paulraphael

I've heard some speculation about this, but no clear answers. My hunch is that it's closer to your latter explanation; it's patterned roughly after Western knives and until fairly recently Western cooking was associated heavily with meat in Japan (because the Japanese ate virtually none, and had a strange relationship with the meat they did eat). But the gyuto is not seen as a specialized meat knife. In fact, traditional Japanese patterns like the yanagi make better meat slicing knives, the western-patterned sujihiki is a better carving knive, and the various patterns like honesukis and garasukis and petties make better butchering knives. The gyuto can't do precise vegetable prep as well as an usuba in the hands of someone with the associated hard-won skills. But for a general prep knife, especially where Western foods are concerned it outperforms everything else, including heavier European chef's knives, and the Japanese patterns made for amateur use, like the santoku and nakiri.

I used to pay a lot of attention to things like the feel of a handle and the balance of a knife. That comes from the European tradition of using a heavy knife that isn't especially sharp: you really work the handle on a knife like that. You grip it hard; you use a lot of force. And I still love the big honking handle and the neutral balance of my Schaaf chef's knife, which I pull out for heavy lifting like rock chopping woody herbs, pulverizing bulk chocolate, or beheading innocents. For most prep tasks, though, I use a much lighter and sharper gyuto, and can confidently say that things like the feel of the handle are practically irrelevent. Because you barely grip the knife at all. If European techniques require you to grip a knife like an axe, Japanese techniques require you to manipulate it like a violin bow or a scalpel: fingertips, the lightest possible touch. Any handle that isn't completely idiotic (um ... Mr. Onion, I hope you're not reading) will work fine. You're not even going to notice it. This is why it's a safe bet to buy knives with good reputations sight unseen. There's no guarantee that you'll like any given knife, but the qualities that make or break it for you will become evident with use and sharpening, not with a brief fondling at the store.

The structure in cookies actually comes from the starch in the flour (not gluten development) and from eggs. So you can use piles of oat flour if you want. I settled on 25% by weight ... enough to enhance chewiness and add nutty notes, but not so much that it starts tasting like an oatmeal cookie. I found 33% to be too much.

Removing sugar and gluten? Can you show me any peer reviewed research showing health benefits of doing this (not counting people with celiac disease)? It's a no-brainer to argue that people eat disproportionately too much of many things (top of the list: calories!) But god, the number of basic nutrients that have been demonized over the years as fundamentally bad covers just about all of them. Meanwhile, basic nutrition science, with regard to macronutrient ratios, hasn't changed significantly in 30 years or more. More and more research piles up, just slightly refining the same ideas. As far as high-quality, organic ingredients vs. factory-farmed equivalents ... I don't even know how to address that. You are conflating several ideas that have no fundamental relation to each other. There are high quality orgainic ingredients and low quality organic ingredients; high and low quality non-organic ingredients; high and low quality factory farmed ingredients; even organic and non-organic factory farmed ingredients! If what you're trying to say is that high quality food is healthier than low quality food, I don't think anyone would disagree ... but this thesis is a little too broad to test scientifically.

Yep, I did a bad search on PubMed when I found nothing. But I just did a good search, and found little of substance. The only controlled studies I found dealt with medicine-specific topics, like comparing paleo to other diets in terms of effect on diabetes, heart disease, or obesity. I didn't find any startling (or even strong) conclusions. As far as the general premise, I can't find any authoritative source that claims authority on what people actually ate in the paleo period. Just some educated speculation. They're pretty sure about some of the things that weren't eaten, but other key points, like the ratio of meats to plants, are presumed to have varied wildly. Almost verything we believe about was eaten comes from circumstantial evidence ... dental development, tools, cooking implements, etc.

Just to be clear, diets like the paleo diet are based entirely on speculation, not science. Even paleontologists' ideas about what humans ate during the paleolithic era are speculative (although educated). The effects of diet on paleolithic people's health, and the effects of this diet on our health vs. other diets, constitute wild, uneducated speculation. Also, please beware of doctors hawking diets in print and on the radio. An M.D. is not a nutrition researcher. Nutrition is not part of the curriculum in most medical schools. It's a title that helps people sell books.

Even if you're abusing the bejeezus out it, that's not normal. If you used a vegetable cleaver to hack through bones, you'd expect to either chip or dent the edge. A blade that cracks like that is deffective. Three in a row suggest bad knifemaking. You can either buy a better one, or keep enjoying the free Furis til the well runs dry ...

