SWISS_CHEF

Its the flash...

WHAT? NO PICTURES?

I love knives...I have loads of them...Wüsthof, Sabatier, Nogen etc. but I have one that is odd...it stinks...the blade on this knife smells.... it is a very old knife from Paris and I am wondering if it might be pure iron. It takes an edge faster than my Sabatier carbon steel knives, but gets dull after a day or two of use. Funny thing is, I have two very ancient forks that seem to be made out of the same material because they stink too and if you touch them to you tongue you can taste it. Do you think these tools are pure iron? Here is my little stinker:

Why? What do you cut up that you need to use a stone that often? When I was a carpenter I only had to touch up my cutting tools monthly. A steel maybe but a stone seems overkill. ← I agree. My knives see the stone maybe once or twice a year, the rest of the time I use the steel. I can revive a pretty dull knife with just the steel to the point where it will neatly shred paper (sharp enough for me). It takes a while, but leaves more steel on the blade. That is one of the reasons I like carbon steel, they take an edge quickly and I almost don't even need a stone.

Hi Margaret, The recipe goes like this: Soak some dried morels in warm water utill soft (save the water). Cut up a whole chicken, S&P pieces and fry them in butter and vegetable oil to give them some color. Put the pieces in a casserole once they are colored. To the frying pan, add some finely chopped shallots and the drained morels and cook utill the shallots are translucent. deglaze with a cup of Vin Jaune...reduce, then add the liquid from the morels and some water and a little sauce thickener or roux and a cup of cream. The sauce should coat the back of a spoon and there should be enough to almost cover the chicken. Pour the sauce over the chicken in the casserole, cover and put it in a medium oven for 30-40 minutes and presto! The smell is to die for and the chicken will be very tender. Morels have a lovely smell and nutty taste that goes very well with Vin Jaune. It also goes well with wild rice and Roquefort cheese. Well actually, I cheated a little because I didn't have a Bresse chicken or Vin Jaune so I improvised with a normal store bought chicken and a half half mixture of German auslese riesling and dry sherry and the result was very close (BTW it makes a a great aperitif not unlike Lillet).

Funny you should mention that. Here I am doing just that. The cheese is mostly gone at this point but that's what I'm doing!

Since we are among friends and I'm in a "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" here are my Nogents: (These are the knives that Julia Child used on her earliest cooking programs and are said to be her favorites.) The stainless blades are hard to sharpen compared to the carbon blades but I like their style and the are light as a feather.

Hi pjackso, Here are my vintage carbon steel Sabatiers (Man they look sad compared to that $900 knife! However, I can assure you you can very nearly shave with anyone of them) I picked them up one by one at junk stores and garage sales over the years. I don't think I have ever paid more than 10 bucks for any of them. As you can see they are from several different makers. The first and 5th knife are marked "Chef au Ritz" Paris. They are much better quality than the others. The handles are heavier and steel is finer. The vintage Elephant brand is common and only average quality, same is true for the vintage Loin brand. I can't say for sure if "Chef au Ritz" is the best Sabatier ever made but it certainly is much better than the rest of my carbon knives There is a guy on e-bay selling vintage knives and a week or two ago he had a "Chef au Ritz" 10 inch chef's knife: http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZralph1396 he has a good selection and seems to know his stuff. Good luck and I hope I helped.

That's a good idea, considering this knife is for instance worth about 2 or 3 good dishwashers. Silly. ← 900 bucks for a chef's knife? Sounds like a yuppie thing to me.

Yeah, with all this new technology out there carbon steel is kind of like driving a '69 Camaro through downtown Manhatten. WANNA RACE?

Ditto here, I really love my my old carbon steel Sabatiers, but did you know Sabatier is a style of knife not a company. Just like Laguiole knives, lots of different companies make them. This accounts for the huge variation in quality. Some are even made in china, so be careful! I mine are from several different companies but the ones from "Chef au Ritz" Paris are the highest quality.

I was so inspired by the Confrérie that I decided to make their famous dish. If only you could smell it too!

I was reading a cookbook from the Jura and stumbled across the formitable title of the "Confrérie de la Poularde de Bresse au Vin Jaune et aux Morilles". Apparently this is an official society of of Gastronomes devoted to a single dish. T he dish they worship is Bresse chicken cooked in a white wine sauce with morel mushrooms! The cookbook had several pictures of grown men dressed up in robes and wearing funny hats presenting each other with keys and documents. They all had rosey cheeks and it looked like they were having a great time. What a great way of looking at life! Do you know of any quirky food clubs? Here is a link to an interesting site. http://www.franche-comte.org/FRANCAIS/TERR...reries_bas.html

Does that help? ← Ah thanks Dave, very helpful! I wonder: if I sold an article to a magazine, would that magazine normally demand an exclusive copyright?

Hello Everyone, I love to write, I'm not particularly talented at it and I don't give a toss if I ever get published but what I would enjoy would be to post some of my stories on eGullet to see what people think. Is there a forum for this? I have been looking but have not found anything so far. The other question I have is concerning copyrights. I have noticed that the bottom of every page says:Copyright © 2001-2004 by the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, All Rights Reserved. If I post my stories do I loose my copyrights? Thanks for your help, Ed McGaugh

Forget about chocolate and army knives, you can get those for a couple of extra bucks back home. Look for two things.... No 1: (eau de vie) Kirsch, Pflümli, Kräuter, Quitten, Williams and Mirabelle. Look for locally made stuff, hopefully made in small batches in copper stills out back in the barn. There are fancy kinds in hand blown bottles for tourists but you want the ones from the farm with a hand painted sign hanging out by the mailbox. One of the best kirschs' I have ever had was actually from the Familia factory store in Sachseln and it was only about 13 bucks a half liter! Bio-familia AG Brünigstrasse 141 CH-6072 Sachseln No 2: A bergkäse called hobelkäse (AOC) from the Berner oberland. They age it for up to 3 years, its as hard as a hockey puck. You will need a kind of inverted block-plane to cut it. You eat the shavings like potato chips....it's heaven, heaven, heaven! But you have to go WAY up into the mountains and knock on a few doors to get it. You can't find it in any Swiss city (that I have seen anyway...well... not the really good 3 year old stuff). These cheeses are so dry that all you have to do is wrap a piece up in parchment paper and keep it in a tupperware box in the fridge and it will keep for months. See: http://www.aoc-igp.ch/ver-de/prodch/alpkase.htm Enjoy, Ed

Speaking of cheese... We go every Fall to the Käseteilets in the Berner Oberland. The cheese is way-way-way beyond good and NOTHING like store bought cheese. We usually look for some hobelkäse that is at least two years old and the best is three. I have tried hard cheeses all over the world but I have never found any as good as the Swiss hand made un-pasteurized mountain cheeses. It is amazing to taste the different cheeses from the same villages and see how they differ! There are always two or three champions in the group. It's like getting a Chateau Latour for the same price as all the other Bordeaux. Käseteilets are truly one of the great culinary secrets of Switzerland. Ed

I have lived in Switzerland for six years now and I can count the inspirational restaurants on one hand. "Status-quo" seems to be the words we Swiss live by and I don't think "cutting edge" translates well into Swiss-German. The highest concentration of good restaurants is in the French section. A good guide for Switzerland's best restaurants is www.grandestables.ch What we sorely lack is creative, inexpensive restaurants especially in the more rural areas of Switzerland. The Swiss have perfected processed foods and invented portion control. Too many restaurants use these products and the result can be pretty miserable. Oh well, at least the bathrooms are clean! Ed