paulraphael

Your picture and complaint reflect my biggest issue with Shun gyutos: they have a really deep belly, like a German knife, instead of the more French-inspired shape Octaveman describes. A more standard shaped 270mm gyuto has around twice as much straight-ish edge as that 8" shun. Cutting technique can be adapted for any amount of belly, but a lot of techniques are just less work when you have a flatter profile.

A few thoughts ... Have you considered something longer than 210mm? I know it's tempting to equate a shorter knife with delicate work, but there's actually no penalty for going with a 240 or a 270. The longer knives are just more efficient and versatile. In fact, my prep knife that I use for veggies is 270, and my heavy knife that I use for hacking things apart is 210. The heavy duty stuff is actually more comfortable with a shorter blade. Also, you mention the possibility of an usuba, but this is actualy a step in the wrong direction, based on your original post. An usuba is thicker and will wedge even more dramatically than you Wustoff. It's a specialty knife, designed for producing extremely thin slices (where wedging isn't an issue, because the slice just falls away). But if you tried to cut an apple in half with it, it would feel like a hatchet. If you're interested in taking your cutting to the next level, which is what it sounds like, I'd put even more thought into refining both sharpening technique and cutting technique than you put into to selecting the knife. Any reasonably thin, long gyuto will be amazing, especially after you start adapting to it. But there's a very good chance that sooner or later you'll sell whatever it is you buy now in favor of something else. And you won't have any way of knowing today what that something else will be tomorrow, so just get a gyuto and hang on for the ride.

I've been experimenting with these. There's something really cool about them. But the saltiness can be a bit overwhelming. I've tried them raw, blanched, blanced and stir fried, and blanched and roasted. Are there any tricks to leach some extra salt? I want to preserve the green and the crunch. A little acid (citrus) seems to mellow the saltiness just a bit. So does a little butter. But I'd like to go farther.

I just stumbled onto some of Mauviel's m'cook pans ... they're made of clad stainless and aluminum, but have the same massive iron handles as the copper pan slkinsey linked. They're lighter and cheaper than copper (though still fairly heavy and pricey).

I just looked in Peterson's soup cookbook, and his advice on onions is the exact opposite of the advice at the top of the thread: use the sweetest onions possible (bermuda, vidalia, or maui). Any further thoughts on this? A technique he suggests that seems like a no-brainer: when the onions are browned, add a small amount of stock, reduce, and rebrown. Repeat a couple of times with the first two cups of stock. This is standard method for amping up roasted flavors in a pan sauce, and I imagine it would improve any French onion soup.

I've had a lot of delcious tenderloin. It's mild, but the flavor can be excellent. The best tenderloins have real marbling and aren't ghost-white. Brining strikes me as the wrong approach. I don't want the mild flavor overwhelmed by salt. I want the juiciness to come from corect cooking. And this cut does not need to be tenderized. Sous vide likely works well. I've also had good luck with the opposite approach, blasting them in a 550 degree oven. I preheat a skillet in the oven, put in the stove on maximum heat, throw in some refined oil, and lightly brown the tenderloin on three sides. Flip the the fourth side down and slip it into the oven for about 10 minutes. Pull out, let it rest, for another ten or so minutes tented. Make a pan sauce in this interrim. The pan and oven sear the outside; the inside cooks almost entirely during the rest period. It's a small enough piece of meat that I've been able to get it medium rare almost all the way through. I find it a bit tricky ... the meat cooks fast, it's a small enough cut to make thermometers unreliable, and it's pretty easy to over or undershoot. I also find it much harder to do in an oven that won't hit 550. But if you can nail it, it's simple, quick, and tasty. Absolutely requires a good sauce.

One approach is to think in terms of performance/fragility instead of just size/shape. I have a gyuto that handles most of my prep. But the price for its thin, hard edge that makes it perform so well is that it's fragile. So tasks that are tougher on a blade, like lopping off the head of a fish, taking a chicken apart, and chopping blocks of chocolate, go to my much heavier German chef's knife. This knife is fatter, is made of tougher, more resilient steel, and is sharpened to more obtuse angles. So it leans toward durabiltiy rather than performance. It can handle any task in a pinch, but I need it for the rough stuff.