I haven't used a clad Watanabe knife, so I can't comment on it specifically. But I prefer solid knives to clad ones, because they tend to be more responsive and give better feedback. I've had clad knives that performed well, but I didn't enjoy using them as much. They felt damped, dull. I've been told that not all clad knives feel this way (some have much thinner cladding, or other construction differences) but I've used enough to have a bias. I'd want to talk to someone who's used both clad and unclad watanabes.

I've had knives made from hitachi blue super (one of the blue steels) ... it is marginally less reactive than white steel, but still forms a patina and still will react with acidic foods when the patina isn't there. I have very limited experience with carbon steel gyutos; you could probably get more specific advice from some of the peopple in the kitchen section at knifeforums.com, or the cutlery section at foodieforums.com ... these are bastions of cutlery lunatics with a lot of pros and a lot of high end knife experience. On an non-metalurgical note, I want to reiterate that expensive knives offer few advantages for tasks like breaking down poultry. Rather than trying to get a jack-of-all trades knife for both butchering and precise vegetable work, I think it's much more sensible to have a high performance gyuto for the delicate stuff, and something heavier for the heavy stuff. If you go this route, you can use a german chef's knife or honesuki or some other butchering knife on the fowl, and then get a thin, high performance gyuto for the rest of your prep. There are plenty of stainless knives that offer incredible performance (better in many ways than the Watanabe) ... like the Suisin Inox Honyaki wa gyuto, Ikkanshi tadatsuna inox wa gyuto, Mizuno tanrenjo inox wa gyuto, or at a lower price point the sakai takyuki grand chef. These knives are all stainless, are made out of great alloys that feel almost like carbon steel when cutting and sharpening, and have similarly thin, high performance blade geometries. All are well under $500. But you sacrifice being able to use them for butchering or anything heavy duty. And they'll all require adapting your technique somewhat if you're used to heavier knives.

I'd advise against any shuns, especially considering that you have experience with knives like watanabe. Some points against it: -thick edge geometry means poor performance compared with better Japanese knives (ones not designed for the western export market) -big belly is a disadvantage if you want to use any of the more sophisticated Japanese techniques -the blade is thick and clad, which gives a dull, damped feel -the sg-2 steel is difficult to sharpen. there aren't many benefits that come with this. sending to shun for sharpening is a poor fix, because you're not going to do that often enough, realistically. and a factory edge should be considered the barest minimum level of sharpness for a good knife, not the standard. -for the same price you can get many, many much better knives.

Back to the OP, on the topic of carbon steel knives discoloring onions. I personally prefer stainless gyutos, but have a lot of friends who prefer carbon. All swear up and down that once a decent patina forms, there is no food reaction ... no discoloration, odd tastes, smells etc.. The only catch is that sharpening exposes unoxidized steel, so you have to keep your bevels relatively small and flat. This means not smoothing your cutting bevel into the the main bevel of the blade with a large concave shoulder.

Yeah, none of those are great knives. Your best bet is the web. I have one of the best knife retailers in the country within close reach, and while I've bought quite a few things from them, I bought my last three chef's knives directly from Japan. Local selections are always limited ... it takes a stroke of luck to find your ideal knife at a store, even if you have a good store.

What did you try? With most good knives, there's limited value in holding them at the store. You can get a sense of the shape, weight, edge geometry, esthetics, etc... But the factory edges range from workable to dull, and you won't know anything about performance and edge retention until you've sharpened it and gone to town on some big piles of prep. If you haven't had a chance to use someone else's (well sharpened) buying a knife requires leaning on recommendations, and a certain leap of faith. Which also means that you don't sacrifice much when buying online. The good news is that the Japanese brands that have a good reputation among knife nuts can be resold for close to what you payed.

I think this is worth exploring. Kind of a pain to test, but not conceptually difficult. You'd need to make two identical batches on subsequent days, and have someone besides the cook do the tasting.

