Blackberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream (with recipe!)

I've been working with the ice cream maker attachment for my KitchenAid and having some success. My first take, an attempt at strawberry, went horribly wrong, resembling more of an icy, frozen mousse than ice cream. It tasted fine, but the texture was awful.

More recently, I've been working with blackberries. I made this blackberry ice cream recipe prior to leaving for our recent jaunt to the North Woods, and then I made it again, with the addition of sour cream, yesterday.

After the problems I had due to not properly chilling my mixture the first time, I've been letting it sit at least overnight before spinning, with improved results. Overloading the bowl is another pitfall I quickly learned to avoid.

I've been doing some reading about making ice cream and learning. Many people recommend allowing the mix to sit in the fridge for 24 hours before freezing, and say that this 'curing' of the batter ensures a creamier product. I also hit my mixture with a stick blender right before I churned it, per another website's recommendation.

I learned that the term "overrun" refers to the amount of air that's incorporated into an ice cream while it freezes. The longer the freezing process takes, the more air is whipped into the mix. Italian gelato gets it's luxuriously smooth mouth feel from its lack of overrun, and for me, the denser and smoother an ice cream is, the better, so that's what I'm working toward.

Using the KA attachment on the mixer's lowest speed ensures the quickest freeze time, and therefore the lowest amount of overrun, since the ice cream mixture stays in contact with the freezer bowl longer. Turning up the speed helps in avoiding ice crystals, since the mixture freezes more slowly and uniformly, but this also whips more air into the mixture. Also, as I learned with my batch of strawberry, that never fully froze, the KA's freezer bowl thingy only has so much time before it's not cold enough to perform. This is one huge drawback of the "freezer insert" style of home ice cream makers. You can't just add more ice and salt.



Making fresh fruit ice creams really smooth and creamy is even more challenging, due to the additional factors the fruit brings and how they work against smooth creaminess.

If I'm making a fruit ice cream, I want the flavor to really pack a wallop, so I use a LOT of fruit. I'm using stuff that's in season, and is inexpensive, and that's the point is to enjoy it and really concentrate its flavor as much as possible when it's available.

I also want to use the fruit in its *fresh* form. The first strawberry ice cream recipe I tried involved cooking the fruit down and making a jam, essentially, which was then mixed into the ice cream base. To me, that misses the point of using fresh fruit, which brings all sorts of wonderful flavor notes that disappear when cooked. Cooked berries are nice, but they are a distinctly different taste than fresh ones. It's the fresh flavor that I'm after here, so all the recipes that I'm using involve pureeing and straining out lots of seeds.

But these choices about flavor have a trade-off; the finished product will be less smooth and creamy. Raw fruit freezes to ice crystals, and pureed fruit is always going to lend a more sorbet-like quality to a finished ice cream. That being the case, I need to really try and maximize the techniques I use to ensure what I make is as smooth and creamy as it can be.

Making ice-cream is a very technique-heavy process. Each time I do it I'm surprised by the amount of bowls, strainers, and rubber scrapers that I use. Lots of moving things from one place to another.

Blackberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream

1 C half-and-half
12 oz. sour cream
1 C sugar
1 C heavy cream
4 egg yolks
2 quarts blackberries
1/2 a vanilla bean
pinch salt

1. Mix yolks and half the sugar together in a bowl.
2. In a saucepan, heat half and half, cream, the remaining sugar, scraped vanilla bean, and one pint of the berries. Scald cream, allow to simmer for about five minutes. Remove from heat for a couple minutes. Remove vanilla bean. Puree with stick blender. Strain.
3. Temper warm cream into yolk-sugar mixture, whisking quickly while adding a bit of warm cream, then more, to ensure eggs do not curdle. Return mixture to sauce pan, put on medium heat, and cook slowly, stirring with a rubber spatula until the mixture thickens to coat the back of a spoon.
4. Strain the ice cream mixture into a shallow pan or bowl set in ice*.
5. Puree remaining fresh berries with stick blender. Push through a fine mesh strainer to remove seeds. This should yield about 1 1/2 cups of seedless berry puree.
6. Cool mixture thoroughly. Once cool, add berry puree and sour cream, whisking to fully incorporate everything.
7. Allow to chill overnight in the coldest part of the fridge overnight or for 24 hours.
8. Process according to the ice cream maker's directions.

