David A. Goldfarb

I think techniques like what Thomas Keller calls "big pot blanching"--i.e., blanching vegetables quickly in a large pot of salted water and then shocking them in ice water to keep the bright color, so they can be sauteed quickly for service--are great for restaurants that have to serve a lot of food quickly and make several complex dishes come out to the table at the same time, but judging by taste and texture alone, I'd rather have vegetables sauteed from raw and served à la minute, which is easily done at home, rather than blanched, shocked, held, and rewarmed. Re: ice cream. I've been making ice cream for years, and it's true--any method that I've used that freezes a quart and a half of ice cream in 30-60 minutes just can't beat the smooth texture that a big professional freezer can get by freezing the same amount of ice cream in 5 minutes.

That reminds me... I have half a dozen little 3.5" Lodge cast iron skillets that I use mainly for individual sized tartes tatin. I also have three 5.5" Griswold cast iron skillets, which I bought originally thinking they might be nice for things like eggs served from the pan, but it turns out they are handy for all sorts of little tasks, like making one quick egg for the toddler when he's being finicky and doesn't want to eat anything else, or little garnishes that I might not otherwise make, because I don't have room to deal with another large pan or because a large pan would be just too large for a small amount of whatever it is, and since they're cast iron, they hold the heat well, so I can make whatever it is, move it off the fire, and it will stay warm. Oh, and one more--my father had two cast iron double-sided grill/griddles, about the same size to fit over two burners. Once at a family gathering where I was cooking sort of spontaneously, I found I could stack them to heat them both up, and they made an excellent panini press.

I take the original question to mean two or more identical things, like having two 10" skillets as opposed to say two skillets, one 8" and one 10". For me that would be things like wooden spoons, spatulas, tongs, and pastry brushes, since those are all things where I might be making more than one dish at a time, and I don't want to mix flavors. It's handy to have identical prep bowls mainly because they stack neatly and compactly, but I don't think they need to be identical in use. I usually try to have two or more of any kind of baking pan or sheet, because things won't bake the same way in different pans. It's not unusual in restaurant kitchens to have stacks of skillets in one or two sizes for just about anything that can be made as a single serving on the stove top, from heating a single serving of soup to preparing a sauteed dish with various components requiring three pans. In that situation, I think having lots of identical pans helps maintain consistent portion sizes and uniformity of cooking, and they're easy to wash and stack, but those aren't usually issues in home cooking.

Chilling a mixture that is thickened with fat like coconut cream or heavy cream or avocado puree (which also has starch acting as a thickener) or butter will give it more body, certainly, and will make it stiffer. You do need to shake it to dissolve the nitrous oxide gas in the mixture, but how much depends on what you're making, and you can get more gas into the solution by using more than one charger (useful for things like pancake batter). You don't want to undershake, or the gas won't dissolve, and you don't want to overshake, or it might overwhip and clog the nozzle, or it might not have a good texture. Also, if you let the canister sit for a while or overnight after charging, you might need to shake it again to redissolve the gas in the mixture to get good loft. You most certainly do not need to whip air into anything beforehand when using a whipper--that's the whole idea of the thing. So start just with whipped cream. Put maybe a half cup of heavy cream in the canister, close it, charge with one nitrous oxide charger, give it maybe two or three good shakes, turn it upside down (the canister must point straight down, and sometimes it's helpful to give it one shake in that position, to get the cream down to the nozzle) and press the trigger slowly so you get a feel for how fast it shoots out. When I first got my Thermo-Whip, I realized that there was a little technique to controlling the flow from the nozzle, but you should be able to get the hang of it in just working with it for a half hour or so. With plain heavy cream you should get about five times the original volume of cream with the whipper.

Looks fascinating!

Creamed spinach

Exactly what I do. Well, me, not so much, but I do all the cooking, and my wife eats just about anything I make that doesn't involve bananas, and our toddler who is going through a picky eating phase is unpredictable pretty much, so his wanting or not wanting to eat what I make has more to do with his mood than with the food and whether he likes it or not. I figure, he'll be hungry eventually and he'll eat something.

If you want to release the pressure and start over, I'd put it with the nozzle up and pump the handle to release the nitrous oxide without releasing the contents. A little of the batter will spatter, so you could put your hand over the nozzle or cover it with a towel, but you can release all the pressure that way without opening it. I've never gotten into a situation where this didn't work.

Good thing you figured it out before it was 2000% wasted money. My father used to have something like that and ruined a number of good knives with it. He was a fine cook with great knife skills, but sharpening was not among them. I bought this french fry cutter at a supermarket once--plastic thing with metal blades in a grid. The circle was too small for most potatoes that you would want to turn into fries, so it was easier just to cut the fries with a knife. I ended up tossing it to save drawer space and to avoid looking at it every time I opened the drawer.

