Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [32]
Okay, there are a couple of other knives you might find useful. I carry a flexible boning knife, also made by the fine folks at Global, because I fillet the occasional fish, and because with the same knife I can butcher whole tenderloins, bone out legs of lamb, French-cut racks of veal and trim meat. If your butcher is doing all the work for you you can probably live without one. A paring knife comes in handy once in a while, if you find yourself tourneeing vegetables, fluting mushrooms and doing the kind of microsurgery that my old pal Dimitri used to excel at. But how often do you do that?
A genuinely useful blade, however, and one that is increasingly popular with my cronies in the field, is what's called an offset serrated knife. It's basically a serrated knife set into an ergonomic handle; it looks like a 'Z' that's been pulled out and elongated. This is a truly cool item which, once used, becomes indispensable. As the handle is not flush with the blade, but raised away from the cutting surface, you can use it not only for your traditional serrated blade needs - like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on - but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish. My sous-chef uses his for just about everything. F. Dick makes a good one for about twenty-five bucks. It's stainless steel, but since it's serrated it doesn't really matter; after a couple of years of use, if the teeth start to wear down, you just buy yourself another one.
Knives are obvious. What other toys are in the professionals' bag of tricks? Numero uno - the indispensable object in most chefs' shtick - is the simple plastic squeeze bottle. Maybe you've seen Bobby Flay on TV artfully drizzling sauce around a plate with one of these - the man's been making Mexican food look like haute cuisine for years with these things. Sure, it's just ancho pepper mayonnaise he's squirting all over that fish, but it looks like . . . well . . . abstract, man!!! No big deal acquiring these things, they're essentially the same objects you see at roadside hot-dog stands, loaded with mustard and ketchup. Mask a bottom of a plate with, say, an emulsified butter sauce, then run a couple of concentric rings of darker sauce - like demiglace, or roast pepper puree - around the plate, and pay attention here, folks, now drag a toothpick through the rings or lines, and you'll see that all the fuss is about nothing. It should take you about half an hour of dicking around with a couple of squeeze bottles and your toothpick to grab the concept fully. This same gag is used by pastry chefs to swirl chocolate or raspberry sauce through creme anglaise and allows them to charge you another three bucks a plate for two seconds of work that you could easily train a chimp to do.
But. . . but Chef, you say . . . how do they make the food so tall? How can I make my breast of chicken and mashed potatoes tower like a fully engorged priapus over my awed and cowering guests? The answer is yet another low-tech item: the metal ring. A thin metal ring, or cut-down section of PVC pipe, about an inch and a half to two inches tall and varying inches across, is the backbone of pretentious food presentation. Just spoon your mashed potatoes in here - or better, pipe the spuds in with a pastry bag - and you are in business. Just pile it high, slip off the collar, stack your vegetable, deposit your chicken on top of that, and you're halfway to making that fuzzy little Emeril your bitch. Jam a gaufrette potato into the mashed, maybe a sprig