Category Archives: Cooking

Cooking hardware that makes a difference.

Slicing, cutting and grating in the kitchen

Cooking

The good, the bad and the ugly.

There are few meals whose preparation excludes cutting, slicing or grating.

Surveying the relevant tools in my kitchen there are some which are exceptional for these tasks, some which are mediocre and others which are downright dangerous. Here they are in no particular order.

Box grater:



Box grater.

Ergonomics: Awful. You have to bear down with one hand and exercise a death grip on the workpiece, which promptly leaves most of the sliced/grated results stuck to the inside of the box.

Danger: High. If it does not tip on you watch out for shredded knuckles.

Clean-up: Awful. You have to work a sponge on a wand inside to do a proper job, which still leaves food stuck in the inside corners.

Status: Recycled.

Cheese slicer:



Cheese slicer.

Ergonomics: Decent. Works well on both hard and soft cheeses. The rubber feet prevent slipping and the design is robust with the wire correctly centered. Comes with two spare wires. Does not get blunt with age.

Danger: Low. Just don’t place a finger where you are cutting.

Clean-up: Easy.

Status: In daily use.

Chef’s knife:



Chef’s knife.

Ergonomics: Poor. The most overrated kitchen tool, the one ‘expert’ cooks say is the most important. It’s poor at scooping. The balance is mediocre at best. More here. I have not used mine in over half a decade.

Danger: High. Your hands are too close to the cutting edge.

Clean-up: Easy.

Status: Unused. Have not the heart to throw it out as it’s a nice non-stainless Sabattier.

Cleaver:



Cleaver.

Ergonomics: Outstanding, if you get one that balances well in the hand. It pays to shop in person, not by mail order. Superior in every way to the chef’s knife. Superb at scooping. The weight and long handle confer tremendous cutting power, but don’t use it on hard beef bones as the metal is relatively soft. This tool allows you to safely cut up an onion in a few seconds.

Clean-up: Trivial.

Safety: Good. Your fingers are remote from the cutting edge.

Status: Used daily.

Food processor:



Food processor.

Ergonomics: Very good. Lots of safety interlocks and large capacity. Very powerful motor and the tool for puréeing. Takes up significant countertop space. Different disks allow for varied slice thicknesses. Not cheap.

Clean-up: So-so. Lots of parts.

Safety: Very high. It’s impossible to get your fingers close to the whirling blades.

Status: Used for big batch jobs like soups.

Hand graters:



Hand graters.

Ergonomics: Marginally better than the box grater, above, but requires significant hand strength to use, easily fatiguing the operator.

Clean-up: Hard.

Safety: Poor. Use a protective, metallized glove.

Status: Recycled.

Mandoline:



Mandoline.

Ergonomics: So-so. You place it over a bowl hoping it does not slip-off. And of course it does.

Clean-up: So-so. Lots of crevices to trap food.

Safety: Arguably the most dangerous kitchen tool. It’s easy to slice off a fingertip. A metallized glove is essential with this killer and, yes, it will get disgustingly dirty with every use. Easily adjustable slice thickness.

Status: Recycled.

Parmesan grater:



Parmesan grater.

Ergonomics: Could scarcely be worse. The hopper is too small. The handle is too short requiring high effort from the operator using both hands – the one depressing the cantilever, the other struggling with the handle. And that handle is very hard to remove for cleaning. The grey rubber handle cover falls off with use, compromising grip when it is inevitably lost. Restaurants love to use these, but check your waiter’s biceps.

Clean-up: Simply awful. Lots of interstices inside to trap food after you have struggled to dismantle this horror story.

Safety: High, if this is your idea of a work-out.

Status: Recycled.

Rotary grater/slicer:



Rotary grater/slicer.

Ergonomics: Excellent. Easy to assemble and disassemble. Very long handle makes use effortless. Suction base requires a smooth surface like a granite countertop to adhere properly. Wood cutting boards do not work. Slicing blade is one thickness only. When shredding soft cheeses, pre-cut and freeze for 30 minutes ahead, for a better cut. You can shred or grate a pound of cheese in under one minute with minimal physical effort. Comes with three blades – slicing, shredding and grating.

Clean-up: Easy.

Safety: Excellent. As the workpiece shortens use the provided pusher to machine the last inch or two of the workpiece.

Status: Used daily.

Poultry shears:



Poultry shears.

Ergonomics: There are many on the market. Just make sure that yours has the loop in the lower handle. Your hands will be greasy when cutting up a chicken and this loop ensures the tool will not escape your grasp. Don’t chintz with a lightweight design – this is a tool Henry VIII’s Chief Torturer would relish.

Safety: High, if there’s a loop in the lower handle.

Clean-up: Easy

Status: Used whenever I cut up a whole chicken into eight serving pieces plus the backbone for stock.

