Paean to a Pen

This week I was going through some of the thousands of photos that I've taken over the years and suddenly it struck me that there was a Sharpie in many of the photos. That got me to thinking about how this unsung and unglamorous pen is a staple of every restaurant kitchen and that Sharpies rank right up there with knives in terms of importance to chefs. In fact, I've never seen a chef's knife kit that didn't contain a couple of Sharpies. And we have them all over the kitchen.

I use them to label anything and everything. They write prep lists and cross items off prep lists. I use them to manage my ticket rail, crossing off the courses as they are fired and as they go out. I kind of freak out if I get into dinner service and there's not one in my jacket pocket. They are hanging by string in convenient locations in the kitchen—so they don't grow legs—especially near the freezer.

In case you think I'm alone, check this out.

We use them to label all kinds of stuff from our pantry staples

to the sauces and garnishes we use on the line.

They hang around all over.

And my jacket never wants for one or three.

They even go where I go (and claim what I own).

David Lebovitz, eat your heart out!

The Endlessly Useful Silpat

I take certain equipment for granted in a kitchen and I don't really miss it until I am in a kitchen without it. The Silpat, a fiberglass and silicone mat for baking, is one such essential piece of equipment. I am guessing that Silpat stands for "silicone pour la pâtisserie," silicone for pastry. I have a bunch of them here at the restaurant and at home. Here you see an original Silpat that is about 20 years old and a newer knock-off Exopat from Matfer, a competitor.

So ubiquitous are these silicone mats that we call them Silpats no matter the manufacturer. I guess my Matfer rep is used to it: I call in an order for Silpats and she sighs and sends her Exopats. There is no functional difference between a Silpat and an Exopat, and little price difference. I prefer Silpats because I'd like to pay the company that invented the product. Still, my current kitchenware supplier buys from Matfer, so all my new mats are Exopats.

A French chemist named Guy Demarle invented the Silpat and his company Demarle still produces it along with other highly useful silicone products such as the groundbreaking Flexipans. Silpats come in a wide range of sizes, but the most common seems to be the half sheet pan size (11-5/8" x 16-1/2") with the cut corners that you see here.

They have a long lifespan if you treat them well. Wash them with soap and water and a soft cloth; don't put them in the dish machine. Even after you clean them, they're going to feel a bit oily to the touch. That's normal. Also, some staining is normal: see the stains on the Silpat above; what's a few stains after 20 years of hard use? Finally, store them flat to keep from breaking the fiberglass mesh. At home, I store mine in half sheet pans in a drawer that I built in directly under my ovens.

Silpats are a great replacement for parchment paper, which is really a euphemism for silicone paper. Parchment burns if exposed to a hot oven for very long; a Silpat will not. Once I bought my first Silpat about 20 years ago, my use of parchment paper for lining sheet trays became nearly nil (but you wouldn't want to cut a Silpat into a circle to line a tart pan, would you?)

We use them for all manner of pastry: cookies, tuiles, macaroons, biscuits, meringues, and so forth. And they also work great when used in pairs to keep items flat while baking. We often sandwich rounds of prosciutto between two Silpats and bake them until crispy. The crisp rounds then become part of a napoleon. Ditto for two ultrathin slices of potato sandwiching a sliver of truffle as a soup garnish. I recently made "bacon" from carrots in this manner. You just never know what you might need Silpats for and it makes sense to at least have two on hand.

Silpats are available at better kitchenware stores and on the net at Bridge Kitchenware and other retailers. Half sheet pan-sized Silpats are about $20. That's $20 really well spent.

Ten Useful Kitchen Gadgets

While I'm dredging up old stuff from the restaurant web site, I might as well repost this article that I wrote about three years ago for the Northern Virginia Daily. The advice about which kitchen gadgets are actually useful (as opposed to the myriad that are not) is still valid today.

Ever wondered why restaurant food is so different from home food? It’s because we take just a little extra time to make things special. Here are ten of my gadgets and tricks to help you easily glamorize your home meals.

1. Please squeeze me. One look in one of our reach-in refrigerators would show dozens of clear plastic squeeze bottles, like the ones you see holding ketchup and mustard at a diner. They’re filled with everything from flavored oils to homemade sauces to pre-prepared sauces. We use them to dot dishes with flavor and to decorate plates. Blend chives and olive oil and let separate. Decant the oil into a squeeze bottle and you’re ready to go.



