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On The Insider:
Andy Dick ARRESTED
The Ten
What the Pros Use
Home-chef kitchen tools for under $10
By Nick Czap
When you think about outfitting your kitchen with professional tools, you might imagine a commercial-grade oven that spits out half a million BTUs or a $2,000 set of knives hand-forged by alpine elves. Ask chefs, and they’ll probably tell you that many of the tools they can’t do without are small and can be picked up for under $10 apiece.
1. Luminarc Stackable Bowls ($1.49 to $3.49 each). Mise en place is French for setting in place. It’s the practice of organizing everything you’ll need before you start cooking. Putting all of your prepped ingredients in bowls like these means you won’t be hunting around for the diced tomato while your garlic burns to a crisp. This technique will look familiar from TV cooking shows, but it’s used in restaurant kitchens as well.
2. Skimmer ($4.95). Ever tried to get a whole bunch of tortellini or dumplings out of a pot with a puny slotted spoon? A skimmer grabs a whole plateful in one go.
3. Pastry Brush ($8.30). If you buy it at a cooking store, it’s called a pastry brush. If you buy it at a hardware store, it’s called a paintbrush. Either way, choose one with natural bristles, such as boar—it will look nicer, and comes from a renewable resource. Use it for glazing pastries, slathering on barbecue sauce, and brushing phyllo dough with melted butter.
4. Commercial-Grade Stainless Steel Scouring Pads ($4.19 for 12). In restaurants, people who wash dishes don’t go Mickey Mousing around with sponges or nylon brushes. Pick up a few industrial-grade scouring pads—they’re big and abrasive, and they shift stuck-on food quicker than a regular sponge does.
5. Lemon Reamer ($4). For simplicity and efficiency, few kitchen tools come close to the hand-held lemon reamer. It’s small (for easy storage), simple to handle, and cleans up quickly. It also puts your lemon juice exactly where you want it with a twist of the wrist.
6. Clear Squeeze Bottles ($7.99 for 3). Tired of fiddling with the lids on a multitude of condiment bottles while you cook? Pour your vinegar, olive oil, or sauces into these transparent plastic squeeze bottles, line them all up in your mise en place, and be done with it. Need a dash of balsamic? Grab and squeeze. Bit more oil in the pan? Squirt. And it doesn’t hurt to label the bottles either; masking tape will do fine. No one wants a stir-fry full of balsamic vinegar instead of soy sauce.
7. Dough Scraper ($8.95). Dried-up goop does not relinquish itself willingly from your kitchen table. Enter the dough scraper: a flat, rigid steel blade mated to a rugged, ergonomic handle. Not only does it divide dough, it also makes cleanup supereasy. It’s kind of like those window scrapers that remove snow and gunk from a car, except it does the same on your counter.
8. Thermohauser Pastry Bag ($3.09) and Ateco Pastry Tube ($2.25). You can use a pastry bag and a tube to ice a cake, but you can also use these to quickly squeeze perfect blobs of cookie dough onto a baking sheet, top bruschetta with tapenade, and lay down dabs of ravioli filling in record time.
9. Taylor Classic Instant-Read Digital Pocket Thermometer ($4.97). Instead of cutting into your steak and letting all the juices run out, use a meat thermometer. You’ll end up with a properly cooked, juicy steak.
10. Dredge Shaker ($2.95). It sounds like something you might use for digging a canal, but a dredge (essentially an oversized salt shaker) comes in handy for dusting confections with powdered sugar, making cinnamon toast, or storing your custom spice mixes and rubs.
CHOW’s The Ten column appears every Tuesday.
Nick Czap lives in San Francisco and writes for a number of publications, including Men’s Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle. He has also worked in several restaurants, most recently at Cena Luna in Healdsburg, California.
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I will love this post even more if you can suggest a good knife for less than $10
Not gonna happen
good knife=good amount of cash out of pocket
A good knife for less than ten bucks is the Forschner Fibrox paring knife, at only 5 or 6 bucks. Granted, it's a 4 inch knife, but what do you expect for the price? Its big brother chefs knife is terrific, and at 30 dollars is by far the biggest bang for the buck in cutlery. Half the kitchen where I work uses them.
Don't think I've ever seen Jacques use a lemon reamer. He always uses his hands and strains the seeds with his fingers.
