They started with wire

Three Snow began in Tsubame in June 1963 as a wire mesh works, and sixty years later that is still the heart of the company. Everything they are good at comes out of one skill: taking steel wire and turning it into a surface that holds food and lets water through.

It sounds like nothing until you have owned a bad strainer. The mesh has to be fine enough to catch what you are draining and open enough to drain fast. The bowl has to keep its shape when three pounds of hot pasta and boiling water land in it. The rim has to stay round. The feet have to stay on.

Doing that and very little else for six decades is why these cost more than the one at the supermarket, and why they tend to be the last strainer someone buys.

They moulded the welds out

Until about 2000 a stainless colander was built the obvious way: press a bowl, then weld on a base ring or a set of legs. The welds are where they die. Heat, detergent and a few hundred dishwasher cycles work away at the joint until a leg loosens or the ring cracks, and in the meantime the seam traps starch that no brush can reach.

The Three Snow rugged range is formed as a single piece of steel. No welded ring, no attached feet, no seam anywhere. Nothing works loose because there is no joint to work loose.

18-8, and what the number means

Steel only counts as stainless once it carries at least 10.5 per cent chromium, which is the point at which it grows the invisible passive layer that stops rust. 18-8 means eighteen per cent chromium and eight per cent nickel: well past that threshold, non magnetic, and untroubled by anything a kitchen can do to it hot or cold.

It earns its place here because a strainer spends its life wet. Boiling water, acid from tomatoes and citrus, salt, detergent, then a dishwasher. Cheaper stainless pits and stains under exactly that routine.

Three Snow make them in Japan and intend to keep doing so. Their own line is that these were born in Japan and raised in Japan, and they will go on being made there. When one finally does wear out, stainless is completely recyclable, so it goes back into the material stream rather than the bin.

What we carry

The rugged range comes in two shapes, and it is worth knowing which is which.

A strainer is the deep bowl with fine perforations across the whole surface. That is the one for rinsing rice, washing berries and salad greens, and draining anything small enough to fall through a colander.

A colander has larger holes, and comes in standard, shallow and deep profiles. This is the pasta and potato drainer.

Both run from 11cm, a little over four inches, up to 25cm at close to ten, which covers one portion through to a family pot. The shallow ones are the useful surprise: they sit flat in the sink and drain a full pot without tipping.

The mesh and fine mesh strainers at 15cm and 18cm are the finer end, for straining stock, rinsing quinoa, and sifting flour and icing sugar.

Then a handful of pieces that came over from the restaurant side of the business and turn out to be just as good at home: the Uchi-Tebo, a long handled basket for lifting noodles or blanched vegetables straight out of boiling water; the speed whisks; long tongs; a miso strainer set; a bar strainer and a tea infuser.