slkinsey
-
Posts
11,151 -
Joined
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by slkinsey
-
-
I think that I need to invest in a good sharpener as well.
Say hello to my little friend.
given the amount of money these babies cost and the time between sharpenings assuming you steel your blade regularly, isn't it better to just get it sharpened professionally?
Expensive? It's only 125 bucks for the Apex model. That's not all that much money.
As for professional sharpening... it's always the best thing provided you have someone who really knows what they're doing sharpening your knives. The chances of that? Around 5%.
-
I think that I need to invest in a good sharpener as well.
Say hello to my little friend.
-
The handle is a tad too small for me, both in girth and length
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.
-
having already jumped on the bandwagon, i can say that roasted brussels and cauliflower account for about 90% of the vegetables that i cook. and, i've converted more than a few guests from "haters" to "lovers".
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.
-
Sooooo.... I need to replace the functionality of my current set and wish to keep the expenditure at about $100 or so. I prefer to have some sort of a block to keep them in and hope to find something with a better balance and better feel in the hand. I'm not hung up on "brand names" per se and if buying separate knives from different makers will really benefit me I am open to it. I'm thinking that high carbon steel is a good choice for me but apart fromt hat I have no specifics.
Suggestions anyone?
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.
-
Lobster tails come from spiny caribbean lobster, not from New England cold water lobster. The caribbean lobsters are harvested just for their tails.
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.
-
Personally, my favorite chopped liver comes from Super Sol (Amsterdam & 85th). It's basically liver, onion, and ground pepper. Schmear it on a challah roll, and I'm in heaven.
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?
-
No longer a wish, but reality in the Mayhaw Kitchen. This thing rocks and looks cool to boot.
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.
-
Don't get caught up in the hype of carbides and how individuals interpret the effects of these particles on the steel performance. The real truth lies in performance and surface and electron microscopy and I do not know any makers that use these techniques to explain 'how' ther steel works.
Well, now you know one: David Boye.
The buzz word Damascus signifies a sort of holy grail of steel. Pretty to look at, more expensive to produce, in reality the blades are about the same sharpness as other high quality materials.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.
Hope this material helps.Yes! Thanks.
-
apparently i'm part of that minority that gets headaches, chills, and fatigues from nutrasweet (nothing makes me crash out faster than being accidentally dosed with diet coke), gets damn near anaphylactic shock from ace-k (tingly back of the tongue, it swells, i find it hard to breathe etc)...
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.
-
All of the makers referenced here produce excellent blades. One that i would like to point out in particular is Bob Dozier. His blades are the sharpest non forged knives I have ever used.
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.
-
And what is the meaning of "drop forged"?
See above: "a several ton press drops down on steel blanks and pounds them into shape in one fell swoop"
-
All of the makers referenced here produce excellent blades. One that i would like to point out in particular is Bob Dozier. His blades are the sharpest non forged knives I have ever used.
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."
-
Thanks to both of you for the explanation. The cast dendritic blade sounds amazing, but a tad pricier than my amateur status probably justifies. Though I'm open to argument. Less sharpening by a factor of 300!
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.
Quit drinking that cheap plonk
in Wine
Posted
I've had some 20 - 50 dollar wines that blew the doors off some 200 - 250 dollar wines. A lot of it has to do with (often not entirely deserved) reputation and supply-and-demand. For example, most wine people would agree that Riesling is one of the great white wines, if not the great white wine of the world. And yet, it is also one of the lowest-priced white wines.