Herald Sun, Citystyle
Home cooks are spoiled for choice when it comes to equipping their kitchens. ED CHARLES looks at the essentials, and the tools we love to use
WE’VE come a long way from cooking in a bush oven over an open fire. The question is whether all our progress has been positive, with kitchen fads changing as frequently as hemlines.
Glossy food magazines and products endorsed by celebrity chefs drive our desire to clutter our kitchens.
Our grandparents survived without Gordon Ramsay’s Royal Doulton pans, preferring solid but sometimes luridly coloured aluminium ones.
Personally, over a Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker I choose a clean jam jar, but somehow voluptuous Nigella Lawson’s measuring spoons found their way into my top drawer.
What we all need is somebody to take control and tell us to stop accumulating stuff we don’t really need.
That person is Michael Ruhlman, an opinionated American writer who co-wrote The French Laundry Cookbook with renowned chef Thomas Keller.
Ruhlman’s food snob’s account of kitchen basics, The Elements of Cooking (Black Inc, rrp $34.95), was recently released in Australia.
He has a strict rule: anything that has only one use doesn’t have a place in the kitchen.
These tools, he says, include shrimp deveiners, cherry pitters, hand-crank fruit peelers, and special butter, egg, avocado and mango slicers.
Aside from a stove, fridge, countertop and sink, he maintains that a kitchen needs no more than a chef’s knife, a large chopping board, a large saute pan, a flat-edged wood spoon and a large, non-reactive – ideally Pyrex – bowl. Could you live with that?
Ruhlman’s ideas irritate many home cooks whose diverse ethnic culinary traditions require special tools.
Melbourne man Neil Murray, for one, has a Polish background and each year he follows tradition by making cherry vodka.
“Ruhlman is plain wrong about cherry pitters,” he says.
“Ours gets a good workout every year and we’d be lost without it. I’d like to see him de-pip 10kg of cherries without one.
“How does he rice potatoes? Does he never eat spaetzle? What, no grater or mandolin? Just because a tool isn’t used every day, it isn’t useless,” Murray says.
Ruhlman concedes that a good kitchen does indeed need other gadgets.
He has many, including a dedicated tin to make popovers, which are a sort of superannuated Yorkshire pudding. That’s to say nothing of his levain for breadmaking.
He reckons a well-outfitted kitchen is defined by its efficiency and by the quality of those tools that make it efficient. His advice is that pans and knives should be bought individually for their usefulness. Cheap sets or ones sporting the grinning mug of a celebrity chef should be avoided.
For knives, the basics are a good-quality, high-carbon, stainless-steel chef’s knife, 3cm wide and 20-30cm long, and a small paring knife.
“All other knives are non-essentials,” he says.
Serrated knives are banned for cutting anything other than bread because they damage the flesh of fruit and vegetables.
Essential pots include a six to eight-litre, heavy-gauge pan and small one that holds 1.5 to two litres. But controversially, he recommends high-maintenance, cast-iron frying pans over non-stick.
Local chefs Raymond Capaldi and Robin Wickens differ, and reckon that non-stick is practical to be used as a default.
“I think it is better if it’s non-stick,” Capaldi says.
That is, he explains, because it will brown food while any residues easily can be scraped off the low-maintenance surface.
But Ella Hall (above right), a working mum with seven mouths to feed, swears by her cast-iron pots.
“I use a lot of cast-iron ware and I treat it really reverently. It’s all really well seasoned,” she says.
Ruhlman also concedes that he loves his wok.
“You can cook anything in a wok. It’s a great shape,” he says.
“I would only say that if you get one, get a real one, not a non-stick one, not one with a flat bottom.”
The minimalist
ALISON Bell cooks for her two kids every night.
“They are just very basic, quite quick, but nutritious meals. They always have to have fresh veg.
They also have a starch such as rice or potato.”
All Alison needs is her wooden chopping block, a small serrated knife and a microwave in which she cooks rice while her husband cooks the meat on the barbecue.
“I’m really, really minimalist,” she says.
“We have this very simple kitchen and this very elaborate barbecue out the back.”
Bell never really cooked until she moved to Clermont-Ferrand in France for six years and became a mum.
“I have lots of things for my kitchen that I bought in France,” she says.
But her kitchen clutter amounts only to a few skillets, pots and pans, a knife block, a rotary grater,
a wooden handheld lemon squeezer and a set of metre-high clear salt and pepper grinders – in addition to one wooden grinder of a more rational size.
“At the moment it is very simple,” she says.
“I have very plain cups and saucers. I have quite a lot of bowls for cooking and baking and stuff.”
