Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [33]
Gaufrette wha'? That's French for waffle-cut, and what we're talking about here is a potato chip. You can do that. All you need is what's called a mandolin, a vertically held slicer with various blade settings. They make some very cheap, very effective ones in Japan these days, so it's not a major investment. One of these bad boys can help you make those slick-looking, perfectly uniform julienned and bâtonnet-cut veggies you thought they cut by hand last time you ate out - and it cranks out lovely waffle cuts with a twist of the wrist. Dauphinois potatoes cut to identical thickness? No sweat. You didn't think they actually cut those with a knife, did you?
All right, the mandolin won't cut meat, and it certainly won't make paper-thin slices of prosciutto. You need a professional rotary cold-cut slicer for that, like they have at the deli. The home versions suck. But I highly recommend, if presenting sausage or meat on a buffet, that you slip the neighborhood deli guy a few bucks to slice what you need before you arrange it on platters. It makes all the difference in the world. Or if you have a few extra bucks, read the back of the paper for notices of restaurant auctions. As you've probably gathered by now, restaurants go out of business all the time, and have to sell off their equipment quickly and cheaply before the marshals do it for them. I know people who buy whole restaurants this way, in what's called a turnkey operation, and in a business with a failure rate of over 60 percent they often do very well. You can buy all sorts of professional quality stuff. I'd recommend pots and pans as a premium consideration if scavenging this way. Most of the ones sold for home use are dangerously flimsy, and the heavyweight equipment sold for serious home cooks is almost always overpriced. Stockpots, saucepans, thick-bottomedsaute pans are nice things, even necessary things to have, and there's no reason to buy new and no reason to pay a lot just wait for that new tapas place on the corner to go out of business, then make your move.
Let me stress that again: heavyweight. A thin-bottomed saucepan is useless for anything. I don't care if it's bonded with copper, hand-rubbed by virgins, or fashioned from the same material they built the stealth bomber out of. If you like scorched sauces, carbonized chicken, pasta that sticks to the bottom of the pot, burnt breadcrumbs, then be my guest. A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent - the victim's head or your pan - then throw that pan right in the trash.
A non-stick saute pan is a thing of beauty. Crepes, omelettes, a delicately browned fillet of fish or tender skate wing? You need a nice thick non-stick pan, and not one with a thin veneer of material that peels off after a few weeks. And when you buy a non-stick, treat it nice. Never wash it. Simply wipe it clean after each use, and don't use metal in it, use a wooden spoon or ceramic or non-metallic spatula to flip or toss whatever you're cooking in it. You don't want to scratch the surface.
I don't want to oversimplify here. Obviously, if you have no sense of taste or texture, and no eye for color or presentation hell, if you can't cook at all - then all the equipment in the world ain't gonna help you. But if you can throw together a decent meal, can read a cookbook, well then, you can do a lot better if you spend some time playing with the toys I've mentioned.
There are also some ingredients that separate food at home from food in a restaurant - stuff that we in a professional kitchen have on hand that you probably don't - and I'll tell you now which of these make all the difference in the world.
Shallots. You almost never see this item in a home kitchen, but out in the world they're an essential ingredient. Shallots are one of the things - a basic prep item in every mise-en-place -