Kitchen Utensils, a Way of Artistic Cooking

Kitchen utensils are at least as important as the cooking itself, for creating the perfect meal. I’ve seen a German cook once, on a pro veggie television, cooking with nice fry pans, but cutting with a minuscule knife directly on the table, taking all the components with his sausage like fingers, and throwing them in the pan, after he poured olive oil directly from the bottle, some commercial brand, always the same, saying: “and now, after the pan is hot enough, four soup spoons of Mediterranean olive oil…” I’ve seen another filthy guy, also for several times, cooking “traditionally” on a minuscule hollowed cutting wood board, with a mockery of a knife, thin, short and hollowed as well. This late one’s frying pans were old, small and had a filthy look, like their handler. The next video shows the forging process of a high quality knife blade, close to Tarantino’s Hattori Hanzo, 🙂

Making Japanese knives – knife forging by Master Blacksmith Keijiro Doi from Chef Hudson on Vimeo.

These are the products, their prices not being thousand of dollars per piece, as the video might have suggested, but a few hundred dollars. The steel is also very important.

This seems closer with one in the video, but what comes next is a must.

The next one is generic, just for the signature:

To sharpen these blades, one needs some set of whetstones, at least the #1000, #4000, #8000 and the Dressing stone.

This is just the #8000 with the Dressing stone. The blades are made of a very high Carbon steel, and a set of them is just what any professional cook needs, but I believe that that such a set is perfect in any home kitchen, along with the other utensils I’m going to present.

Without a wok, preferably a carbon steel wok one, not an Aluminum, it is hard to make a high quality fried rice, so one needs the real deal. Amazingly, this one, which is the real deal, is closer to reality as price, some $9 – $30, mostly depending of the diameter and the place of delivery.

This one is the Peking type. If you buy the authentic Chinese carbon steel wok type, you need to “season” it, a simply but time consuming procedure. After the seasoning, you don’t need anymore the $300 Aluminum German Teflon non stick, which if scratching the plastic coat, the fake wok will start to stick the mix, more and more on the scratched areas, increasing them. Of course, the Germans are boasting the different density of the Aluminum and the non – stick “all tools” high resistant plastic coating. Money thrown, the combination is good for a few months, after that becomes a classic, 🙂 Even the french fries taste better prepared with the wok, instead of the plated classic pan. The paddle, spatula and spoon, all in burned bamboo, are also welcomed, instead of the highly resistant plastic material ones. Sometimes, where bamboo is not available, the cherish wood would do just fine 🙂

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, a smooth but large cutting board could be very handy and easy to clean up, easy to handle, preferably from a not easily degradable synthetic material, like this:

This pair of chopsticks is Japanese, like the knives and the sharping whetstones, but I’m sure you may find something closer to your homes, locally made.

Rice, can be boiled without too much stress with this electronic rice cooker device:

I said without stress, because otherwise, it’s not easy to boil rice like the Chinese, Indians or Japanese without being too puffy or sticky or whatever. (Really bad is when you mistake the timing, the method and the water quantity, and just burn it). What Europeans call Risotto, made with chicken soup or worse, with a “beef bouillon” from Knorr or Maggi, I mean especially with Sodium Mono-Glutamate (I have a lapse right now as for Rachel Ray’s “corner store” from somewhere she took last time some ad money ingredients), is far from the classical “fried rice” with or without shrimps, meat, chicken, fish, but with vegetables and oil, soy sauce or not. In the end, we need to laugh a little with some knives video ad spoof.

Amazing Knife from Andy Gillingham on Vimeo.

Have a nice kitchen experience, I’ll repeat it in another category, a proper one 🙂

 

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