The comprehensive kitchen
SANDRA Rubinstein’s kitchen cupboards are jam-packed with gadgets, including shrimp deveiners, cherry pitters, hand-cranked fruit peelers and special egg and avocado slicers.
“I have no room for anything more. Not even a marble,” Sandra says.
A prolific cook and entertainer, her kitchen is equipped with two Magimixes, two blenders and a plain Mixmaster. Sieves, tongs and other implements hang off the kitchen bench.
Meanwhile, slowcookers, electric frying pans and two electric grills gather dust on top of her cupboards.
Rubinstein describes her pantry (below) as her treasure. It is piled high with pots and pans, including a tall thin asparagus pan, a special oval frying pan for fish and a giant one for cooking paella. But she is quite clear on what she likes and uses most.
“My favourite thing?” she asks.
“That’s the fish scaler that came from a market in Malaysia.”
It looks like a wooden hairbrush, studded with sharp nails.
“It just works so well it is unbelievable,” she says.
A brush made of a special material which skims fat off soups and casseroles is also invaluable, she says.
And she couldn’t do without a tomato corer or a green plastic slicer designed to slice beans into three.
But there is just one item Rubinstein is without: “I’m waiting for my birthday to get that Thermomix,” she says.
The eclectic kitchen
YOU won’t find Jamie Oliver pans in Ella Hall’s kitchen.
“Or the latest gadget that everybody has to have,” she says.
“I don’t own a strawberry huller. I don’t own a prawn deveiner. The most useless thing in my kitchen would be the world’s smallest whisk. It’s the size of a pen. And I have no idea why I have it or what you would actually use it for.”
Ella has seven mouths to feed, so cooking is a practical affair.
She can’t live without her 6.5-litre stockpot for stews and curries.
“It even travels with me down to the holiday house,” she says.
The clasp is now broken on the Breville Toastermatic she bought five years ago for $2.
But with the help of a heavy pan to weigh it down, it still works to feed hungry children and friends in between sports on a Sunday.
She has a handheld blender or “whizzy dizzy” and a loved but unused K-Tel electric frying pan.
“I have to say I’ve never used it,” she says.
“I tend to collect kind of funky and quirky antique cooking things.”
Most treasured of all is a 100-year-old marble slab passed down from her great-grandma.
“My mother cooked pastry on it. My grandmother cooked pastry on it. My mother has memories of her grandmother cooking pastry on it. It is one of those girly family things that gets passed on.”
Hall bemoans the quality of modern gadgets.
“The big bane of my existence is that you just can’t get a decent can-opener any more.”
THE PROFESSIONALS
Chefs have a wealth of equipment at hand at work, but what do they use at home?
Robin Wickens
Interlude, Fitzroy
Wickens doesn’t have many have many gadgets at home.
He survived for years with Ikea pans, but now has a top-quality set.
“I think the best investment you can have is buying a couple of good pots and pans and a good non-stick frying pan. The non-stick pan probably gets used more than any other.”
Patrizia Simone
Simone’s Restaurant
Electric gadgets don’t rate highly for Patrizia Simone.
The item she can’t do without is a wooden chopping board on which she mixes and stretches pasta dough.
“I love my board,” she says. “I prefer it to anything.”
Her other essential is a chitarra or pasta guitar, a frame strung with wire that is used to cut fresh pasta into strands.
Raymond Capaldi
Chef and restauranteur
Known for molecular gastronomy, Raymond Capaldi uses his Thermomix, a device that is part food processor and part cooker, the most.
“The Thermomix is never off because it makes soup quick. You just put all your ingredients in there with some butter and stock. You switch it on at a certain temperature for 10 minutes and you have a soup already made.”
Shanaka Fernando
Lentil as Anything
The most loved item in Shanaka Fernando’s home kitchen is his wok.
The founder of the Lentil as Anything group bought it from a Vietnamese shop in Victoria St, Richmond, with a bamboo steamer.
“I cook my pastas, my curries, everything in it,” he says.
Zoe Roy
The Commoner, Fitzroy
Zoe Roy counts her pestle and mortar bought on Victoria St as her most useful home kitchen item over and above a food mixer.
“The problem with a food mixer is that it is a pain to clean,” she says. “A mortar and pestle, you just wipe out.”
She also loves her electric spice grinder, microplane grater and tongs.
“I think everyone has lots of fun little gadgets,” she says.
“But when it comes down to it, tongs get you a long way.”
Caption: ALISON BELL, SANDRA RUBINSTEIN, ELLA HALL.
A wok, electric appliances, saucepans and dishes, cooking utensils.
Robin Wickens, Patrizia Simone, Raymond Capaldi, Shanaka Fernando.