2. Beyond coffee. We use the common and cheap coffee grinder for grinding whole spices. As the Indians and Mexicans do, toast whole spices and then grind them for a fresher, more vibrant flavor.



3. Zest for the best. The fantastic Microplane® grater/zester is the tool for grating hard cheese over pasta or a salad. It’s also the tool that we use to grate lime zest over our Thai and Mexican soups.



4. Bag it. Use a pastry bag with a star tip to pipe those mashed sweet potatoes onto your Thanksgiving plates and your guests will think you’re a kitchen genius. For cleanliness and food safety reasons, we’ve switched to one-time-use disposable bags.



5. Be the wizard. Think we’re knife wizards with hours and hours of spare time to hand slice all those beautiful cucumber scales for our cold poached salmon? Or those potato scales for our potato-crusted sea bass? Think again. After having gone through three $250 professional mandoline slicers, we think that cheap Japanese benriners cannot be beat.



6. Blend in. Our inexpensive immersion blender lets us thicken and puree soups right on the stove, without moving the hot pan and without risking burns using the big blender. And it makes salad dressings a snap—we can make small quantities right in the speed pour bottles from which we dress salads.



7. On point. Wonder how we get those lamb racks on point—just how you want them—time and again? It’s a five dollar meat thermometer, the best investment you’ll ever make to safeguard against both over- and undercooking foods.



8. Soft and curly. Another favorite is our soft-handled vegetable peeler. Besides getting a constant workout on potatoes, it’s also responsible for the beautiful cheese curls on our salads and soups. When yours becomes dull, get a new one.



9. Cook’s friend. Parchment paper has hundreds of uses from lining pastry pans, to making icing horns, to shoring up the sides of soufflé pans. A favorite use: making packets of fish, vegetables, herbs and white wine for a sensational baked fish en papillote that will amaze your guests.



10. Foiled again. Forget how useful aluminum foil is? We bake our baby beets in a foil pouch on a sheet pan. They steam without burning and we have no mess to clean. Do the same for roasted garlic to enhance your sauces, stews, and pasta.

What's a Chinois?

A reader sent me an email recently asking what on earth I meant by "pass through a chinois" in my post on the wild boar rack. Sorry, I'm not trying to talk in code; I forget too easily that we don't all speak the same language. A chinois, pronounced SHEEN-wah, is a conical strainer. They are so useful in the kitchen that I own many of them from teacup-sized to the 16" monster farthest away in the photo.

Chinois is a loanword from French that means Chinese and likely refers to the conical hats worn in China and Asia.

There are two basic kinds of chinois as you can see in the photo above. The closest and farthest chinois in the photo are perforated metal cones, which in some kitchens are called china caps. The middle chinois has a fine wire mesh cone and is universally called a chinois in English. The French, when making the distinction and as in English, they often don't, would call the mesh chinois a chinois étamine. Mesh chinois come in coarse, fine, and double mesh, depending on the application for which you need them.

If you work in the business, you might recognize the tami root in étamine. A fine wire (and now, nylon) mesh on a hoop is called a tamis, pronounced tah-MEE. Here is one of my tamis. Besides being a great sifter, it's standard practice to force certain forcemeats for pâtés through a tamis with a flat scraper. The tamis yields a silky texture unachievable by another other means. But because using a tamis is so labor intensive, most kitchens now use high powered food processors, even though the resulting texture of the forcemeat is not quite as good.

We use the perforated metal variety, the china cap, as an all purpose strainer, especially when separating bones and mirepoix from stock. Pressing on the contents in the chinois with the bottom of a two-ounce ladle helps force all the stock through. The wire mesh variety, like its cousin the tamis, we use when we want a very smooth sauce. The wire mesh is too fine for the sauce to drain through on its own, so we force it through with a conical hardwood (beech) pestle.

Chinois are equipped with a hook on the rim opposite the handle so that they will fit over a bowl or pot while in use. You can also buy a three-legged chinois stand to support the chinois. That's just something else to get bent or lost in our kitchen. Hanging the chinois over a stock pot works just fine for us.

There you have it. More than you wanted to know about this kind of colander or strainer.

