Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [31]
HOW TO COOK LIKE THE PROS
UNLESS YOU'RE ONE OF us already, you'll probably never cook like a professional. And that's okay. On my day off, I rarely want to eat restaurant food unless I'm looking for new ideas or recipes to steal. What I want to eat is home cooking, somebody's anybody's - mother's or grandmother's food. A simple pasta pomodoro made with love, a clumsily thrown-together tuna casserole, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, all of this is pure exotica to me, even when I've been neck-deep all day in filet mignon and herb-infused oils and all the bits of business we do to distinguish restaurant food from what you get at home. My mother-in-law would always apologize before serving dinner when I was in attendance, saying, 'This must seem pretty ordinary for a chef . . .' She had no idea how magical, how reassuring, how pleasurable her simple meat loaf was for me, what a delight even lumpy mashed potatoes were - being, as they were, blessedly devoid of truffles or truffle oil.
But you don't want to know this. What you'd like to know is how to make your next dinner party look as though you've got the Troisgros family chained to the stove in your home kitchen. Maybe you're curious about the tricks, the techniques, the few simple tools that can make your plates look as if they've been prepared, assembled and garnished by cold-blooded professionals.
Let's talk about tools first. What do we have in our kitchens that you probably don't? The joke is that many of our stock items - herb oils, crushed spices, chiffonaded parsley, pureed starches and veggies - are often made with home-model equipment, just like yours. I may have a 25-quart professional Hobart mixer and an ultra-large Robot-Coupe, but chances are I used a home blender to make that lovely roast red pepper coulis dotted with bright green basil oil drizzled around your plate. So, what do you absolutely need?
You need, for God's sake, a decent chefs knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers - all those medium-size 'utility' knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers - not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef's knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously. But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won't)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I'd forgo the Germans.
Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has - in addition to its many other fine qualities - the added attraction of looking really cool.
Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need?