Those scouring pads are the balls, but they're murder on wet hands and nails, so you'd do well to invest in a pair of rubber dish gloves too. Those yellow Playtex numbers from the grocery store are cheap and provide plenty of protection.
kobetobiko: Hit up your local restaurant supply store for a $30 boning knife. It won't be from a brand you recognize, and will have a crappy-looking white plastic handle, but it'll be the sharpest dang knife you ever used.
My favorite knife in my roll at present is an antique boning knife that has been sharpened for decades into a sliver that would lay open rhinoceros hide. I paid 98 cents for it at a thrift store in Portland. I always go gingerly through the box-o-knives at the garage sale or secondhand store. I also would recommend a Wusthof Classic bird's beak, well made and versatile.
That comment about labelling your squeeze bottles reminded me of the time I poured soy sauce instead of dark maple syrup on my pancakes. Good thing there were plenty more!
Are those commercial scouring pads like steel wool? Because I have a little "steel wool handle" -- just a hand-hold with prongs that grip the steel wool pad that's very handy.
Victorinox Forschner 10 Inch Chefs Knife- Best chef's knife for an affordable ~25$
I got my knife for $11, and it works fine. I think a good knife is not based on price but on sharpness. You should be able to get a very cheap knife and maintain a sharp edge. I don't like European style sharpening since it tends to dull out quickly. Asian style sharpening seem to be better in my mind, since the whole blade is sharpened instead of the tip. The difference seems to be angle. A more shallow angle for Asian knifes.
A good knife doesn't need to be costly especially since expensive knives tend to be really heavy.
Anyways, unitaskers galore here. I find a fork works just as well as a lemon reamer. Also, seriously chow? are you recommending those annoying bristles on the pastry brush just because it's "renewable" whatever that means. A silicon works much better since you won't get bristles in your food and it is much easier to clean. Also, silicon is an abundant element.
Trry a Russell-Dexter white plastic handle chef knife. The Blade is carbon/stainless, they are razor sharp and can be had at any of the retaurant supply shops in lower east side/bowery. The one we bought is every bit as good as our 12 year old Henkel and sharpens better due to higher carbon content. About $12
With the possible exception of the lemon reamer, I dont see any of these as unitaskers (unless you count, eg, bowls as only being able to hold things). And a lemon reamer performs one very common task well.
I thought this was an interesting list and a good feature, the kind I'd like to see more of here. Although a lot of us probably have most of these already.
A pastry brush is more expensive because it's more sanitary than a paintbrush.
A hardware store paintbrush has an empty cavity encased in the metal band that bridges the end of the handle and the base of the bristles. This cavity, one the brush is cleaned, is like a big, dark, wet bacteria party.
Well-made pastry brushes don't have the same cavity, and therefore are not as hospitable to bacteria. If you insist on using brushes that are not food-grade, throw them away after several uses.
Pastry bags are a waste of money. Just cut a corner off a Ziploc, and throw it out when you're done.
Mordacity, I agree completely. Although it does waste palstic, it is so far cheaper. heck, you can wash out ziplocks several times, too.
Lemon reaming and similar duties are happily performed with that famous inexpensive multitasker; the wooden spoon! (Thank you unnamed Thai cooking show!)
Bittman did a similar article on nytimes available here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/din...
He recommends the Dexter-Russell 8" chefs knife with polycarbonate handle that you see regularly in every restaurant kitchen for about $15.
Doh! I thought that was an edit button, not a post button! Ignore the other 2 reposts with different wording :)
Ruth Lafler:
Those scouring pads are more like a metal version of a plastic shower "poof" if that helps. It's like matted/wound together curly steel strings for lack of a better visual.
They're great. I agree with the other poster that they destroy wet hands and nails, but they take baked-on grime off of a pan like nothing else.
monkeyerotica,
You're absolutely right - Jacques Pépin does juice lemons with his hands, as confirmed by the folks at KQED. Thanks for pointing that out to us. The story has been updated.
I believe the scouring thingies being referred to are bundles of thin strips of steel, rather than steel wool. At some restaurants during busy periods, they'll turn the pans upside down over the flame, then finish off cleaning with the scourers.
it's actually a very good list! the posts about the large stainless scourers' destroying peoples' fancy manicures are very funny to me. they do work wickedly well on pots-- it drives me nuts to spend 10 minutes picking at crust on a pot at dh's grandma's house when it would take 10 seconds at work!
jacques pepin also separates eggs by hand.
to the list i'd add xoni stainless portion scoops and clear cambro liquid measures, and of course, the irreplaceable wooden spoon, microplanes, and chinese restaurant cleavers.