*lots of advice out there about cooling the mixture down as quick as possible. the bowl set in ice appears to be key. Some say to hold back 25% of the cream and pour it in cold to aid in cooling, but then the proteins in the cold milk won't have been denatured during the scalding process, which is also supposed to aid in producing smaller ice crystals and yielding a creamier product. Ice cream is all about trade-offs.

That's a good recipe, adapted from the one I linked to above. I'll keep working on it, but I've also found a few other recipes that look pretty nice.

Ice Cream Misadventures

Between the amazing peaches and cherries that have been showing up at Costco, farmers' markets, and even my local Jewel(!), we've been eating a lot of fruit recently, and when I stumbled onto a two-dollar ice cream maker at a garage sale on a particularly balmy lunch-hour, I instantly thought of making a great peaches and cream or cherry with mascarpone*.

But the two-dollar ice cream maker's motor died halfway through the first batch of nectarine I made and I ended up finishing it by spinning the metal drum by hand and holding the dasher. Needless to say the end result was not smooth and creamy. Once it was cured--stored in the freezer overnight--it was hard like a rock and full of ice crystals. Not very pleasant to eat, even if we allowed it to thaw for quite a while before digging in.

I had the taste for this project at this point, though, so I started researching. Everything I looked at for less than around forty bucks seemed cheap and chintzy and I figured that the motor on these cheapies would quickly burn out as well.

So when I came across the ice-cream maker attachment for the KitchenAid stand mixer, I figured, ok, that makes more sense, since it uses my KA's motor. (I have one of the older KA's, which are gems. )

After debating the pros/cons of spending $75 on something that's just an attachment, when all these full-on, freestanding appliances can be had for fifty or less, the next round of produce was upon us and my romantic notions of making some beautifully creamy fresh fruit ice creams motivated me to dip into my gifts/bonuses mad money account, and I doubled up on the shipping by including a copy of the new Wilco cd. Splurge!

I went looking for more nectarines or peaches in the midst of a trip over to Babies 'R Us for more childproofing stuff (Nora is into everything these days), but I found some organic strawberries that just smelled great at Fresh Farms, I spun up a batch of strawberry ice cream.

We were in a rush to eat dinner, get the ice cream made, and get out of the house for Henry's camp carnival, which is a pretty huge event here in bucolic Park Ridge, Illinois (an officially-designated Tree City, USA), so I didn't think to take any pictures.

The main issue was that I didn't allow the mixture to chill thoroughly before using the KA attachment to freeze it. Also, forgot to think about the mixture expanding while freezing, so I totally overloaded the bowl. And THEN added a bunch of chopped strawberries for good measure. Then, while it was spinning, I read the instructions where it said not to overload the bowl. Duh.

So it never quite fully froze. After about 50 minutes, it had a light, frothy, mousse-like consistency, and tasted great (I added a few drops of balsamic vinegar for tang), but it was barely cold and not at all smooth and creamy. Pressed for time, I dumped it into tupperware containers, threw them in the freezer, and headed out for an evening of bouncy slides and rubber chicken toss.

I knew it was going to be bad when I put it away, and it was. Very hard and crunchy, even after it softened and I mashed it around with my spoon a lot. Not good.

I'm holding out on any assessment of the KA ice-cream maker attachment at this juncture, because I just went about the whole thing all wrong. The ice cream mixture should always be well-chilled and allowing it to sit overnight is good for flavor development as well, so rushing the process the way I did was a boneheaded mistake. Overloading the well didn't help and, since I've never done this before, I'm just randomly pulling recipes from the web.

Anyone have a good ice cream base recipe? Maybe one that includes a measure for fruit or fruit puree? The peach one I made with the doomed garage-sale ice cream machine was interesting because it involved making a simple syrup, and then using the hot simple syrup to cook the egg yolks while running in the stand mixer. This technique seems easier to me, plus there's less risk of curdling than the traditional method involving tempering the egg yolks with the hot cream, then returning that mixture to the pot to finish cooking.


