Dakki

I assume the book was subsidized by whoever makes French's, thus the brilliant marketing person having the insanely bright idea to exchange dollars for product placement in a cookbook. I still think it's pretty dumb. Who looks at a recipe like that and believes French's is necessary? EDIT: And LOL Sandra Lee. We should thank her for making the rest of us look so good in comparison.

Bleh, I wasn't looking at the prices. There's no public library here so that's out. One would think National Geographic's Field Guide would be more about wildlife and landscape photos? Or is it a generalist handbook?

That sounds...excellent. I'm wondering...would it be crazy to grind up bacon to add to ground pork, if one wasn't able to smoke one's own pork fat? I tried that once. Putting bacon ends in my meat grinder made bacon paste. Also cleaning the grinder afterward was a real drag. There were tough white threads of something wrapped around everything. Maybe this won't happen if you freeze it first. I can't remember if I took the bacon from the refrigerator or freezer that time.

So I though I'd get some photo books. Amazon has one of those deals where you get three books for a special price if you buy them together. Are these good? http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Exposure-Photographs-Digital-Updated/dp/0817463003/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_a http://www.amazon.com/Bryan-Petersons-Understanding-Photography-Field/dp/0817432256/ref=bxgy_cc_b_text_a http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Close-up-Photography-Creative-Encounters/dp/0817427198/ref=pd_sim_b_2 I'd like to hear suggestions for other books as well.

Thanks for all your advice David. I posted that photo in my Facebook profile and got ten recipe requests (so far). The previous record was three, for something much, much fancier. I guess presentation makes all the difference!

For all we know this Josh Ozersky posts here under a pseudonym. Who is he anyway? From Mbrowley's blog post I take it he's some kind of food sleb but other than his TIME articles I've never seen anything by or about him. I expect he was told to keep the article short and accessible (TIME isn't a food or drink magazine and it's not exactly aimed at highbrow audience) but I don't think that's an excuse.

Not a wok guy but I assume seasoning is going to be the same as found on a cast iron skillet. Traditionally you'd scrub the bottom with coarse salt to get rid of loose residue, I've found a stiff nylon brush or scrub pad (NO SOAP) under hot running water substitutes adequately. Salt does have the added virtue of picking up that last bit of oil that just won't come out otherwise, though. More than one way to skin a cat, etc.

Thanks, David. Looking at the photo again the limes seem somewhat out of focus. Would it look better if I had set the focus on the middle of the plate and then moved the camera to get the angle I want instead of focusing on the taco in the foreground? Would a stronger light source help with the depth of field? I'm thinking I could clamp a desk lamp on my counter and put a strong bulb in it, maybe cover it in white cloth to fake a larger light source.

I think you have three choices. a) Make the servers share tips with kitchen staff, which will cause the servers to grumble. b) Tell the kitchen staff to suck it up, which will cause them to grumble. c) Pay the kitchen staff better wages, which will cause you to grumble. If your cook is worth it I'd go for option C but that's just me.

Okay, I tried taking the photo from in closer, from a lower angle, and tried to make a more interesting composition.. It was too late for sunlight so this was taken in fluorescent light. Still life with tacos, by Dakki. Pre-messing around with, for comparison:

I grew up in Mexico. We had a maid who doubled as a cook. She was okay for simple homey stuff, not so great on anything that included ingredients she wasn't brought up on (like beef). Mom can't cook to save her life (she lives on frozen dinners and readymade food from the grocery store) and Dad -thinks- he can cook based on vague recollections of his Jewish-Mexican-American heritage. Sometimes he does remember how to make something accurately and it comes out wonderful, others are epic disasters that would make Dr. Rand Paul pause and reflect that federal intervention in private business might sometimes be necessary. The only real exposure I had to the culinary arts was a great-aunt who made the most wonderful criollo food for her catering business. Unfortunately she passed on before I could learn anything from her, and I believe hers was the last generation of cooks in that tradition. My culinary consciousness first stirred when I moved out to go to college. Even fast food took out too much from my beer budget, and I soon discovered being the only person in the building who knows which side of the frying pan the food goes in gives one a certain status. Even so I kept my meals simple, having no budget for exotic ingredients I didn't know what to do with and no way to learn the skills. Then, circa 1998 AD, I discovered the Internet (yeah I'm always the last guest to show up at the party). There it was, all the information I always wished I had, right at my fingertips. Tutorials covering every imaginable skill. My local stores don't carry this book/tool/ingredient? No prob, Amazon will deliver it to my front door overnight if I'm a hurry, with free shipping if I'm not. I started by relearning the most basic techniques. I'd spent my entire cooking life holding a dull knife the wrong way and nobody had thought to mention it. From there I've worked my way along, always more interested in picking up new skills than formula recipes. My current project is baking, which I am absolutely horrible at. I'll get good at this though. All it takes is training and practice.

