slkinsey

Dean, how do you hold a knife? Do you hold it like this: Or do you tend to hold it mostly on the handle? If the latter, you might consider switching to a "pinch grip" as shown above. It provides much better control. Also, for knives that don't have a bolster (and I think that applies to Chad's Mullin), you can "choke up" on the blade even more than the picture shows. I also tend to hold my thumb and forefinger much further down the blade, closer to the edge.

Babbo's tripa alla parmigiana is amazing. But we digress... isn't this thread about 'Cesca?

Because stainless steel is the best in terms of (non)reactivity and durability, and such a small layer is used that it doesn't significantly impact the thermal properties of the pan.

Rock on! I made a shaved Brussels sprout and stilton gratin (also included fresh bread crumbs, onion, garlic and evoo) for Xmas eve dinner that blew my parents away.

Yes. My suggestion is that you spend the entire hundred bucks on a 10" chef's knife. Then, if you find down the road that you are really pining away for another kind of knife that does things you can't do with your chef's knife -- get yourself another knife. Over a few years, you will build up a battery of great knives that really fit your use.

They look like giant shrimp.

Why is that? Is there something wrong with the rest of their bodies? Virtually all of the meat on a New England cold water lobster comes from three areas: the tail, the claws and the knuckles. The rest is tomalley, etc. Caribbean spiny lobsters don't have large claws like their New England relatives. Thus no claw meat and no knuckle meat. All that is left is the tail meat.

Yum. I hope they're open on January 1.

Welcome to eGullet, Sarah. Um... I got nothing. Hopefully the others can provide some info. Actually.... isn't Barney Greengrass supposed to have really good chopped liver?

You can use it to make Mayhawnnaise!

FWIW, Dean, a lot of custom makers have a "loaner" knife they'll let you borrow for a week or two. Might be worth exploring.

Dean -- Thanks for including us in your search! One suggestion: Don't go to a knife store. Are there any good, professional-oriented cookware stores in your area? Or perhaps a knife store that is run by real knife fans rather than bored counter-jockeys? A good thing to do might be to take a long, late lunch and check out one of these places during off-hours when they can give you special attention. Get them to explain to you the differences between the different knives they have, get them to lay two or three of them out for you at a time, let you play with them on a cutting board, etc. Another thing you might think of doing is finding out if you have any friends who could lend you a Global chef's knife, maybe borrow a few other styles, get your Henkels sharpened up, and use them all for around a week, changing knives every so often. After a week or 10 days, you should find that you keep on reaching for certain knives.

I am with Malachi -- especially with respect to butter poaching.

Well, now you know one: David Boye. I'm not clear whether you're making just a general comment here about modern Damascus steel, or whether you're interpreting the earlier discussion regarding dendritic steel as relating to modern Damascus steel. As I understand it, they are two entirely different things. In re to dendritic steel, the one thing that I have observed through my own side-by-side testing is that it has markedly better edge-retention properties than any other steel I have used. Whether or not one steel inherrently provides a sharper edge... I'm not sure it's possible to say that. There are many different kinds of sharpness, and what counts as sharpness on one kind of edge doesn't on another. I've never been able to pop hair with a dendritic steel edge, which would make it "less sharp" than some fine grained forged steel edges I have in that respect... on the other hand, I can drag something across a dendritic steel edge and cut much more deeply than I can doing the same procedure with the fine grained forged edge. Yes! Thanks.

That's very odd. The FDA says that "carefully controlled clinical studies show that aspartame is not an allergen." I wonder if it's something else. Do you get the same reaction from just raw aspartame by itself? I wonder if if would happen if you drank a diet coke that had been spiked with enough high fructose corn syrup that you were unable to taste the difference. I am not suggesting, of course, that you don't react the way you say you react. I just wonder a bit about what might be causing it.

Are you sure they're not forged? Or are you trying to say that they're not specially forged like Japanese knives? AFAIK, 99.999% of knife steel is forged. Isn't cast steel the only alternative to forged? Well, there are bangers and there are grinders. Forged, in this instance, means that the knife maker has taken a chunk of steel, heated it in a forge and hammered the knife into shape -- a process that takes several heatings, beatings & quenchings. Okay, I see the point here. Not all forging is equal. But wouldn't you say it is true that, once you beat on the steel and break up the carbide crystals, the steel is forged? Isn't this true even of steel blanks used for the stock removal method? I'm not asking rhetorically -- I'm curious.

See above: "a several ton press drops down on steel blanks and pounds them into shape in one fell swoop"

Are you sure they're not forged? Or are you trying to say that they're not specially forged like Japanese knives? AFAIK, 99.999% of knife steel is forged. Isn't cast steel the only alternative to forged?

The fully clad lines (All-Clad Stainless and All-Clad Cop-R-Chef) use around half as much alumimum as the lines that are only interior clad (All-Clad MasterChef and All-Clad LTD). As a result, they are significantly lighter. If Dennis had the weight of MasterChef or LTD in mind when he looked at the Stainless skillet, that might explain why the Stainless piece seemed light. FWIW, the interior clad pieces only use 2 mm of aluminum. I hardly see how (or why) they would use less.

Heh. Include me in that group! You may be right about the NP guys, accounting for conferences, etc. My exposure to pointy heads mostly comes because I am the son of a very well-known scientist (Nat'l Academy member, etc.).