On Frying Pans

For many years, I have been trying to find really solid frying pans for the restaurant. We use them hundreds of times a day, so they need to be relatively inexpensive and work reliably.

Years ago, I got a stack of used All Clad stainless pans at a good price and they lasted for a couple of years. They were slow to heat but the surface was really nice and the pans looked nice, sort of. After a pan goes through its paces at a restaurant, you would never again say that it really looked nice. But in the end, they proved to be expensive junk. At around $100 apiece, they should have lasted forever, but they couldn't stand up to the professional kitchen. They all delaminated after being heated over very high heat and then being tossed into water in the pot sink.

Like every restaurant, we've always had a stack of Vollrath or Dura-Ware 10-inch aluminum pans. They're relatively cheap and light enough weight to be useful. They heat quickly, but they're going to warp over time and the rivets on the handles are going to come loose, but then, they're cheap. But you can't use them to get a really good crust on anything; everything sticks to aluminum. Still, they're the workhorse of every restaurant kitchen.

We made another foray down the All-Clad way with a couple of their MC2 pans. They look nice and seem to work OK, but they just haven't found favor with us, probably because they're expensive and we feel that we have to baby them.

Then Vollrath introduced some really nice pans in their Tribute line. We have several of their 10-inch stainless clad pans and they work pretty well. While they're on the expensive side (but less than All Clad), they seem to be a good value. They're a little slow, but they seem to be rock solid and the gator grip handles are extremely nice. The jury is still out on them; we've only had them about nine months so they haven't been through the test of time.

But, I finally got fed up with high end pans in my search to find a pan that is inexpensive, fast to heat, robust enough so that it doesn't need a warranty with three pages of disclaimers, and sears the hell out of food. I got so fed up that I went back to basics, 9-1/2" Matfer Bourgeat black steel frying pans, which you see in action in the photo above.

They heat quickly, they sear like crazy, and once broken in, they produce amazing crust on foods with little to no sticking. We can put them on high flame and forget them, toss them smoking hot into the dishwater, and heap the usual restaurant abuse on them, and they just take it, service after service after service. And at less than $15 apiece, they're cheap! We're in the process of replacing all the glamour pans with these French beasts.

Black steel is not for everyone. For starters, it's really heavy and looks like hell after just a few uses. And, it requires constant maintenance to prevent rust. We've had to retrain the dishwashers not to use stainless steel scrubbers on our pans, not to put them through the dish machine, and not to put them through any sanitizer solution. The dishwashers have to give the pans back to us on the line and we either throw them on the grill or in an oven to dry them completely, then we wipe them down with oil all over. So, they take a little upkeep, but no more than my cast iron at home, so I can deal with it.

I am so done with other kinds of pans.

Cross Contamination

A couple days ago, I was sitting on the restaurant deck eating lunch with the art director of a magazine after a photoshoot—we couldn't let all that good food go to waste, now could we?—and during the course of our conversation, he asked, "How antagonistic is your relationship with the Health Department?"

His question seems to be informed by books he's read and stories from the city where he lives. I think I surprised him when I replied that I had never found the Health Department to be against us, that they have always approached me and my restaurant from the perspective of giving us guidance about how to handle food safely, about how to apply the ivory tower "Health Code" to real world restaurant conditions.

We seem to have a really good working relationship, even though we've had the occasional skirmish over the years. The relationship with each inspector has been different, but each has operated from the perspective that we are not trying to handle food badly, that we really do have a vested interest in not harming customers. It has never been an us versus them thing.

It was my guest's turn to surprise me by asking, "Restaurant kitchens are a lot safer than most home kitchens, aren't they?" In the restaurant world, our equipment, procedures, and training are designed to help prevent foodborne illness. So, when I leave the restaurant world where we take all this for granted, I am often shocked by what I see in home kitchens. I have seen the most egregious food handling practices in home kitchens, so I had to agree with him.

This led into a discussion of cross contamination and other terribly unsafe food handling practices that I have witnessed in home kitchens. Simply put, cross contamination is the transfer of pathogens from one food substance to another. More specifically, we're talking about the transfer of pathogens to a food that will not be cooked sufficiently to kill those pathogens, thus greatly increasing the risk of becoming sick.

