The agony of adapting to different equipment

[Baggy]

Just got back from a well equipped vacation rental in Paris – only no tweezers to remove the pin bones from the fish. Fortunately, found a pair of eyebrow tweezers which worked (sort-of).

[Kim D]

The agony of adapting to different equipment beats the heck out of living in a hotel and having no access to a kitchen.

My husband and I have made several month-long trips to London and NYC.

In London, I baked apple pies in a teeny convection oven and I think they were the best apple pies I've ever made. Why? Not because of the equipment, that's for sure. It was because of the ingredients.

In NYC, I make awesome dinners in a kitchen that's smaller than the bathroom. The stove has an oven that has to be lit with a match. The refrigerator has a freezer that has to be defrosted. And the sink (of course there's no dishwasher) is in the corner between the stove and the refrigerator making a very tight squeeze for two people to cook anything.

Give me an inferior kitchen any day of the week. I'll gladly trade cooking in my house in Chicago with a six-burner Thermador, a Sub-Zero refrigerator (with the freezer at the bottom where it belongs), and a Miele dishwasher for an apartment on the Upper West Side with inferior equipment but access to ingredients that I just can't get here in Chicago.

That said, I would love to find a nicer apartment with a better kitchen on the UWS for a price I can afford. Then I'll complain about the equipment.

- Kim

[paulraphael]

I think it's a great set of skills to aspire to. I'm always in awe of my friend who works as a personal chef ... not only does she put together whole menus for clients who typically have special (insane) needs, but she whips up a whole week worth of food for them in one afternoon, in their own kitchens.

It's hard to get around a completely dull knife or impossibly bad set of pans. But a lot of the stress of cooking in strange settings can be reduced by studying your own procedures (and how the foods respond to them) rather than just falling into habit.

Simplistic example: suppose you learn to cook steak by trial and error, and finally base your method on using a certain pan, preheating for 5 minutes, with the gas turned to 4, and cooking for 3 minutes on the first side and 2 on the second. you'll have a reliable method, as long as none of your variables changes. But if you learn the look and feel of a piece of meat that's cooked the way you like, you'll have a much more portable method. You might not like your friend's stove, but you'll be able to manage.

To this end, I spent a lot of time getting temperature readings on chickens that I roast. I don't need a thermometer when I roast in my own oven ... I don't even need to look at the bird, because I have the timing down based on weight. But I don't want to be locked into using my own (rented) kitchen, so I've gone out of the way learn then non-equipment specific cues.