)

Your aluminum rice pot went gray after the baking soda, and the frying pan you scrubbed the same night came out shining. That is because the same box does two different things to two different metals, and the cure for the gray pot has been printed on a cookware maker's care sheet for years. THE THREE POTS: • THE SCORCHED STAINLESS PAN. Baking soda belongs here. Soak it 15 minutes in hot water, then a paste of baking soda and water for 5 to 10 minutes, then a soft sponge. Welded on? Sprinkle the soda in, add water, and bring the pan to a boil. No steel wool, no oven cleaner, nothing with bleach or peroxide. And let a burnt pan cool until you can hold your hand on it before any water goes in, or it warps. • THE BLACKENED ALUMINUM KALDERO. This is the pot baking soda turns gray. Aluminum keeps its shine with a thin skin of oxide that holds steady between pH 4.0 and 8.5, and alkali dissolves it, so that gray is not burnt rice at all. It is the metal itself. The fix comes from the acid end of the scale: 2 tablespoons of cream of tartar per quart of water, boiled in the pot 10 minutes, or tamarind pulp rubbed over the gray and rinsed off the moment it lifts. Pour the acid out and rinse right away, because Nordic Ware warns that acid left sitting on aluminum can pit it. Cream of tartar is scraped out of wine casks, and sampalok, the tamarind that goes into sinigang, carries ten times as much of that same acid as the grape. • THE SEASONED KAWALI. Neither powder. That black is seasoning, oil you built one coat at a time. 2 to 3 tablespoons of coarse kosher salt, a folded paper towel, a drop of oil. Rust is the one time you scrub past the seasoning: get the rust off, oil it, and season it again. Go look in your sink and tell me in the comments which of the three is sitting there, and what you tried on it last.