#knife-performance

#knife-performance

Contrast is at the center of many popular culinary trends. There's also a strong emphasis on contrasting textures within a single baked good. For example, soft milk breads and laminated doughs that have been hard-baked create exciting combinations.

I like to fold the bag over my hand as I fill it with frosting and I press everything down towards the tip as I am filling. This gives more control over the bag and allows her to apply pressure and remove the air.

Cutting a pizza fairly involves more than just making a straight slice; it requires consideration of how toppings are distributed across the pizza. If one side has significantly more toppings, the division is inherently unfair.

When churning out cover after cover at the saute station you can't exactly be picky about what's on the shelf above the stove. But that doesn't mean professional chefs don't have opinions about the pans they use every day during service.

Sometimes the best designs come from asking a simple question nobody bothered to ask before. For designer Kathleen Reilly, that question was: why does a knife always have to lie flat on the table? The answer came in the form of Oku, a table knife that literally hangs around the edges of your plates and boards thanks to a unique folded handle that defies centuries of Western tableware convention.

Most utility knives live in junk drawers until you need to open a box. You dig out something with a flimsy plastic slider, a rattling blade, and a body that feels like it costs exactly one dollar. They are treated as disposable, even though you use them constantly for packages, tape, and workshop tasks. There is room for a small knife that feels as considered as the rest of your desk or carry.

Instead of cheapest, ask for the 'best value for [your] cooking method.' That small shift in wording can make a big difference in the 'final cut,' so to speak.

My time in a fine dining kitchen as a line cook was one of the most stressful and surprising experiences I ever had. It wasn't just difficult work. It was a difficult environment for a number of reasons. It was cramped and frantic, and the personality clashes you see on shows like "The Bear" were not uncommon. I don't recommend it.

Most knife recommendations come with a quiet asterisk. A brand deal, a commission link, a product sent to a chef's PO box before the review goes live. What gets left out of that conversation is what the same chef keeps in the drawer at home - the blade they reach for on a Sunday morning when nobody is filming.

Cheesy comparisons aside, the reason chefs are responsible for their own knives boils down to subjective preferences and comfort. "I want the knife to be an extension of my arm and my hand," says Fredrik Berselius, executive chef at Aska. Since there are far too many variables that go into a knife's design-handle shape, blade shape, weight, balance, material, and so on- determining which knife is the best knife is fundamentally impossible.

If you've ever mixed something vigorously in a large bowl during a cooking project, you have probably experienced the universal frustration of a tilting, wobbly bowl. Maybe you're whipping cream by hand, whisking a vinaigrette, or even just beating eggs for a casual, but perfect, omelette, and notice the bowl starts migrating across the counter. There are some low-tech workarounds, like a damp towel or a silicone mat slipped underneath the bowl. Neither works terribly well, especially with super-slippery granite countertops.

Whether donning an apron at home or in a Michelin-starred restaurant, pretty much everyone agrees on the merits of cooking with cast-iron pans. They've been around for generations, passed down like an heirloom and fired up for all kinds of meals, from everyday comfort food to special company-is-coming fare. But there's one thing that needs to be acknowledged: it's not ideal for everything - specifically, cooking eggs.

For example, if a recipe calls for 1 cup of chopped onions, do you know exactly how many onions you'll need to buy or ultimately, chop? Often, you won't know until you get deep into your recipe's ingredient list, whether you'll need a specific volume or number of onions (sometimes with a size specification, but oftentimes - annoyingly - without). This leads to further confusion as small onions weigh around 6 ounces, medium about 8 ounces, and large roughly 16 ounces.

So when engineers at The New York Times steered a generative artificial intelligence model to scale our recipes, I worked with them to address common questions that math alone can't answer and create nuanced rules for a range of situations. (How do you halve three whole eggs?) Our recipe editors, all of whom have decades of professional experience, then reviewed rounds of scaled recipes, and the engineers incorporated that feedback into their model to help ensure the best possible outcomes.

Not only does a mortar and pestle amp up your spices, releasing oils and concentrating flavor by crushing them against the stone bowl, but the iconic chef also notes its versatility. "These ancient kitchen tools are perfect for everything from pestos to dressings," he says. Other aspects he likes are the total control they allow for - as opposed to what you get with electric food processors or grinders, the textures that you can achieve and control by hand, and even just their appealing look.