It's interesting to me that vinegar is disdained in some contexts, like bigos, as a cheap substitute for wine or sour apples, but then there are things like filipino style adobo (and a number of other filipino dishes as well) that are all about the vinegar, and the choice of vinegars will affect the flavor profile in a major way. Polish cuisine has a lot of sour fermented things (kwasy) that are added to soups and other dishes (like fermented beet juice, which is typical of Polish borscht, but not Russian borscht), but they don't seem to have a lot of kinds of vinegar, while you can find shelves of different filipino vinegars (white, cane, dark cane, select Ilocano style dark cane, coconut, hot pepper, and various infused vinegars). Good sherry vinegar is useful in a lot of contexts, and is surprisingly inexpensive even for premium aged varieties, particularly compared to balsamic. High quality Japanese brown rice vinegar is also nice, not unlike a good sherry vinegar.

Eggplant can make a great sauce--dice, saute with garlic and spices of choice in olive oil until it cooks down into a sauce. Excellent with pasta. Any vegetable that can be combined with stock to make a soup can potentially become a sauce, usually by making it thicker. I don't think it's an issue of tomatoes being overrepresented in sauces so much as the idea of sauces falling into decline in the home kitchen.

Some of these are questions of technique as much as which knife to choose. If you like to cut the top of a carrot off in your hand, drawing the knife toward your thumb, then a paring knife is easier to handle than a chef's knife. If you stack the carrots up on the board and cut the tops off all at once, then a chef's knife makes more sense, particularly, if you're then going to slice or otherwise chop the carrots with the same knife. So for carrots, I use a chef's knife, and for strawberries I use a paring knife. Bell peppers--it depends. If I'm making stuffed peppers and need to keep them whole, then I like a paring knife to get inside the pepper. If I'm slicing or dicing the pepper, then I usually set it on the board vertically, and cut it down in three or four sections, separating the outer part from the ribs and seeds, or if I'm slicing a lot of peppers that aren't too irregular in shape, I'll set the pepper down horizontally and slice down on the right side (doing this right handed), then turn the knife so it's parallel to the board with the blade facing toward the left, and run the knife along the inside of the pepper, rolling the pepper to the left, separating the ribs and seeds as I go, leaving a flat sheet of pepper, and then I can stack the pepper sheets (or cut in half to make a taller stack) and slice or julienne them with the same knife. The rolling technique works with any kind of flat knife, like a chef's knife or a santuko.

I have other small knives that I use more than a paring knife, but I'll agree with paulraphael that for those handheld trimming, coring, peeling, and garnishing tasks, a paring knife is often the right knife for the job. Some of those tasks have specialized tools like an apple corer or vegetable peeler, but I think there's some virtue in cultivating those knife skills as a way of gaining better knife control in general.

I also scatter the blueberries on the pancakes just as the batter is starting to set on the bottom. The blueberries sink into the pancakes without bursting and turning everything blue.

I use it for poaching fish usually, sometimes a fish stock, but a vegetable stock doesn't usually add any competing flavors to the fish, and the vegetable flavor is usually an enhancement.

Anyone ever bought anything from chefknivestogo.com ? They look like they have a good selection of Japanese knives at fair prices, but the only mention I could find here is a plug from a friend of the owner's.

Did I mention that I was in a rush earlier this week, so I thought this would be the ideal time to try the dreaded Pizzacone, and it was every bit as horrific as it looks, and that it looks even more horrific up close than it does in the photos? You've got a pre-baked breadcone, thick enough to hold hot liquid without dripping, which is put in a rack, filled with sauce, cheese and toppings, and microwaved. The idea seems to be to have something like an ice-cream cone that you would eat while walking around taking up too much space on the sidewalk and looking up at the tall buildings, but the whole hot gooey admixture of sauce and cheese melts down into the cone, and becomes more awkward to eat than a folded slice of pizza. At least I was ready in time to talk about my budget.

Yeah, got some garlic scapes, sugar snaps, Thumbelina carrots, a belle rouge chicken, eggs from Quattro's, Queen Anne cherries, a whole black sea bass for dinner tonight, whole milk and cream from Milk Thistle, and cider donuts for me and Melchi (my three-year-old son who comes to the market with me) to eat in the park.

I saw that pork and maduro sandwich, and it did look attractive. Next time.

Tried the Cuban sandwich at Tina's, which is a Cuban restaurant run by Peruvians at 34th and Madison, and while maybe not the best Cuban sandwich I've had in the city, it would certainly qualify as a respectable entry. The roast pork was nicely done. Lots of other attractive looking lunch plates as well with the option of table service or takeout, and they do a very brisk lunchtime business. As an aside, I had a really good Cubano last week or so at Favela, which seems to be a Cuban restaurant run by Brazilians (I guess Cuban emigres don't go into the restaurant business particularly) just south of Washington Square Village by NYU.

Impressive!

Thanks for posting!

Thanks for the suggestions. I thought Nanoosh was okay in a new-age organic kind of way more than in an authentic Middle Eastern kind of way, but I agree that it's nothing special.

My first adventure in Korean chicken was Kyochon today--hot & sweet wings. Not a bad thing!

No, I haven't seen that. Thanks for the pointer.