Meaningless convention, like the habit of calling Phys-Ed teachers "Coach." Also you should call me Chef Dakki because I am so boss.

I have quite a few of these as well, most of them inherited. I don't actually use them (I prefer books that offer "guides" rather than "formulas") but I do look at them occasionally. My absolute favorite (for kitsch value) is a grill book that lists virtually every ingredient with a brand name. It's kind of endearing that some marketing jackass somewhere seriously thought putting 3 Tb French's Mustard in a bbq sauce recipe would increase sales and enhance shareholder value. "Welp, the recipe says use French's mustard but all we got is that store brand stuff. I guess I'ma have to go to the grocery!"

Put them in plain water and hope the salt comes out?

And this is why I don't let other people touch my good knives. I hope her company was worth it.

It's seriously hard to permanently damage the edge of a knife without power tools. Worst case scenario, you'll thin the edge until it's unstable, in which case you can just back off a notch and put a microbevel on it. If you're worried about scratching up your nice blade just tape it up (blue painter's tape works a charm). If you want a very decent workin' knife to fool around and practice your sharpening onwith until you make up your mind I suggest Foschner, or one of the Kershaw (makers of Shun) Wasabi series. I believe the MSRP on both of those is around $50 for a chef's knife, and who pays MSRP?

I'm cringing at the mention of sharpening scratches (I tape the blades) and if someone threw one of my good knives in a box there would have been blood on the dance floor that night. I admire your Buddha-like patience and kindness. Knives are a separate hobby for me, not just tools. I'm very proud of my little collection and maybe I do baby them a bit too much from a purely practical point of view. Dcarch, I'm glad you found an inexpensive knife you like. Ultimately, the skill of the user is going to be much more important than the tools and if you can stay away from high-end knives throughout your career you'll probably save several thousand dollars. I've often thought you could get a perfectly decent knife out of cheap steel if the manufacturers would just give them a proper heat treatment. Maybe someone finally did, or maybe you just got lucky and the knives in that particular batch came out pretty good. Also Paul's right on the out-of-the-box sharpness thing. All my J-knives have come with usable edges, in fact what most people would consider very good edges, but it took some work on the EdgePro or waterstones to really make them shine and believe me the difference is like the moon and the sun.

Okay, to make up for almost derailing the thread... 1-Get the EdgePro. As much as I hate recommending brand names it's the ne plus ultra of sharpening systems. You're going to need it to get the most out of your knives. Get the coarsest and finest stones they've got. In fact, get a couple extra of unmounted stones of the coarsest type as well. You'll go through them pretty fast if you start messing with edge geometry a lot. 2-Think hard about what you want to do with your new gyuto/chef's before dropping any cash. As you can see, not everyone likes a super-thin, super-hard blade. David has probably forgotten more about practical kitchen technique than I know and he even finds lighter Euroknives too light. Paul is also an excellent cook with lots of real-world experience and he likes the hard thin blades even more than I do. So try as many things as you can before making a final decision. On the other hand, don't be afraid to specialize - you already have a perfectly good general purpose knife in that Shun cleaver. As an aside, my own go-to knife is a 240mm gyuto, as I said before - but my second knife is a short little baby chef's from Shun, from the Alton's Angles series. (Gimme a break, it was a great sale). It has a wicked belly (I think the angle helps a lot) and is just crazy fast on things like onion, garlic and herbs, as well as small amounts of veg. So specialization isn't just in materials and edge geometry, it can be in size and shape as well.