Whether you pay $20 or $100, they will all stop releasing food. Sadly, Teflon coatings are not long for this world. Some of them have hard particles embedded in them (ceramic, diamond, kryptonite, whatever) to let you get away with metal utensiles, for a while. But they'll start sticking, just like everything else. I'd rather pay $20 than $100 for something that comes with an expiration date. But it also sounds like some other questions are in order. There are very few foods that warrant a nonstick surface. Eggs, very delicate fish, and ... I'm not sure what else. If chicken is sticking to your pan, this is a matter of technique. Even with the skin on it. If you refine your methods, you'll never have a problem getting chicken to release from a stainless steel surface. There will be other benefits, too: the meat will brown faster and brown better. The drippings will adhere to the pan surface, which allows them to brown and develop deeper flavors. And which allows you to pour off extra fat without losing the drippings, and which allows you to deglaze and get more flavor into pan sauces and fricassees. The bright surface makes it much easier to judge the level of browning. And you get to buy a pan that isn't disposable. Final benefit: if you keep a nonstick pan around and use it purely for the few things it does well, it will last much longer than it would as an all-purpose workhorse.

Steve is right. Teflon is a brand name for PTFE. The marketing B.S. has succeeded in bamboozling the Saveur food writers. All nonstick surfaces use teflon in one form or another. All will lose their magic powers sooner or later. Sooner, if you use them a lot and don't handle them with kid gloves. And they all do a lousy job at many cooking tasks. Moral of the story is to use nonstick only when necessary, buy cheap ($30 for a frying pan should be the upper limit) and expect to replace and recycle fairly often.

Have you tried them during actual cooking? If you know anyone who has them, something to try is to handle them with a towel wrapped around the handle. The skinny stainless handles stay cool enough enough much of the time that you don't have to do this ... but any pan that's been at the back of a hot stove, in the oven, or on high heat for a while will need a towel. The AC handles grab onto a towel really well. Some of my other pans feel more likely to pivot and spill when held like a towel, even though they're a bit more comfortable to hold bare-handed. If it's still an issue, there are some pans that have a big, tubular handle. Some of the nicer commercial brands might offer pans with this and with clad construction.

I agree with Octaveman. There's nothing one of those wee knives can do that a gyuto can't. But a gyuto can handle much more than they can, much more efficiently. I'd consider a Nakiri/santoku if I was limited to using a truly tiny cutting board. but in that case i'd probably just use it to open a vein and check out of the kitchen for good!

I'm pretty sure it's demmeyere, and it's very good, and for the most part way overpriced. They make one roasting pan that I had to have because it was the only one made in a shape that I like, but that's it. I'd reconsider the all clad. The handles feel uncomfortable when I'm playing with them, but I've never once even noticed the handle on my a.c. frying pan while actually using it. I think handles are largely irrelevant, as long as they stay attached after long hard use, which cannot be assumed with many brands.

Have you checked out the user forums at the KA website? There are fanatics there who talk about mixers every day. They might even be able to point you to resources that would let you fix the broken one yourself.

Can you elaborate on the distinction?

Yeah, I agree. And if you have a good thermos, there's really no need for an automatic machine. I find that full thermos keeps coffee hot and fresh tasting overnight. There's some shift in flavor, but I feel that there's a worse decline if you grind the beans 8 hours ahead of time. I think it makes more sense to buy a cheap press pot or drip cone, and put the money into a decent burr grinder. Brewing is easy; grinding is hard.

Yeah, that's my impression too. Acidity seems similar to salt in that it does two things that may be related but are different: it balances flavors, and it also brings out other flavors. In this second sense, it's often conspicuous by its absence. Something might taste flat or off or dimensionless, but it won't cry out to be more tart. Unless you've trained yourself to recognize the problem, you won't necessarily know it needs acid ... just that you want it to taste more like itself, or more alive.

Yeah, that's basically slicing with the tip. It's great for anything sticky. The knife doesn't even need to be at that steep an angle, and it doesn't need to contact the board all the way through. There are two components that make this efficient: knife speed, which keeps the food from grabbing, and the simple fact that by the time the slice is fully separated, there's very little blade in contact with it to stick. Probably just the tip, which flying full speed out the back door. Anyone who suffers from sticking starchy foods and contemplates getting an unecessarily thick knife with grantons should really try this technique.

