Oven cleaner to the rescue.

Very occasionally I write about cooking tools in this journal. For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

Almost 12 years ago I wrote about the Sabatier non-stainless chef’s knife, and it remains as perfect as the day I bought it. Sadly, it seems that non-stainless knives are no longer available. Shame, they present the best possible cutting edge to your food, in exchange for a bit of love and care.

Great cooking tools are not the sole preserve of the gourmands who make France home, and Tojiro’s bread knife remains a marvel. The price of that tool has jumped around and is back to a bargain $20 as I write. It will beat the pants off your $100 German original.

Today I’m looking at restoring the original color and finish to a Le Creuset cast iron skillet. Get the 11.75″ one – only regrets will result if you chintz on the smaller one. The downsides of this tool are its high price and high weight, along with a tendency for the gorgeous flame finish (all Le Creuset cookware should only be bought in Flame. Nothing else looks right) to discolor with use. The upsides are that this is one of the few remaining Le Creuset tools to still be made in France (hence the price) and the fact that you can put it in an oven at broiler temperature comfortable in the knowledge that no damage will result. And your grandchildren will be passing it down to the next generation.

Mine was horribly discolored after years of brutal beatings.

Hard, baked on deposits.

Hot soapy water? Fughedaboutit.

A baking powder and water slurry? Useless.

Bar Keeper’s Friend cleaning solution? Bad idea. Despite claims to the contrary, just try rubbing some of this product between thumb and forefinger. Yup, it’s mildly abrasive, meaning that vigorous use will destroy the gloss on your cookware’s enamel.

So the hard stuff was called for.

The nasty stuff.

The makers say this oven cleaner is fume free (they lie), and take it from me. You want this nowhere near your kitchen surfaces. Off to the garage and give the pan a serious spray coat. The recommended cure time is 2 hours, cold, after which my pan’s surface looked like this – rubber gloves and paper garage towels are all that’s required:

80% clean after 2 hours.

OK, do it again:

Two more hours.

Now we are at 95% clean.

So, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Another coat and leave to stew overnight:

Aah!

Now we are very much in the land of diminishing returns, at 99% clean.

A thorough wash with soap and hot water is called for unless you want to grow another head and develop terminal cancer. But the gloss is there, as is the restored pride of ownership. A schmuck who uses a brassed up Nikon to broadcast his macho prowess is as bad a photographer as the lousy cook who takes no pride in the appearance of his tools is a chef.

Japanese. Think different.

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

Some nine years ago I extolled the French Sabatier chef’s knife, and it remains in service to this day, sharpened on a Chef’s Choice 130 machine which combines a coarse grinding wheel, a fine polishing wheel and a miniature strop/steel which re-establishes the edge with negligible wear to the blade. Being at the peak of the culinary expertise of the free world no one beats French cooking, so the choice of the Sabatier was simple. That non-stainless steel knife – yes, it rusts as quickly as you glance at it – seems to have been discontinued in favor of the modern stainless variant, but I’m sticking with old tech because it works so very well. Just like ignition points in my old Airhead.

As it happens I like to cook bread and chanced on a fine Italian bread baking book by Carol Field. I’m having a blast working my way through it and, for the first time, find myself ordering groceries from Amazon. Have you tried finding durum wheat flour in your local store? Amazon has it, needless to say, which is why they will take over the world. One recent, successful effort saw a couple of loaves of Pane di Altamura exit the oven, a bread which hails from the heel of Italy and comes with a very hard crust.

Pane di Altamura, along with the now recycled Taiwanese bread knife.

But try as I might, sawing away with my Taiwanese bread knife offered more threat to my fingers than to my carb intake. The knife, properly sharpened, is next to useless.

When it comes to tools, the Japanese and Germans excel. Cars, cameras, power tools, knives – both nations massively recapitalized by the US in the late 1940s brought new thinking to tool design and ended up dominating their respective genres. Heck, this blog would have little to write about on the hardware front had there been no German or Japanese engineers. Sure, the easy answer when it comes to bread knives is to blow $130 or more on a Wüsthof, but that’s kind of offensive to my frugal ways, and there’s a far cheaper alternative which Just Works:

The Tojiro has at it with the Altamura crust – paper thin slices, effortless, total control.

I suppose all those centuries of seppuku, samurai sword feats and the occasional ritual disemboweling have allowed the Japanese to perfect their knife making expertise – I mean, when you are slicing your abdomen in half or beheading a fellow zealot you really want to do it just once – but the modern cook is the beneficiary of Tojiro’s skills. Price? You can get six or seven of these for the price of one fine killing machine from the Master Race and it is absolutely superb.

The wonderful selection of Tojiro’s specialty kitchen tools can be found here.