Paul I'm not going to try to convince you but let me show you where I'm coming from by way of explanation. Long ago in another lifetime I was a history major. Since I was studying outside the Anglosphere, historical materialism was a big deal. In the English-speaking world historical materialism gets short shrift because it has long been associated with Marxism, which is a real shame because it was really the first attempt to explain history as something other than the Clash of Great Men and/or the Will of G-d. Historical materialism is not perfect by any means but it seems to be accurate most of the time, and it's also a lot of fun to think about. One of the basic tenets of this doctrine is that for every thesis there will be an antithesis, which results in conflict and ends in synthesis. Any trend at any point in time can be understood as its own thesis, as another trend's antithesis, to be in conflict with the thesis it sprung from and the antithesis it produced and to be the synthesis of a thesis/antithesis pair. To give an example we should all be thoroughly familiar with, the current fashion for local, organic, cruelty-free and traditional methods of food production can be understood as its own thesis, the antithesis of the industrialization of agriculture and the Green Revolution, to be in conflict with those trends as well as with the Alice Waters "backlash" (I won't link the relevant thread but you know what I'm talking about) and the synthesis of anti-industrial, anti-globalization sentiment with certain folks' desire to obtain high-quality ingredients. So from this point of view, an antithesis of the gyuto trend thesis is pretty much inevitable. It doesn't necessarily have to be a return to the soft Euroknives we've all graduated from, but something is going to give, and the way thin hard gyutos are approaching the limits of what you can do with steel I think it'll happen sooner rather than later. EDIT: That was in reply to Paul's previous post, as I was writing before he posted that last one.

In the case of a (simple) carbon steel, as someone else mentioned, you'd avoid acids, particularly fruit. Before stainless became widespread special fruit knives with blades made of silver alloy were used. In the case of a stainless steel or a steel with high corrosion resistance that was very hard and/or had an extreme edge geometry you'd avoid certain tasks and cutting surfaces more than certain foods. Cutting through bone, even fish bone, is out, as are poly cutting boards. In both cases you'll have to be rather more careful than you would with another knife washing and storing them. Putting them in the dishwasher or soaking them in a sink is out, but we already avoid that with any knife. Simple carbon steels will lose their edge to corrosion surprisingly fast so they should be washed and hand-dried immediately after every use, and I do mean immediately. For very hard steel you'll have to be super careful to remove them from a magnetic strip the right way (separate the edge first, then the back), and don't put them down anywhere they might fall to the floor or into a sink, or get something dropped on them, or get banged with something hard. It's a good idea to make yourself some rules: Rule 1 is that the knife must always be in your hand or in storage. Rule 2 is that the knife doesn't leave your kitchen. Rule 3 is that nobody, not your girlfriend/wife, parents, your best bud, that chick from culinary school your buddy is trying to impress by bringing her over to look at your collection of fine kitchen tools, gets to touch it. I actually keep my Foschners (the first "good" knives I ever bought, years before being bitten by the gyuto bug) in a knife roll for when I cook outside, when I cook in someone else's kitchen or for guest use. Don't let all this scare you away from a good gyuto. You already have a meat cleaver and a stainless Chinese cleaver for the types of tasks you should avoid with these knives.

The technology isn't making knives more fragile, but our singleminded focus on a single aspect of performance is. For example, you have a German knife you can put through stuff that would damage a gyuto, without second thought. My impression is that as we get more extreme in edge geometry (and the steels required to stand up to that edge geometry, new or old) we lose more and more of that versatility. I have a whole bunch of chef's knives and gyutos to choose from for a particular task and I think you do as well, but probably most people even in these forums do not, so they'd be pretty ill-served by (simple) carbon steel or an extreme edge geometry. Steel in general is such a complex subject that it's tough to make generalizations that hold true in all cases but in very broad strokes and with all kinds of exceptions and special cases, the harder a steel is the less tough it is. Just to be clear: I definitely don't think the current trend towards a hard, thin edge with an extreme geometry is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think it's great those of us who care about such things have them available. What I am saying is that we've completely focused on a single aspect of performance, decided that's the only definition of performance, and have ended up (or will soon end up) with knives that just aren't up to some common kitchen tasks. My idea of what's going on with innovation in the cutlery steel world is simply an extrapolation of what I know is going on in the tool steel and special-purpose steel worlds. For example, some virtually inert steels have been introduced fairly recently, stuff that just leaves "stainless" in the dust for corrosion resistance. I am not familiar with Devin Thomas' knives or AEB-L so I can't comment on that.