A note on cleaning-up:

Many kitchen tools have hard to access nooks and crannies. I recommend replacing your faucet’s spray head with one of these. It replaces the poncy stock sprayer on your tap with a head which not only includes an equally poncy stream/spray toggle, but also has a button for a turbo spray so powerful that you will experience Newton’s Third Law of Motion when you depress it. And your tool will be cleaned fast. A wonderful investment for an efficient and clean kitchen. It comes with a raft of adapters for common taps and several choices of finish.

Sharpening knives:

Forget abrasive stones. Your chances of getting the right angle on the blade are zero unless you want to invest in additional gadgetry which will only make sure that you will not use it as often as you should.

Further, I have found that manual, unpowered ‘pull through’ sharpeners are worthless, doing a very poor job.

For the past 18 years I have had nothing but success with the powered Chef’s Choice 130 sharpening station. The motor runs as well as it did when I purchased the tool new, and it’s used weekly. The device sets a perfect 20 degree angle on your blade(s) and has two powered abrasive wheels, coarse and fine. The center location holds a hard steel serrated strop which puts a tremendous toothed edge on any blade. Cutting tomatoes with a knife thus sharpened is a sublime pleasure.



Chef’s choice 130 sharpening station.

Sadly this model has been discontinued, replaced by one with three powered wheels …. but no strop. However, the 130 model is abundantly listed, used, on eBay for as little at $30, a fraction of the price of the latest new machine. Not a big risk – if you have to buy three to get a good one you are still far ahead economically.

Paul Prudhomme

Cooking, Dining

Cajun cooking.




Cajuns migrated from southern France to Nova Scotia whence they were kicked out by the British, moving to French Louisiana. This was before Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, buying Louisiana and a bunch of other states from Napoleon. Nappy promptly wasted the proceeds on his disastrous invasion of Russia.

Paul Prudhomme (1940-2015) was a Louisiana born chef, the youngest of thirteen (!) children, who learned cooking from his mother. The home had no refrigerator so everything was sourced daily from the surrounding land. He remains the dean of French influenced Cajun cooking, and of its Creole cousin with its more African focus.

Cajun cooking has a strong focus on chicken, shrimp and fish, and both the classic ‘Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen‘ (Cajun and Creole) and ‘Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Seasoned America‘ (countrywide American dishes) make extensive use of spices, often as many as nine or more. So probably ill suited to bland English palates. The books were published in 1984 and 1991 and, rightly, remain in print. Invest in these and your spice drawer will grow. Mine comes in at no fewer than 68.

Prudhomme opened his famous restaurant K Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in 1979 (now closed) and I was fortunate to dine there, in beautiful New Orleans, in 1982, enjoying a still memorable seafood and Andouille sausage gumbo with a Cajun Martini*. The line was out around the corner and I was accompanied by my girlfriend of the time, appropriately a Southern beauty and native of nearby Mobile, Alabama. As we waited behind a couple of cops, she got into conversation with one and they discovered that they has been high school classmates some 20 years ago!

Anyway, if you like properly and subtly spiced food in Cajun and American styles these two books are strongly recommended. Clearly Louisiana natives have abundant time on their hands as some of these recipes are anything but speedy. No problem for this retired old fart. Be warned that the layout is dated – solid text interleaved with (beautifully photographed) color plates – maybe just 5% of the recipes illustrated. From a health standpoint our understanding of saturated fats and their artery clogging proclivities is far better than it was when these tomes were written, so I would advise cutting back on processed Andouille sausage, and replacing margarine (ugh!), butter and vegetable oil with extra virgin olive oil, in the interest of heart health. Also the recipes frustratingly use volume (cups) instead of weight, though that is easily fixed with the knowledge that 1 cup = 8 ounces.

Tip: Unless you like your books splattered with food, juices and oils, no cookbook should ever see the inside of a kitchen. Take a picture with your cell phone, print and annotate the result and it’s off to the stove.

A word of warning: A few of the recipes call for warming up your pan until it is smoking hot, adding the fish or chicken and then immediately adding butter. That’s a prescription for fire. In a large, professional kitchen with large, vented hoods that’s likely not an issue. However, in the tighter confines of a home kitchen you could be looking at a visit from the fire brigade. I avoid those recipes.

Searing: I have found that the safest way of searing meat is to use a cast iron pan and avocado oil. Avocado oil has a smoke point of 515F (270C) which is the highest of any commonly available vegetable oil. By contrast, extra virgin olive oil smokes at 375F (190C) – far lower. I heat the oil in the pan until it just starts smoking then add the meat of choice. Safe, with negligible fire risk.

*Soak coined jalapeno peppers in dry/white vermouth for a week, strain and add vodka. Liquid fire.

Octopus

Cooking, Leica, Macro

Yum, yum.




Click the image for a larger version.

I drop it in rolling boiling water (with bay leaves, peppercorns and vinegar) to sear the skin, then simmer at 185F for 20 minutes/lb., let it cool in its water then grill it for 10 minutes on a medium-high grill. Meanwhile I boil off the water to form a treacle which is brushed onto the grilled octopus. The key is not to boil it in 212F water which makes the flesh rubbery. A wonderful local Asian food market always has these in stock.