Well... there are toxins and there are toxins. Potatoes, bamboo shoots and taro all contain toxins that can kill you, and I don't see too many people on eGullet worrying about them. The fact is that there is really no hard evidence that aspartame is all that bad for you. As for the brilliant people and Nobel Prize winners who are afraid of aspartame... Let me just say that I would be very surprised if anyone on these forums has met more NP winners than I. I even have a picture of myself at lunch with Linus Pauling. The fact is, however, that as brilliant as these people may be in some areas, they can be just as whacky in others. Megadoses of Vitamin C, anyone? While I would agree that it is important to have an open mind about chemicals and additives, I would suggest that it is even more important to have a critical and skeptical mind when it comes to reports that such an extensively tested and examined substance is crossing the blood-brain barrier and causing brain tumors, cognitive impairment and so forth. For example, this article here (TechTalk from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) says, "Despite the high consumption of aspartame, the 48 normal subjects showed no changes in mood, memory, behavior, electroencephalograms (which record the electrical signals of the brain) or physiology that could be tied to aspartame, Dr. Spiers found. Although some subjects reported headaches, fatigue, nausea and acne, the same number of incidences were reported by subjects taking placebo and sugar as those taking aspartame." The Food and Drug Administration says, "Analysis of the National Cancer Institute's public data base on cancer incidence in the United States -- the SEER Program -- does not support an association between the use of aspartame and increased incidence of brain tumors." They also say, "To date, FDA has not determined any consistent pattern of symptoms that can be attributed to the use of aspartame, nor is the agency aware of any recent studies that clearly show safety problems."

Well, less sharpening by a factor of three. The one drawback is that dendridic steel is very hard and as a result sharpening is quite a bit more difficult. As for the price... Boye's knives are very expensive. But this is mostly because they are "art knives" with all kinds of fancy images etched onto the side. I doubt many of them are actually used as working knives. When I got my knives (and Chad is correct: Boye provided the knife blanks and my knifemaker did all the rest), they didn't cost all that much more than a comparable Wusthof. They're probably a bit more than that, but certainly not up at the huge prices Boye's knives command. From what I have been able to tell. my guy has left the custom kitchen knife business and is making blades for chicken processing plants, etc. But it's possible he still does the occasional custom kitchen knife. I'll shoot him an email if a number of eGulleters think they'd be interested. Perhaps we can comission a bulk order of "eGullet Specials" from him, or from another custom knife maker. Might be cool, and we could probably get a deal if we made an order of, say, twenty 10" chef's knives. I want one of those big-ass Tichbourne "Chinese cleavers" myself.

"Dendridic" steel is steel that is cast rather than forged. This provides certain desirable properties. Steel, fundamentally, is a bunch of carbide crystals held in a matrix of iron. The carbide crystals stick out on the edge and are what give a blade its actual cutting power. If you look at a polished blade edge under a microscope you will notice that it still looks like a saw. The carbide crystals are the "teeth" of the saw. Forging steel, among other things, involves banging on the hot steel with a hammer. This has the effect of breaking up the carbide crystals and making them smaller. Forged steel with smaller carbide crystals is said to have a finer "grain size." So, if one has a blade made with a steel that has a very fine grain size, the "teeth of the saw" will be smaller -- is a very valuable property in certain applications. It is very good at "push cutting" (cutting something with no side-to-side motion of the blade) and it does very little tissue damage. This is why one would like to use a forged steel with a very fine grain size for a scalpel or a razor. One disadvantage of forged steel with a very fine grain size is that the edge dulle fairly easily. This is because the primary way a steel edge becomes truly dull (as opposed to simply needing to be straightened on a steel) is by having the carbide crystals that form the "teeth of the saw" pop out of the iron matrix. The smaller the grain size is, the weaker the iron matrix's grip is on each individual carbide particle and thus the greater the probability that the particles will pop off of the edge. Dendritic steel is made an entirely different way. David Boye, the modern-day pioneer in this kind of steel, started thinking about fine-grained forged steel and asked: "who cares about minimal tissue damage and clean push-cutting ability when you're cutting up a chicken?" The answer is, well... no one really. Certainly not the chicken. So, what Boye did was to make steel that was not forged at all. Instead, it is cast in blade-shaped molds. When the steel cools, the carbide forms in a large network of interlocking crystals throughout the steel. Since the steel is never forged (i.e., never beaten with a hammer) the carbide crystals stay very large. This has several benefits: First, since the carbide crystals are very large, the "teeth on the saw" are also very large. This gives dendridic steel blades what knife fans call an "aggressive edge" -- which is a fancy way of saying that it will cut the crap out of anything you drag it across with a sawing motion (as opposed to a push-cut motion). One can somewhat mimic this effect with a forged steel blade by sharpening with a course grit, but it's not really the same thing. Second, since the carbide crystals are so large, the iron matrix has a very firm grip on them, and since the crystals are embedded in a network of interlocking carbode crystals, they all have a very firm grip on each other. The result is that the carbide crystals at the edge are very resistant to popping off. The result of that is that the edge stays sharp for a very, very long time. When I was deciding which knives to buy, I tested the dendridic steel knives against a variety of forged steel knives for edge retention (cut a 1" piece of hemp rope and counted how many cuts it took to dull the blade). The dendridic blades retained a keen edge something 300% longer than the forged blades.

It didn't? Flocculate means, roughly, "to aggregate into a mass formed of a number of fine suspended particles."

Right. Doppel Bock is a dark, very rich and malty German beer. Dubbel is a pale, ester-ey, light but often surprisingly alcoholic Belgian beer. Two totally different beers. For the record, there are two main types of beer: Ale is fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast that flocculates on the surface of the liquid. Lager is fermented with Saccharomyces uvarum (once known as Saccharomyces carlsbergenisis) yeast that flocculates on the bottom of the fermenter. Lager is also lagered, which means that it is aged at low temperature for a period of time. Both ale and lager are beer.