I'll try it again a few times over the next couple weeks and we'll see how it goes. As I write this, it occurs to me that I'm following Ruhlman and Leibowitz on Twitter, but it never occurred to me to check Ratio, or Leibowitz's ice cream book. Duh again. Learning process.






*ugh. huge pet peeve, here. The endless inability to pronounce the name of this soft, creamy fresh cheese. Mas-car-, folks, not mar-ska-. And don't get me started on Chee-pohl-tay.

Cheap Stuff That Works Vol. 4--The Best Sauté Pan

Ok, I'm not going to mince words here. I've done the work. I've tried everything. And I can say, without a doubt in my mind that these French carbon steel pans from de Buyer are the best you can get, even if you spend twice what they cost.

Calling them "cheap" might be a bit of a stretch, but considering how they compare to the really pricey stuff that's comparable in quality, they're a great value and well deserving of being tagged as part of my Cheap Stuff That Works series.

I got a big load of All-Clad LTD pans for my first wedding. They're extremely high-quality pans and I still have them, some fifteen years later. They look great and function well. But the French carbon steel pans leave them in the dust, and the All-Clads are roughly double the price.

Check it out. This 12" pan is going for just shy of a hundred bucks (marked down from the ludicrous $155 list price) over at Amazon.com. That's a good price that you'd have to shop around for. But the same size on the French steel can be had for $69.95 from the Chef's Catalog website.

And it's a superior pan!

Ok, some things to know: first, the French carbon steel pans require, like cast iron, seasoning. That means they arrive clean and you have to dirty them up before you can use them. It's a really easy process that I've touched on before. There are tutorials all over the internet on how to do it, so I'm not going to get into it in much depth here. Basically, what I do is wipe the inside of the pan down with an oil-soaked paper towel, and then throw the pan in a 400° oven for a few hours. I try to do it when I'm using the oven for something, so I'm not wasting too much energy. You can do it over a burner as well, which is what the picture above shows.

The main way to season your pans is to cook with them. There's really no way to quickly get the seasoning that repeated usage over time produces.

Second, you shouldn't use soap to clean the pan. But if it's well-seasoned, you won't need to. A rinse with hot water and a good wipe with a wet scrubbie (or, alternately, salt) will do the job.

In order to allow the seasoning to set, you should avoid cooking food with a high acid content or deglazing with wine for the first few months. This is all part of the normal seasoning process, though, and once you've got a nice well-set crust on the pan, you can do anything you want (even use soap) and the seasoning won't go anywhere. It just takes a while for it to build up.

But once it's there, it's a thing of beauty. A well-seasoned pan is more non-stick than the best Teflon pan, and without the dubious chemicals found in the non-sticks. Pictured to the right is my big, honkin' 14-incher that I've had for about four years. The patina on there is so solid that I can use soap, scrape it with metal tongs, deglaze, whatever, and the seasoning isn't going anywhere. They're not pretty, these pans, but they work. If you want pans to hang on your pot rack and look shiny, these aren't the best choice. They're for cooks that use their gear for cooking.

The thick, heavy construction of these pans is wonderful for heat conductivity, comparable to cast iron, but they have the traditional shape that cast iron lacks, and can be manipulated a lot more easily. They also have just the most perfect slope to the sides, which causes a quick back-and-forth shake of the pan to flip the food nicely without having to actually pick the pan up off the burner.

There are quite a few products out there that are labelled "French steel" or "blue steel", and they're all pretty good, but I've had the best experience with these de Buyer brand pans which are part of a line this company is calling "Carbone Plus". They have a few lines, but this is the heaviest of the bunch, which, for the purposes for which this pan is suited, is what you want.

Eight to ten years ago, it was almost impossible to find these pans in the US. I worked in a restaurant back then which had them shipped in from France at great expense. Now, they're everywhere. I see them at Williams-Sonoma, Sur la Table, Chef's Catalog, and lots of the online shops. Shop around, though, because some of the fancier places are charging 25% or more over what discount outlets charge. The deal at this link, where you get an 8", a 10" and a 12" inch for $140, seems pretty good, considering that's still less than the list price of ONE 12" All-Clad.

Check them out. You'll thank me later.

Smokin'!