Leica SL2-S, 100mm Macro-Elmar-R at f/16, Bellows-R, 3 strobes. 12 images focus stacked in Helicon Focus.

The Savoring books

Book reviews, Cooking

Gorgeous and tasty.

For an index of all my book reviews click here.



My small collection.

Take a magnum opus like Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ and you have every recipe imaginable from that land of culinary genius. Yet the books are as boring and as poorly presented as it gets. There are no photographs, a handful of poorly rendered pencil sketches passes for illustration, the fonts are dated and ugly and, well, the whole thing smacks of a well prepared meal thrown on a paper plate in higgledy piggledy fashion.

And that is very much not the case with these wonderful books from Williams-Sonoma, mostly published in the first five years of the millennium and now sadly out of print. I got mine from Abe Books, lightly used, for pennies on the dollar. Each boasts not one but two photographers – one for the locales, the other for the food and the photography is, without exception, gorgeous. And these are not just cookery books, for each recipe comes with historical detail explaining provenance and subtleties. Highly recommended not just for cooks aspiring to emulate the best in Western European cuisine but for lovers of great photography everywhere.

Amaranth flour waffles

Cooking

Super healthy.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

One simple rule of healthy eating is to avoid any product with ingredients whose names you struggle to pronounce. That pretty much includes all ultra processed foods and store bought pancake mix for waffles.

In my piece profiling the Presto waffle maker I mentioned that I used Aunt Jemima pancake mix. (In deference to modern times, the ‘Aunt Jemima’ black mammy branding has been retired in favor of ‘Pearl Milling Company’ but the product remains the same). Well, applying the above guideline I note that that mix contains a slew of nasty sounding chemicals, so in the garbage can it goes. Garbage to garbage.

And say ‘Hullo’ to Amaranth flour, a five pound bag costing $30. I had to buy from Amazon but if you can source it locally it will almost certainly be cheaper. That’s roughly twice the price of the Aunt Jemima poison but, hey, that’s the cost of healthy eating. Do you think all those superbly toned Hollywood stars subsist on Big Macs, America’s biggest killer?

The recipe I use is here with the following changes:

  • Do not bother beating the eggs and milk, or pre-mixing the solid ingredients. Just put the lot in a bowl and stir/beat.
  • There is no need for the 15 minute cure period for the batter. It can be used immediately.
  • Do not add ANY granulated sugar or salt. There is absolutely nothing good about refined sugar or salt and the maple syrup will add all the sweetness you need.
  • I add dark chocolate chips to the batter – a solid handful
  • You should substitute Avocado oil (smoke point 515F, no saturated fat – good) for the vegetable oil (smoke point 400F, loaded with saturated fat – bad) or butter (way too low a smoke point) for a healthier mix. The high smoke point of the healthy avocado oil makes sure the pancakes do not get charred – avocado oil has the highest smoke point of any commonly used cooking oil, and is by far the healthiest choice
  • You must use a touch of anti-stick spray or the waffle will stick to the waffle maker’s platens – not ideal but the Pam spray I use mostly contains oils, with a touch of anti-smoke and anti-sticking chemicals. The waffler runs at 395F which is right up there with the smoke points of the three oils in the spray, hence the need for an anti-smoke agent.
  • After a requisite 3 minute warm up period I heat the batter for 3 minutes, flip the waffler, then heat for 3 minutes more, for a total of 6 minutes.
  • A five pound bag of flour will make 14 waffles in the Presto waffle maker.

The health benefits of amaranth are described here. It’s an ancient grain first used for food by the Aztecs! Perhaps most significant is the fact that amaranth flour is gluten free, a blessing for those who are wheat intolerant. The health benefits of avocado oil are described here.

For a fully formed waffle in the Presto waffle maker you require 1.1 cups of batter, meaning the following amounts should be used to make 2 waffles:

  • Egg – 1 large
  • Milk – 285 grams
  • Avocado oil – 45 grams
  • Amaranth flour – 155 grams
  • Salt – NONE.
  • Granulated sugar – NONE
  • Baking powder – 1 teaspoon (a dry chemical leavening agent, a mixture of a carbonate or bicarbonate and a weak acid which releases carbon dioxide into the waffle to make it rise)
  • A handful of dark chocolate chips (avoid the white variety which is loaded with saturated fat)
  • A handful of walnuts on top
  • Real maple syrup to taste
  • For a crisper waffle use a 50/50 mix of amaranth and bread flour

You can see that most of these measures are stated in weight rather than volume, which is the accurate way to go.



The result.

Here is the result using 1.1 cups of batter in the waffler:



One perfect waffle.

A single waffle topped with bananas, strawberries, blueberries and walnuts, chopped hazelnuts or slivered almonds makes for a healthy sub-300 calorie meal and please, only use real maple syrup. Sure, it’s costly but your body does not need the many poisons and imitation sugars in the cheap stuff.

By the way, the beautiful country style plate shown above is proudly made in America by H F Coors, in Tucson, Arizona, and is highly recommended for its provenance, quality and toughness.