I ♥ Kuhn-Rikon

The most expensive piece of equipment in the CC's kitchen. The Rolls-Royce of pressure cookers which you may only pry away from the CC out of his "cold dead hands".

The Eightfold Way

A baking pan in the form of an octopus.

Nope, the CC can't make this kinda shit up! You better believe it.

Parade of the Terminally Useless

That's an "electric wine opener". Independent of what Wine Spectator might say, "never go full retard".

Gravity Nutcracker

Wonder if we can create a category for "less than useless". Enter the Gravity Nutcracker™.

With any instrument, there's only one interesting question. How does it behave in the limit case? As in, will it help me crack 100 walnuts or hinder the effort?

Given that this is German, the CC supposes we can classify it as a Hindenburg.

Oh, the humanity!

Rotate on this!

We haven't had a good rant in here in a while.


Enter the Rotato Express™. Another member of the "special" Pantheon of the Useless™.

Bowls

Possibly the most silly thing to write about on this blog but its summer which means silly, so here's a rave disguised as a rant. How's that for true inversion?

If you want to be a good chef, and the CC knows you do ("why else are you here?") buy lots of bowls.

Lots of glass bowls. Deep glass bowls. With rims.

Rims. Rims. Rims. Rims. Rims.

Did you miss it the first few times? Rims; glass bowls with rims.

You also need bowls of different sizes. Mostly for the mise-en-place (but that's obvious, right?)

The glass part is obvious. It's non-reactive, blah-blah-blah. All the chemists understand this , and so should you from your high-school chemistry beakers and pipettes and burettes, etc.

Rims. Now there's technical practice triumphs over theory.

The appreciation of the fine rim is subtle. It is in the the realm of the connoisseur not the amateur.

Let's enumerate the most obvious:

[1] covering with plastic wrap to store,
[2] filtration using stuff on top so you need a "grip" (e.g. food mill),
[3] cheese cloth cover tied with twine under the rim (porous but clean)

The list is endless. You will rue the day you refuse the rim.

The difference between a good and a great chef is whether they understand the need for a good rim.

Machine Madness

Nothing inspires the purchase of a gadget than the daunting task of having to do it by hand.

In a spirit of exuberant culinary madness the CC purchased a few pounds of cherries at the farmers' market.

The object? Cherry granita.

After pitting the first four cherries by hand, the CC went out and purchased a cherry-pitter.

The same thing happened a few years ago when the juice of 40 lemons beckoned. After the second lemon, it sank in really quickly what one was up against, and a juicer was purchased.

Reality has a rude tendency of intruding on culinary flights of fancy.

Cherry Granita

Ingredients

2 lb cherries (pitted)
1 tbsp sea salt
2 tbsp lime juice (read below)

Recipe

Blend the cherries in a blender. Pass through a fine sieve.

Add the salt, and the lime juice depending on the tartness of the cherries. You want the final mixture to be quite liquid, slightly salty, and on the tarter side.

Put it in the freezer. Every hour initially, break up the ice as it forms. After a while, you will need to break it up every half hour or so, and then every fifteen minutes. Takes about 6-7 odd hours in summer (which is when you want it anyway.)

Life Changers

Every once in a while you come across a kitchen tool that snakes its way from a mere twinkle of an idea in your consciousness ("someday must buy that") to being completely and utterly indispensable ("how did I live without that?")

There is a life before and after the instrument, and never the twain shall meet.

Rare, naturally.

Not every instrument can qualify for such exalted status.

Meet the box grater.

Just for the record, the wimpy little nebbishy bottom thing was tossed away into some dank corner of the recesses of the CC's cupboard. Who grates in such tiny quantities anyway?

Anyway, this teeny-tiny little thing, much beloved of Italian mammas, and Spanish mamacitas, and Turkish anne-s, and oh, just about all the mammas everywhere is truly a wondrous creature. (and a tiny salute to modernity too for the little rubber edges which prevent slippage when grating over a glass bowl.)

Hurrah for the box grater!

Chork-issimo!

It's not a spork, nor a knork; it's a chork!

Supposedly for Asian "Fusion" cuisine. Bah humbug!

Special-ized Equipment

A martini maker.

Now the CC has seen everything.

It's "special" alright, just like the Special Olympics!