It's the first day of Spring and the sun is shining, so that's reason enough for me to bust out the smoker. I use a Weber Smokey Mountain smoker and generally do ribs, chicken, and pork shoulder at least a couple times a month when the weather is good.

It's easy and the results are delicious, but it's quite the process. There is a bit of a learning curve to get started. And mastering the process is a long journey. But there are resources available.

I used Gary Wiviott's excellent Master the WSM Smoker in Five Easy Dinners Course, which I stumbled onto via LTH Forum. Followed it to the letter, I did. And emerged with a good amount of working knowledge about how to handle the smoker. I highly recommend Prof. Wiviott's method for novices.

Reading GWiv's website will give anyone interested the fine details and methods, so I'm not going to cover all that. What I will do is gloss over the process, giving whoever's interested a bit of an intro into barbecue, generally, and the WSM, specifically. If you find yourself wanting more specifics after reading this, they're easy enough to find.

First, I'll define what we're talking about. "Barbecue" is a term that is often misused. It refers to a process of cooking meat (usually) for long periods of time over low, indirect heat, in near-constant contact with the smoke of hardwood. Low, smokey, and slow cooking. The trick is to keep the smoke moving across the meat while keeping the cooking temperature low; usually around 200°-250°F.

The WSM accomplishes this by having the fire burn at the bottom of the "bullet", and then placing a pan full of water between the fire and the the racks that hold the meat in the upper area of the unit. The water pan helps to moderate the temperature, as well as catch drippings from the cooking meat that could result in flare-ups if they landed in the fire.

This process allows the smoke to infuse and flavor the meat, and the long, low-temp cooking causes the collagen and connective tissue in certain tougher cuts of meat to break down, resulting in a transformation that anyone who loves good barbecue is familiar with. Cuts like beef brisket, pork shoulders, and ribs become meltingly tender and unctuous when given four, eight, or 12 hours of the barbecue treatment. It's a unique way of extracting the most flavor and enjoyment out of these particular pieces of meat.

One thing that really makes me bristle is hearing people referring to their grill (especially a gas grill) as a "barbecue" or saying that they're going to have a "barbecue" when they're planning on cooking some steaks, burgers, or dogs on the grill. THAT'S NOT BARBECUE!!! That's "grilling". There's an enormous difference.

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against grilling. I own a gas grill and use it often. But I don't call the burgers, chicken, or portobellos I cook on my grill "barbecued" because they're not.

Grilling is a high heat method of cooking in which the food sits on a grate directly above, and in close proximity to, the heat source--usually open flames. The foods cook very quickly. Therefore, it's best suited to items that are leaner and inherently tender; steaks, chops, fish, burgers, etc. "Lesser" cuts like ribs and brisket would be a disaster on the grill, as the tougher fibers of these meats would not break down during the quick grilling process. Ribs are often finished on a grill, but try grilling them from their raw state and then eating them. Not good.

Even if you're using a charcoal grill, and loading it up with real hardwood charcoal (as opposed to those nasty, chemical-laden "briquettes"), you're still grilling. If the heat is high and direct, it's not barbecue.

Grilling is often considered (especially by marketing/advertising types) as the ultimate "guy thing". Take a look at the father's day gift ideas every year and all you see are these high-tech grilling gadgets and tools. But smoking is much more of a real guy thing than cooking a steak on one of those $4,000 gas grills with their infrared sear burners could ever hope to be.

I mean, think about it; anyone can turn a knob, wait a few minutes, plop a steak on a grill, poke it with their silly temperature sensing fork a few times, and then pull it off when the thing beeps. A friggin' monkey could do it.

Smoking, on the other hand, involves fire. Fire that you light with a flame. Fire that burns differently every time, depending on the air temperature, the wind, and the quality of the charcoal.

Like the primeval ancestors that came before him, a true barbecuer makes a fire and that fire is a living thing that must be controlled. It's much more of a "guy thing" to work with your fire, learn its idiosyncrasies, and figure out how to simultaneously tame and maintain it. There is much skill involved with this. Turning a knob and clicking the igniter on your big, shiny, culinary equivalent of a Hummer doesn't put you in touch with your inner caveman, no matter how much you grunt like the guy from Home Improvement when you do it.