If you really need a knife for breaking down birds, presumeably you do a lot of it. A knife made for the task will be much faster than a 10" chef's knife. People who butcher poultry all day long use a honesuki; I can't recommend a brand, but there's no need to spend a lot of money. I personally find an 8" chef's knife faster and more nimble than a 10" knife for this task, and the specialized poultry knives are smaller still. If you also butcher a lot of fish, a 165 to 180mm deba will do a quicker, cleaner job on poultry than a western knife. I would not get a knife like a watanabe or any of the gyutos you mentioned for this task. These knives are designed with a thin edge geometry and are made for high performance with softer foods. You could regrind the edge and make it tough enough to butcher birds, but this makes about as much sense as getting a ferrari and putting monster truck tires on it. Those are all great knives (not counting the Ken Onion ... blech) but none are meant work working around bones. My choices, in order from most generally useful to most specialized and high performance, are: 8" german chef or 210mm cheap, thick gyuto with fat bevel angles; generic 6" boning knife (this works pretty well); 165 or 180mm cheap deba, with a back bevel put on the last couple of inches for crashing through bones; honesuki.

Something to consider: disk-bottom pans often have a much thicker piece of conductive material on the bottom than straight gauge pans. Not always, but it's common. The result is significant performance differences that are separate from the fundamental properties of these designs. Pans with a thick disk tend to heat extremely evenly. They also tend to have high thermal mass, making them excellent for browning big pieces of meat on the underpowered burners most of us have. The tradeoff is that they respond slowly to changes in flame size, making them harder to control. A pan with a thick disk can therefore be a great choice on something like a 12" rondeau, and a lousy choice for small saucepan used for reducing cream sauces or whisking emusified egg yolk sauces.

Most low-end cookware is a pain to cook on ... at least for tasks like sautéing and saucemaking. But I find the difference between medium- and high-end stuff to be more a matter of luxury than necessity. When I'm cooking in other people's kitchens, I have more trouble with not being able to find pans of the right size / shape than with quality. You can usually compensate for a bad pan by giving it more attention, more stirring, more motion, etc... And a decent pan can be functionally as good as a great pan; it just might not be as pleasureable to use. When you're busy, you probably won't even notice. For some tasks, you might find yourself developing a preferance. Some types of pan are slower/ steadier, other are faster / more responsive. Each set of qualities has its pros and cons. And don't discount the value of familiarity. You've had your pans a long time; you know how they behave. For a given task, a $300 piece of french copper may or may not feel better to you.

I've worked on cc cookies with brown butter for years before Cook's Illustrated published theirs. I'm willing to bet this recipe will be better, based on ingredients and technique, although it's a bit more work. It addresses the chewiness issue directly with the use of oat flour and added moisture.

Sure ... high gluten flour is similar to bread flour. I was responding to a suggestion of adding vital wheat gluten to the dough (a product I'm not familiar with, but I believe it increases the gluten network in doughs).

Adding gluten won't do the trick. The reason for the bread flour isn't actually for gluten development (which would just make a tough cookie). It's for the higher protein which will absorb more liquid, allowing for a moister, chewier texture and a bit more shelf life. if you have to substitute a lower protein flour, you'll have to reduce the total liquid ingredients in order to get the right consistency. The results won't be identical. I use a mix of AP flour and oat flour (which you can make from whole oats). Oat flour has very high protein content but doesn't produce any gluten.

There's a big difference between a noise level that's fun and lively and one that makes it hard to talk. The problem isn't primarily with romantic, one-one-one, smoochy smoochy kinds of dinners; you can always just get closer. High noise levels ruin it for bigger groups. If you have a table of 6 or 8 or 10, the people sitting far apart just can't hear each other without screaming. So the dinner breaks down into a bunch of smaller, isolated conversations (either that or they actually start screaming, which of course, makes everything worse in the big picture).

Obviously, only put knives away clean. Then this won't come up often. When grunge appears, I've taken small wads of cloth soaked in sanitizer and shoved them all the way through with a round-tippe knife or a hack saw blade. On most blocks, the slot goes all the way through to the botom.

I didn't read it like that at all.

Acid, yes. And a little bite, and a little sweet. I served stir-fried kale with shallots and blood oranges once, and it worked brilliantly. Since then, mixing bitter greens with citrus fruit and and some member of the onion family (shallots and garlic seem to work best; nothing cooked more than slightly) has been a favorite combination. Works great with broccoli raab as well ... anything green and bitter.

My fish expert's a chef! my local fish butcher is great, but none of the guys there know much about cutting. I understand the theory of cullens. In practice, the only knife where they've seemed to make a lick of difference is a Glestain slicer. With other brands I've used, the cullens just seemed to force the maker to use a thicker edge geometry, resulting in worse performance all around.