Paul, I'm not that sure we've reached the limit. There's plenty of metallurgists working on improving steel alloys, but we are going to hit a wall eventually, even if I'm right and we haven't hit it yet. At some point we're going to end up with knives that are so thin and fragile due to our focus on a single dimension of "performance" it'd be a huge relief to go back to the German/French knives of yesteryear. Most of us probably won't, but the next generation might, especially if the Europeans start innovating in materials as well, which I understand they have. The truth is we were stuck in a rut knife-wise for a long time before the Japanese started making serious inroads in the market. Of course, the next generation of super-knives might come from India or China or Brazil instead. Wouldn't that be neat? Blether, I agree with you on the performance thing. I think eventually (soon?) we're going to start looking at things like wear resistance and toughness rather than just how thin and hard a blade is. D2 is a pretty interesting steel for cutlery uses. It tops out at ~62 Rockwell C with a mild temper, which is plenty hard in my book, much harder than the mid-50s you'll find on a typical European-style knife. It's also very tough and wear-resistant, which has an upside (you won't have to sharpen it as often) and a downside (it'll be a PITA when you do). It's pretty corrosion resistant for a "carbon" (tool) steel. Plus, it's inexpensive, well-understood and readily available compared to the so-called supersteels. The downsides are a large grain size (you'll have to work to get that finely-polished edge beloved of sharpening nuts, although lots of people like it "toothy"), and tricky heat treat compared to simple carbon. I think it suffers from being in the middle in too many ways: corrosion resistant but not stainless, inexpensive (materials + manufacture) for a fancy steel of whatever type but not as cheap as simple carbon, and maybe a sort of image problem from being an older alloy. If anyone's actually interested in checking out a D2 knife for a reasonable price, Queen Cutlery makes a line of pocketknives in this steel. They're pretty nice, but I've gone back to good ol' Victorinox.

I've given this particular topic some thought and I think at some point (pretty soon, actually) we're going to run up to the limits of what steel of whatever alloy and treatment can handle. Then we'll plateau for a while. After that, backlash. "Now, you might think I'm crazy but what I recommend is a good German knife. Feel how nice and solid this is? This is a Wusthof. The Germans have a tradition of bladesmithing that goes back to the Middle Ages, when knights carried swords that were so durable they could bang away at each other in full armor all day without breaking their swords, so you KNOW it's gonna be tough."

Do you work in a restaurant? The following assumes you're an enthusiastic amateur. What do you want to do with a chef's/gyuto that you don't already do with the Chinese cleaver? I think Shun makes a very nice knife but its not really a gyuto, if that makes any sense. Global I have no personal experience with. I don't like their looks and once a knife breaks the $50 mark I think it should look nice as well as perform. Your other choices I have no experience with either, maybe one of the knife nuts here can help. Unless you're going to prep vast amounts of ingredients on a regular basis 12" might be overkill. My current favorite chef's is a mere 240mm (about 9.5"). I have larger knives (including a 14" monster) but they feel unwieldy by comparison. YMMV. Simple carbon steel won its excellent reputation in comparison to crappy stainless. At the sort of prices you're looking at, you can easily afford stainless "supersteel" or tool steel. (Tool steels are sometimes called carbon steel, though).

Imagine my sharpening system + knife is a triangle with the sides formed by the part with the holes where the rod goes (a), the clamp plus blade (b) and the rod + stone ©. Angles are where the stone meets the edge A, where the rod goes through the hole B, and a 90 degree angle where the bit with the holes in it joins the clamp C. Assume I carefully measured angle A and it's 17 degrees with the blade placed in the clamp as deeply as possible - that number is actually going to vary depending on how far the edge is from the back of the blade. I want to make A 11 degrees instead. Unfortunately, my rod is already at the lowest hole. What can I do? Well, I can make (a) longer. I could do the maths if I could remember high school maths but I don't. So I'm just going to take my transporter -which I already used to measure the angle the first time around- and move the blade out of the clamp so that (a) is longer and A is lower, until A is 11 degrees. That's what I'd do if I actually cared about the numbers, but I don't. I mean I'm just sharpening a knife here. So what I'd actually do is make (a) as long as humanly possible while still securely attaching the clamp to the blade - then, if the angle turns out to be too extreme (the edge nicks or rolls easily) I put a microbevel on it, a few degrees higher. That said, if I were trying to put a really extreme edge on a really hard Japanese knife and the clamp + blade just weren't long enough, I might be SOL. As an aside, I don't think getting the angles just right and perfectly consistent is nearly as important as some people (such as the manufacturers of these jigs) make it out to be. People sharpened freehand for millenia before these devices were invented and continue to do so, with extremely good results. The main thing is to get the sides of the edge to meet at an angle reasonable for the steel and the use you're going to put it through - they don't have to be perfectly straight, they don't have to be identical on both sides and they don't have to be exactly the same all along the edge.