I joked in my last entry about how I enjoy taking on projects with steep learning curves. Well, this one's no joke. All the senses are involved in the smoking process--watching the fire and meat, smelling what the fire's doing, listening to hear when the water pan needs refilling and when the charcoal has gone to ember, touching the meat to figure out if it's reached that falling-apart level of tenderness.

Not only that, but once you've got the basics down, there are an infinite number of variables to mess around with. You've got your various rubs and marinades to play with. Hardwood options include oak, hickory, mesquite, pecan, apple, alder, and more. The classic meats to use are brisket, pork shoulder, and chicken, but once you've got those nailed, you can start branching out with turkey, fish, smoking your own pork belly for homemade bacon, making your own smoked sausages, and on and on. It's also nice to smoke non-meat items while your main dish is going. I usually do a pot of baked beans that I set on the smoker for a few hours while the ribs or chicken is going, and I've also smoked onions, peppers, and even potatoes to use in side dishes.

It's one of those minute-to-learn, lifetime-to-master things. And those are often the best things.

Cheap Stuff that Works Vol.3--Kyocera Ceramic Peeler

I had reservations about including this awesome new gizmo (I got one for Christmas) in my "Cheap Stuff" series, because with its nearly eighteen-dollar price tag it's really not cheap at all.

But it works. Holy smokes, does this thing work.

It's as if, before you picked it up, you had never actually used a peeler. Never even heard of one. It's like all the other so-called peelers you've been using were constructed out of old Diet Coke cans or rusty license plates.

I've been reading and wondering about ceramic blades for a long time, but I've never tried one. Basically, they're made out of a special type of ceramic which is like the hardest surface known to man, second only to diamonds. The upside of this is that they become and remain really sharp. The downside is that they're nearly impossible to sharpen yourself (you have to send them in to the company to sharpen), and they can shatter if dropped or used for more challenging tasks like cutting through bones or smashing garlic cloves.

Due to the negatives, the fact that I love my carbon steel Sabatiers, and the fairly prohibitive price tag on some of the more decent brands of ceramic knives, I'd never gotten one. But someone laid this sweet little Kyocera ceramic peeler on me for Christmas (thanks, Mom--sorry about how I ripped into the mango splitter you gave me a few Christmases ago!) and it's really a perfect way to kind of try out the whole ceramic blade thing without having to spend eighty or a hundred bucks on a new knife (which I don't even need--I have too many knives already).

(Wow! Just now while I was googling 'Kyocera' so I could provide the link above, I discovered that they make a ceramic-bladed mandoline that looks to be almost as affordable as the trusty old Benriner. I so don't need to buy that. But I want it. And it's available in my choice of four high-fashion colors....and I have a responsibility to the readers of this blog. Must. Stay. Strong. Must. Not. Shop. Online....)

Anyway, it's probably pretty clear by now that I love this new handy-dandy peeler. The blade is freakishly sharp. It glides effortlessly across the surface of normal stuff like carrots, parsnips, and potatoes, but it also does a pretty damn good job peeling thick, tough stuff like butternut squash that you'd normally resort to using a knife on. And due to the fact that the blade is so mind-blowingly sharp, it really shines when peeling delicate stuff like tomatoes, ripe pears, and grapes.

Ok, that was just a test to see if you're paying attention. I didn't use my new best friend the cool red peeler to peel a grape. But this thing could probably do it if you really decided you wanted to. In fact, if I had any grapes in my fridge, I'd go peel one right now, just to say I did. But I don't.

The coolest thing about this peeler, though, is that the blade rotates 180 degrees. So righties and lefties can use it the normal, vertically-oriented way, and you can also rotate it only 90 degrees and use it like a Y-peeler. It slices! It peels grapes! It can remove unsightly body hair! It's three, three, three peelers in one!

(As a ridiculously off-topic aside, has anyone besides me laughed their ass off at those Sham-Wow commercials that have been airing recently? The guy who does those commercials has this hilarious, strangely dark, self-parodic way of delivering the classic Ron Popeil-style, in-your-face, as-seen-on-tv ad schtick. Seriously, mark this guy down. He's one to watch.)