I still use the term "push cut" more broadly than this, because the amount of slicing motion is typically so much less than what most people would associate with slicing or shearing. The closest thing most cooks do to pure push cutting is woodpecker-style shopping near the tip of the knife, for small things like garlic and shallots. But even this has a small shearing component. Just not nearly as much as the classic shearing motion you get from traditional European rocking. It's true that there are only a handful of basic knife motions ... what sets apart someone with excellent knife skills is their mastery of the slight variations and their ability to apply them apropriately to different cutting situations. You'll see two cooks using the same basic skills, but one whose herbs never turn brown, whose cuts are consistent, who seems magically immune to starchy vegetables sticking to the blade and falling under it, and who finishes in half the time. Some of this might be years of experience, but a surprising amount is just the practice of more efficient techniques.

That's a good point. In my experience, things rarely get to that point. The freezer is the only place I might forget food for a period of months, but well wrapped in that environment food takes a lot longer than that to go disgustingly rancid. Nuts and oils and butter are the most common culprits. They usually don't get much past the iffy stage before they get tossed. One counterintuitive tip: salt speeds rancidification. Even though it acts as a preservative against microbes, it speeds oxidation of fats.

No, rancid has a specific definition ... it's a particular kind of spoilage. In general the effect of rancidity is less dramatic than the word, so people consume rancid stuff all the time. Rancidity is spoilage due to oxidation of fats. It has nothing to do with microbes. The process is slowed but not halted by freezing. Polyunsaturated oils rancidify most quickly (fish oil, canola oil); saturated fats least quickly (pork fat, butter). Monounsaturated fats are somewhere in between (olive oil, etc.). If you've ever noticed cooking oil or butter that smelled a bit like stale nuts, that's rancidity. It won't usually taste so bad that you spit it out; it just won't taste good. It won't make you sick, at least not accutely. Rancid fats are high in free radicals, which may have bad longterm health effects, but you won't get any kind of food poisoning from them.

That's true. I think we usually call it chopping or push cutting when the horizontal motion is very small compared with the vertical motion. It's there, but much less so than with traditional slicing. These terms and definitions are far from standardized. I always like to add some description to words like chop or slice or push ... people have assumed that I meant the opposite more than once.

The concept is simple, but I have a hard time believing it. All the efforts to improve braises by getting them to self-baste strike me as dubious. Does this process really hold in the aromatics? Has this been demonstrated? And if not, do you gain anything besides slightly less moisture loss (which is never really an issue with the braises that I've done)? Considering that the inside of a braising pot should always be hovering around 100% relative humidity, I don't see how it matters where the water condenses and drips. I've never been sold on the idea of water-based basting. Has anyone actually experimented with the self basting concept?

It works better with a knife that's anything less than very sharp. And by very sharp I mean sharper than what many euro-trained cooks use over the course of their careers. Those who get any kind of Japanese cutting education (which usually goes hand in hand with sharpening education) find that a whole range of different techniques actually work better than the old ones. But much of it has to do with tradition more than knives. It's been taught in French kitchens that you should cut silently. This means slicing and rocking. Push-cutting is noisier, and chopping with the tip of the knife sounds like a woodpecker attacking the cutting board. The noise is a bit obnoxious, but the benefit is about three times the speed of the fastest slicing, and also higher quality cuts with less sticking and ripping.

I was going to deny it, but then I went to make dinner, which involved slicing beef and onions. Sure enough, the motion I make has a distinct lateral component: I am definitely slicing, at least for both of these items. Just imagining the motion I make was not enough, I had to actually watch myself cut things before I noticed it. ← You're both describing Japanese-style push cutting. The motion is primarily a chop, but there's enough of a forward/slicing component to allow the blade to cut effortlessly. Typically, the sharper the knife and easier to cut the food, the less slicing motion you find yourself using.

Interesting. Is that because a dull knife/faulty technique ruputures more cells or something? ← Yes. A clean cut from a sharp knife weilded skillfully does profoundly less damage to the cells at the surface. It can spell the difference between chives that turn brown in 20 minutes vs. chives that will stay bright green for days, until they eventually start fermenting. Here's a post where I demonstrated with a picture.