For example, if you were to cut raw chicken on a cutting board (chicken is notorious for being contaminated with Salmonella) and then you were to chop a salad on the same cutting board without first sanitizing it (Unthinkable? I've seen it!), you would put everyone eating the salad at risk of becoming ill. More frequently, cross contamination is not this obvious. Picture the same scenario, in which the cutting board has been sanitized, but in which you use the same knife, without sanitizing it.

At the restaurant, we use color-coded cutting boards to help prevent cross contamination. As you see in the photo, we break down meat on the red board, poultry on the yellow board, seafood on the blue board, and ready-to-eat foods and vegetables on the green board. Notice that we store the boards by hanging them with good air circulation to ensure that they dry properly.

I'm sure you don't have enough room to store four cutting boards at home (I surely don't, not even in my vast kitchen), so that's not an option for you. But here are a few simple things you can do to prevent cross contamination in your kitchen:

• Be aware that cross contamination is an issue.


• Wash your hands and knives frequently in hot soapy water.


• Plan your cutting such that you prep vegetables and ready-to-eat food before raw proteins.


• Make a sanitizer solution of a capful of household bleach per gallon of water and wipe surfaces frequently with that solution.


• Store raw proteins in your refrigerator well wrapped so that they cannot leak.


• Separate raw proteins in your refrigerator such that if they leak, they cannot contaminate anything else.

You can learn more at www.foodsafety.gov.

What Kind of Knives Do You Use?

Note: much of this information has been published previously on oneblockwest.com.

When I do public demonstrations, the attendees want to know what kind of knife that I use, meaning what brand I use. I almost always reply “one that fits my hand.” There are much more important selection criteria than brand, and here are three very important ones, none of which have much to do with price.

The single most important thing about a knife that you are going to be spending long hours with is fit. The handle must fit comfortably in your hand and you must be able to use it without banging your knuckles on the cutting surface. There is only one way to determine if a knife is comfortable and that is to try one. Try all your friends’ knives and then go to a shop where you can hold many brands in your hand.

Second most important to me is balance, especially in a chefs knife. There needs to be enough weight in the handle to counterbalance the blade, letting the knife rock easily back and forth when mincing.

Third, and something that all the test reports neglect, is ease of sharpening. If a knife is too hard to be readily sharpened, it is useless.

Here's what's on my magnetic knife bar and a little bit about each. Each knife or implement in the photo is labelled with a letter. You'll need to click the small image to the right to open the large photo.

A—First up is my 20-millimeter Econome melon baller from France. I bought this about 20 years ago in New York from Carolynn Bridge at Bridge Kitchenware, the kitchenware mecca for chefs, in their 52nd St. store. Carolynn suggested that if one melon baller was all I wanted, I should use the 20mm one. She was right. I see that son Steven still offers them in sizes from 10 to 28 millimeters. My primary use for the melon baller is hollowing out tomatoes and making cups from squash and cucumbers. It takes some patience to keep the round edge sharp.

B—This is an inexpensive Dexter-Russell 12-inch slicer with a Granton edge, meaning that little air pockets called kullens have been ground into the blade to help food release from the blade. I use this knife for slicing things paper thin, mainly gravlax and hams. This is a very recent acquisition, about two years ago, and is not something you'd need at home. The edge needs babying.

C—This 7-inch flexible boning knife from Henckels is the oldest knife I still use currently. I bought this about 26 years ago and we use it every day here at the restaurant when breaking down meat. Because the blade must be flexible, the steel has to be softer and as a result, this knife takes a great edge very quickly, unlike the rest of the rigid Henckels knives, which are so hard that they are an absolute nightmare to sharpen. I love this knife.

D—Here's my workhorse 8" Wüsthof chefs knife that I bought about 15 years ago to replace a piece of Henckels junk that I had owned since I was 18. This is the extra heavy, extra deep knife that Fred Bridge worked with Wüsthof to develop. I love this knife and my hand knows just how to work it. Truthfully, I rarely use it any longer (for reasons I'll get into below), except for breaking down large fish, rabbits, and chickens. When I was growing up, a lot of chefs thought it was not macho to use an 8" chefs knife. To be a chef's chef, you had to use a 10" knife. What baloney! In a cramped kitchen, what use is a broadsword?