Oh, one caveat. This peeler has a single-sided blade, meaning that it can only cut in one direction. Most peelers, since they lack the rotating head, have a double-sided blade allowing for either right-handed or left-handed use. An added benefit of the double-sided blade is that you can peel in both directions--ie, on the downstroke and then back on the upstroke. I don't peel this way, but for those of you who this is important, this may not be the peeler for you.

Anyway, since it really is like three tools in one, due to the rotating head, and since good quality peelers already go for eleven or twelve bucks these days, I'm urging everyone to ditch the habit of buying that ubiquitous metal piece-o'-crap that you buy in the grocery store that gets dull so fast that you probably have three of them rattling around your utensil drawer. Just stop.

Cheap tools end up costing more in money and headaches over the long run. Spend the extra eight or ten bucks, emerge from the Stone Age, and step into the high-tech, 21st century world of vegetable preparation.

Cheap Stuff that Works Vol.2--Benriner Japanese Mandoline

Stuff that works is good. Stuff that lasts a long time and works is really good. Stuff that works, lasts a long time, and costs less than twenty bucks is worth blogging about. (Although some people seem to think their bellybutton lint is worth blogging about).

At any rate, I will now sing the praises of the Benriner Japanese Mandoline Slicer (pictured above). This little gem does everything the big, expensive, stainless steel mandolines do, for a fraction of the price. Plus, it's easier to clean, easier to change/replace the julienne teeth on, and....did I mention how friggin' cheap it is?

Ok, some background; basically, a mandoline is a device that houses a very sharp blade in a body that allows the user to slide a piece of food (like, say, a potato) across it, yielding a very thin, even slice (like, say, for a potato chip). Most have additional attachments that add teeth to the blade so that the thin slice can also be cut cross-wise at the same time it's sliced, producing uniform julienne strips. They're widely used in restaurant kitchens because they allow cooks to do things more consistently and faster than they could do with their knives.

Most restaurant kitchens use this mandoline. It's French, made by a company called Bron, and costs about $200. It works well, although it's kind of tricky to configure--you have to flip the base/support thingy around a few different ways to get it to stand the way you want--and also, the teeth tend to get bent after a while. But it's a good product. It works.

I will now digress with a story; when I was in culinary school, I landed my first real restaurant job. I was making $6.50 an hour at a now-defunct place called Spruce here in Chicago. I had never worked in a restaurant before and had been in culinary school for about 9 months. This was where I first encountered a mandoline. Of course, the moment I first encountered this device, we were deep in the shit, way behind, and the fire-breathing Napolean running the show was screaming for something--I can't quite remember what--but I do know that it involved cutting some sort of root vegetable razor-thin on a mandoline.

So I ran to the cooler, plunged my hands into buckets filled with ice cold water and the root vegetable in question, neatly peeled in quantity ahead of time, ran back to my station near the fryolator, and set up the mandoline as quickly as I could, after which, I began slicing, frantically, the desperately-needed root vegetable (I think it was taro...or maybe yucca) so that chips could be made. Chips on which, I was led to believe, the entire success of the restaurant depended.

Victory! As my hand worked the root vegetable across the blade of the mandoline in a blur, a pile of paper-thin slices began to accumulate beneath the device. Another cook swept them into the fryer as fast as I could slice them and the highly in-demand chips were produced. Crisis of the moment averted. The fate of the restaurant was secure! "Don't forget to season them, you stupid piece of shit!", the little genius chef barked as his beady little eyes spotted them emerging from the fryer. "Yes, chef!", I replied, pleasantly surprised by his acknowledgment of my hard work. He was clearly impressed by my speed and prowess.

But as the emergent situation resolved itself and the yucca (or taro) chips were placed perilously atop the dish for which they would serve as the essential garnish, I noticed something strange. Why was my cutting board all red? What's all this mess under my mandoline.....? Wait....is that....?

Yep. Blood. My blood. A lot of it.

These mandolines are sharp. Sickeningly, frighteningly sharp. So sharp was the blade of this brand-new mandoline, that I had run my four fingertips, along with the side of my thumb, across the blade multiple times without even feeling it. Of course, once the heat of the moment passed and I saw the blood, my brain stem finally re-connected with the nerves in my fingers and the pain hit me all at once, blindingly.

