[Sca-cooks] Queston on Basic utensils

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, bill mayfield wrote:

>
>     Mostly for Home Cookery and the always popular
>     Art/Sci entry.
>     And yes.........someday I may do a feast.
>
>     Thermometers.......good idea !!! Thank you
>    As far as pots go am I better off with Cast Iron
>     or the ubiquitous stainless ?
>    What about presses and peelers and graters etc etc ?
>
>    I know this may seem a bit much much ,however i would
>     rather ask then venture of on a hairbrained mission.
>
>     Aethelwulf
>
Hmmmm. I have, depending on the piece, stainless, aluminum, non-stick, and
cast-iron. My non-stick is Farberware Millenium, which is probably not
available anymore but makes the spouse and bf extremely happy--it is
almost impossible to scratch with metal utensils, and being non-stick,
things don't adhere to it with the tenacity that they adhere to the other
pots.

Shop thrift stores and garage sales. My second favorite piece of
cast-iron was from a garage sale. Look for the ones that are smooth on the
inside--you can get either rough cast or polished/ground, and I find that
I have better results with the polished. Cast iron has a learning curve,
because it holds heat longer than other cookware, but other than that it's
personal preference.

As for gadgets--like books, kitchen gadgets become things to collect, and
to collect dust. ;-) The things I would kill to protect (ok, not quite
that extreme, but you get the idea) are my Le Creuset spatulas, my knives,
my Kitchen-Aid mixer, and my cheese graters. For coarser grating, a
standard box grater is fine, but I bought myself some of the Microplane
graters last year and I love them. Nutmeg grating with no effort! Plus,
they clean beautifully. If you are the sort of person to melt the edge of
your rubber spatulas, try a Le Creuset. They have been destruction-tested
in deep-frying oil at frying temperature and came through unscathed.

I have found that a garlic press is one of those things that you either
use all the time or you use it a couple of times, get fed up with
cleaning the darned thing, throw it in the drawer to languish, and buy the
pre-minced garlic. ;-) If I am *not* pressed for time (intentional,
yes) then I prepare my garlic the way I saw on TV once--you put your
peeled clove on the cutting board, lay your chef's knife flat on it,
and give it a good whack. Then you mince what's left.

Multiple vegetable peelers are a godsend. It's always easier to find one
of five than it is to find one of one. I buy the cheap ones from Wally's
because a) that's the style I'm comfortable with, and b) the other person
who cooks in my kitchen destroys things at a frightening rate, including
vegetable peelers. If it were just me I'd have a nicer one, but at the
moment such is not to be.

You can never have too many wooden spoons.

I have never found that a food processor would make my life easier. In
my experience, it's just another thing to clean. When you don't have a
dishwasher, this is an important consideration. Other people seem to love
theirs, so, YMMV.

Definitely worth the investment are knives. There is no substitute for a
good knife. The only cheap knives I own at the moment are those 3 for $1
paring knives from Wally's (they are wonderful for pumpkin-carving) and my
eventing knives, and I use them as little as possible. I have particularly
small hands, and I had to test-drive all the major knife brands to find
the ones that were most comfortable.

Different cooking styles accumulate different gadgets--take a good
critical look at the things you find yourself doing, and then at the
gadgets you're lusting after, and evaluate whether that gadget is going to
do anything useful for you or not.


Margaret FitzWilliam