A martini is not exactly hard to make as the recipe here points out. Of course, we've seen our share of silly ideas like here.

Kitchen Instruments (The List)

Promised before the CC went on vacation, here are:

"The Indefensibles"

Prep work

French chef's knife
trimmer
kitchen peeler
mortar & pestle
kitchen scissors

Pots & pans

stock pot
any ol' pot
skillet

Miscellaneous

coffee grinder
food mill
food processor
blender
measuring cup

Pre-serving instruments

cheese grater

Everything else is icing on the cake; there are tons of items that would be "useful" but they are not "necessary".

Kitchen Instruments

Well, the CC wasn't going to post after the holiday announcement but who the hell is the CC kidding?

A brief conversation with a friend, and a Buñuel Martini threw the CC into a full-blown reverie about kitchen instruments.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the CC has reveries about kitchen instruments.

The CC has noted that the Pareto principle (a.k.a. the 80-20 rule) applies to kitchen instruments as well.

There are a very small number of instruments that are absolutely indispensable. The rest one would manage somehow even if one didn't have them.

The CC will leave the list for a later date. Think of it as an "upcoming feature" on this blog.

Kitchen Instruments

On my vacation, the CC was asked if he was a "gadget freak" by the sister of the mother of the wife of this dear friend of mine.

"Absolutely not!", cried the CC in alarm, at the risk of being classified along with the Williams-Sonoma freaks!

"In that case," she retorted, "tell me what kitchen instruments you find indispensable."

So the CC hied himself on a mental walk around his kitchen (we were greedily gorging some lamb (cooked deliciously rare) laced with rosemary, and spanakopita on their familial farmhouse at the time.)

Blender, and food-processor

Big duh there!

Coffee grinder

The CC actually uses it to grind fresh spices (both roasted, and unroasted.) Even Indians don't understand good Indian cooking until you have it made with freshly ground spices. (If the CC had to pick just one instrument, this would win hands down!)

Pressure Cooker

Everything from beans to conch!

Juicer

The CC never knew how much he would miss it until he had one. Juice of forty limes? Not a problem!

Food mill

Ditto! Where have you been all my life?

Cheese plane grater

You don't understand until you own one. Trust the CC on this one.

Mortar and pestle

The CC is "old school". Some things cannot be improved upon.

Sure the CC would miss the stones in the oven, and the pizza peel, or the steamers, and the zesters but they are not indispensable. The above constitute "basic necessity", at least in the eyes of the CC.

So, gentle readers, are there things you find indispensable?

Instruments, fatties, and other musings

So every once in a while, the CC gets into the mood, and into the nude, and into the...

Hang on! That's not what I wanted to talk about.

Anyway, every once in a while the CC gets into the mood of possessing a kitchen instument that he needs, but since the CC is mortally afraid of becoming one of the Williams-Sonoma crowd, the CC shies away from mortal possession of true-and-tried tactical tools.

The CC happens to be just wrong!

Hail Italy!

We should never have doubted you (as far as food is concerned.) Your governments suck, and have sucked since WWII, but why doubt your food?

Anyway, back to the point.

The CC bought a cheese grater for a party.

The CC also bought some kick-ass parmigiano-reggiano to serve over the risotto.

The CC has been humbled, and acknowledges his need for instruments after understanding the true nature of a cheese grater.

The combination of cheese grater and authentic parmigiano-reggiano over fresh risotto is something to behold!

Here's how it works:

The risotto is served rather warm, the "parmesan" (pardon the Americanism) is shredded fresh with an instrument into such tiny threads that it falls over the rice, and instantly "cooks". The threads of cheese (and they are truly tiny) are so divine that the CC is shocked.

And for you fat-phobic fatties, true parmigiano-reggiano is a hard, skimmed cheese. You probably eat more ten times more fat in one of those crappy "fat-free" yogurts because the US FDA allows companies to advertise "zero" fat if it contains less than one gram of fat per serving.

Even a tablespoon of pure oil is "zero" fat if the CC defines 100,000 servings per tablespoon (get my drift, fatties?)

Consider this a plug for authentic parmigiano-reggiano (and only incidentally, a plug for a good cheese grater.)

Gott im Himmel!

Talk about German precision engineering!

What a waste of time and money.