Suffice to say that I worked the rest of the shift with two rubber gloves on my hand and my fingers looked like wooden matchsticks because the tips kept bleeding and the blood built up in the fingertips, reservoir-tip style, and balooned up. Cuts inflicted by really sharp blades take forever to stop bleeding.

That little story is intended to serve as the disclaimer for this piece of equipment. Warning--blades are sharp. It's written on the box too, but I think my anecdote makes a stronger impression.

Getting back to the subject at hand, the Benriner's blade is equally sharp. Did I mention it's twenty bucks? Less, even. I saw one at H-Mart the other day for like fifteen.

So what's the difference between the cheapie and other mandolines like the $400 Shun model, the above-mentioned Bron, or the as-seen-on-tv V-slicer?

Not much. The Benriner can't do gaufrettes (aka "waffle-cut"). So, if that's a deal-breaker, you can shell out the extra $180. That'll buy you a lot of trips to Arby's. Or, you could just buy yourself an old fashioned krinkle cutter for five bucks and use the $175 you have left to buy like 700 pounds of potatoes. Is anyone really making waffle-cut fries at home anyway?

Other than that, the wonder-cheapie does everything the big, heavy, shiny mandolines can do. Seriously. The expensive ones almost certainly have better blades that will last longer, but you can buy ten Benriners for the same price as one Bron, and I guarantee that the Bron's blade won't last ten times as long. I've had the same Benriner for about four years now and it's fine.

What else? Well, the plastic on the lil' cheapster gets stained. Mine's kind of an ugly red/orange color from doing carrots and beets on it, and it won't wash off. The color is somehow kind of impregnated into the plastic. What. Ever. Again, if this bugs you, toss it and buy another. They're twenty bucks. But it doesn't bug me. I don't need my kitchen tools to be shiny. Or even clean.

What else can I tell you? You'll lose some of the teeth, but you can buy replacements for about five bucks. DO NOT lose the screw that adjusts the slice thickness. I worked with a guy once who always lost the most important little element of any machine and he always tried to jimmy it up with wooden skewers. I spent way too much of my life adjusting the broken bits of skewer that he'd jammed into the lid of the robot coupe, the screw adjustment on the mandoline, and the ice cream spinner. Just don't unscrew it all the way.

Common sense. Such is life. Why spend $200 when you can get almost the same thing for $20? You'd be surprised how many people would when the $200 version is shiny, French, and the only one they sell at Macy's, Williams-Sonoma, or wherever. Don't do it. Buy the cheap little Benriner and use the money you save to buy more root vegetables.

What Not to Get Me for Christmas

I'm a chef.

For some reason, people, knowing I'm a chef, like to get me kitchen gadgets for gifts. Why? I really have no idea.

Would you get a carpenter tools? Would you get an photographer a camera? No, of course not. You'd assume that: a.) they already have this stuff, and, b.) they have a very specific set of criteria for the tools that they use in their trade.

So it never fails to amaze me when I receive stuff like a "mango cutter" for a gift. I already have a mango cutter. It's called a knife.

Ok, stop right there. Maybe you think I'm being arrogant or ungrateful. I'm not. A mango cutter is just plain impractical. Take a look at the picture in that link. The device is used by lining it up and then pushing down onto the mango. Now, when you eat a good mango, what's it's main characteristic? A ripe mango is soft and almost mushy. If you place this oxo good grips guillotine collar type thing over it and press down, what's going to happen? Are you going to get nice, clean, ready-to-eat mango halves? No! You're going to get a smashed mango.

News flash, people; I get paid because I know how to take apart a ripe mango so that I can get all of the juicy fruit off the pit and skin and cut it into even, pretty pieces.

Here are some more classics:

An avocado cutter, herb snips, a corn "zipper", a $30 electric potato peeler, a garlic roaster (tin foil accomplishes the same thing) and what's got to be the dumbest of the dumb gadgets, a banana slicer. Is slicing a banana even slightly difficult for anyone over the age of six? You've *got* to be kidding me. I already have a dozen or so banana slicers in the drawer. They double as butter knives.

This stuff makes me sad. It attempts to take people's lack of knowledge about how to cook or prepare food and parlay that into sales of stupid made-in-china garbage. If people would just read up and get themselves a good sharp knife, 95% of this stuff would disappear overnight.