E—Another knife in daily use is my 15-year old 8" Wüsthof slicing knife. It comes in very handy for a lot of tasks, but mainly I use it for skinning and portioning fish and portioning meats. This is the knife I use to cut tenderloins into filets mignons, for example.

F—Cheap and extraordinarily useful, this offset handle F. Dick serrated bread knife is the best value knife I own. It does everything from slicing tomatoes to rough chopping. I probably use this knife more than all the others put together. This one is about three years old and is getting to the end of its life. Time to get a new one and give this one to one of the newbie line cooks.

G—Here's a little 3.5" F. Dick paring knife. Everyone should own one for those pesky little tasks such as hulling strawberries or fluting lemons. I buy cheap ones as they tend to disappear because of their small size. Pesky tasks aside, I never use a paring knife.

H—I break down a lot of fish and nothing is better at pulling the pin bones out of filets than a pair of needlenose pliers. For wet work, you do not want to go to your local hardware store to purchase cheap pliers that will rust. These are expensive stainless steel ones from Messermeister.

I—One of two steels that I use at work, this one is a very light, very fine one from Dexter-Russell that I use daily to keep my blades aligned.

J—Up next is my santoku from Shun, a knife that is pretty new to me and one that has all but replaced my chefs knife in daily use. I bought it about three years ago, looking for a lighter weight knife that could motor through standard prep tasks. When buying the knife, over the course of an hour, I tried about ten similar knives and my selection quickly narrowed the Shun or the Wüsthof. I chose the Shun because the blade has more rocker (more curve) near the tip, letting me use it more like a chefs knife when I want to. I think if I were to do it again, I might choose the lighter and straighter Wüsthof: that little rocker up front on the Shun means that for certain things, I have to chop a bit further back on the heel of the knife than I want to. I am really happy to have a santoku in my arsenal: I use it constantly.

K—Also hanging in my office is my Matfer offset handle icing spatula that is useful for all kinds of applications from serving desserts to spreading batters to turning scallops to lifting tuiles off baking sheets. Matfer is expensive, but it will last my entire life.

L—Finally, you can just see the handle of my Wüsthof diamond-coated heavy steel. I use this steel when I really need to tweak a blade, rather than just touch it up. You must be careful in using such an aggressive steel.

That's my arsenal. As you can see, my hardware comes from a lot of different manufacturers. If I had to recommend one brand, it would be Wüsthof: they make great steel. But don't get hung up on brand.

Over the past 30 years, I've used all kinds of knives from Masamoto sashimi knives, to classic mild steel Sabatiers, to the really slick Global knives, to the ceramic Kyocera knives. And I can summarize this experience with the old maxim: it's not the arrow; it's the archer. That is, practice will make you better with a knife, a better knife will not.

A Sharp Knife is a Beautiful Thing

Most chefs are so used to having really sharp knives that when an edge gets a bit dull, it is a constant source of irritation. It slows us down, primarily, but it is also not nearly as safe. A sharp knife performs the necessary task; a dull knife does everything but and can wind up cutting you pretty badly.

We spend a good bit of time every day tuning up the edges of our knives on a steel. I have two steels, a big heavy diamond steel for serious blade work and a very slick lightweight steel for polishing and truing blades. Still, a steel does not a blade sharpen; it merely realigns and straightens the edge. And if you're not working with a good edge to begin with, you wind up steeling your knife very frequently.

A professional knife needs to go on the whetstone or polishing wheel with some regularity, at least twice a year if not much more frequently to rebuild the edge. After that, realigning the blade with a steel will keep it in tune until the next date with the stone.

Living out here seemingly in the middle of nowhere, we do not have access to all the things that big city chefs do, such as knife sharpening services. On the flip side, we're a lot closer to fresh produce than they are. So, it's been a long, long time since I've really had my knives sharpened.

Yes, I have beautiful Japanese waterstones in many grits in my workshop for accomplishing the task, but what I don't have is the time. And without regular practice sharpening knives, it becomes a tough task to do well.

So I was delighted when a guy came into the restaurant yesterday afternoon asking if we needed any knives sharpened. Yes, this happens regularly in big cities, but never here in Winchester.

After washing the blades post sharpening, I tucked into a side of snapper with my fish knife. What a difference! It reminded me that a sharp knife is indeed a beautiful thing.