So, please....DO NOT get me this kind of stuff for Christmas.

Cheap Stuff that Works Vol. 1--Reversible Grill/Griddle

Allow me to wax rhapsodic about my twelve-year-old well-seasoned heavy cast anodized aluminum reversible grill/griddle. It rocks. I have a ridiculous number of expensive pots and pans, such as a bunch of AllClad LTD that I got as gifts for my first wedding, a few Le Creuset pots, and some fancy French blue steel pans that I discovered when I cooked in Europe. Yet I use this grill/griddle almost every day.

I have a 30" range with only four burners, yet this thing sits spanning two of them and almost never gets put away. It cost me twenty bucks.

Now, they're a bit more than that today, but you can still find these guys for less than forty bucks all over the web. I cannot recommend these things highly enough. In fact, this simple slab of metal works so well, and costs so little, that it should be considered an island of sanity amidst a churning sea of single-use kitchen appliances and implements. In its honor, I'm going to begin a segment I'm calling "Cheap Stuff that Works".

Stay with me here, because there's two sides to this coin. On the one hand, stuff that works the way it's supposed to, lasts a long time, and isn't expensive is hard enough to find and should be celebrated in its own right. But the other side of this coin is that there's so much useless garbage being marketed to home cooks that it's sometimes hard to take a step back and realize that the best stuff is sometimes the simplest.

For instance, a friend of mine's wife has an electric appliance called a "quesadilla maker". These handy-dandy things retail for twenty to thirty bucks and when you plug them in, they....uh....apply heat to tortillas that you've placed cheese in between. Whoa! Talk about re-inventing the wheel. It's a plasticky piece of garbage that's made in China and has snazzy thematic southwestern decorations and chile pepper-shaped handles. Odds are, the thing'll break within two years.

Needless to say, you can see where I'm going with this. I get to save my twenty five bucks because I already have a "quesadilla maker". It's pictured above, where it's functioning as a cornmeal-ricotta pancake maker. AKA, a griddle. Twenty-five bucks buys a lot of flour tortillas and cheese, not to mention the counter space that's freed up.

But wait...there's more. If you act now, your cast aluminum (or cast iron--they're great too) reversible grill/griddle can replace other small appliances that manufacturers, marketers, and department stores will try and convince you are essential. Yes, folks, this thing does it all; it's not just a pancake maker and a quesadilla maker--it's also a panini maker, a "griddler", and an indoor BBQ and grill. It replaces literally hundreds of dollars worth of these "unitaskers" (with respect to Alton Brown), and is easier to clean, has no moving parts, no electronics, and will never break.

There are a few tricks to using this versatile gem; first, it needs to be seasoned in order to attain that nice black nonstick coating. There are plenty of sites that'll fill you in on how to season cast iron, but you can also just start cooking on the thing. It'll season itself pretty decently over time. Seriously...cook a griddle full of bacon on it twice and you're done.

Another great tip for use on both the grill and griddle sides; have a large metal bowl or a square metal baking dish available for use as a cover. If your grilled cheese or chicken breast is browning too quickly and the outside's getting done before the cheese is melted or the chicken is fully cooked, just dome it. Pop the bowl or baking dish upside down over the food and you'll get a nice convection action which will act as a small oven, allowing the inside of the food to cook more quickly and stay even with the outside.

Oh, and know your burner strengths. I have a range where some burners are stronger than others, and my grill/griddle sits astride a 22K BTU burner in the back and only a 15K BTU burner in the front. So, if the burners are set at the same level, the back will run hotter. I like it this way, as it gives me two different cooking 'zones', but it's important to know how your cooktop's burners are configured, especially front-to-back.

Other than that, sky's the limit. In our house, it's most frequently used for pancakes, bacon, eggs, hash browns, grilled cheese sandwiches, and....yes, quesadillas. I rarely use the ridged 'grill' side, unless it's super-freezing outside, but I've used it for chicken breasts and the occasional burger in the past. Works fine. The grease and juices drain off the meat via the large channels and grease troughs built into the sides allowing for a good char and browning.

In short--it's a cheap thing that works. A rare and valuable thing. Something to be appreciated. Celebrated, even.