{"id":1356,"date":"2011-06-23T14:47:16","date_gmt":"2011-06-23T21:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/?p=1356"},"modified":"2011-06-23T14:47:16","modified_gmt":"2011-06-23T21:47:16","slug":"equipment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/2011\/06\/equipment\/","title":{"rendered":"Equipment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new friend left a comment on a previous post asking what equipment was &#8220;most important&#8221; for cooking dishes like these. It&#8217;s a broad and involved enough question (and I&#8217;m verbose enough) that I thought the answer might oughta warrant its own post.<\/p>\n<p>The Alinea cookbook provides a list of some of the more esoteric or unusual equipment readers will encounter in the recipes. This book&#8217;s list expounds on each item, but here it is (along with some comments of my own) in short version:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Acetate sheets &#8212; buy these from a bakery or candy-making shop, not from an art store. The former is thinner and more conducive to the uses in the book.<\/li>\n<li>Chinois &#8212; I use this on every single recipe; in fact, I have three of them because I use them so often and am usually moving quickly enough that I don&#8217;t want to stop and wash one.<\/li>\n<li>Cryovac &#8212; a vacuum sealer. I use a foodsaver; the one I had in New Zealand was a very low-end white foodsaver and it was great. The one I have now is a silver upright model and it&#8217;s way more annoying and wasteful to use&#8230;if I had to buy again I&#8217;d go with the cheapest one again.<\/li>\n<li>Dehydrator<\/li>\n<li>Food Processor &#8212; had a nice one in New Zealand, here I have a tiny post-college-graduation personal one that works fine, but I haven&#8217;t used either of them a ton.<\/li>\n<li>Hemispheric molds<\/li>\n<li>High-Speed Blender &#8211;definitely a very useful thing. I have a Blendtec, and it&#8217;s 98% awesome, the 2% loss is because it shuts itself off after 50 seconds and doesn&#8217;t have a variable-speed knob. If I had a million bucks and had to buy this again I&#8217;d get a vitamix. But I still love my Blendtec.<\/li>\n<li>Immersion Blender<\/li>\n<li>Juicer<\/li>\n<li>Microplane<\/li>\n<li>Mortar and Pestle<\/li>\n<li>Silicone Mats &#8212; very useful.<\/li>\n<li>Soda siphon and cream whipper<\/li>\n<li>Spice Grinder<\/li>\n<li>Syringe<\/li>\n<li>Tamis<\/li>\n<li>Tweezers &#8212; specifically go for &#8220;jeweler&#8217;s tweezers&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>X-acto knife<\/li>\n<li>Antigriddle &#8212; two sheet trays with dry ice between them does the trick fine<\/li>\n<li>Heat Sealer &#8212; built into the foodsaver<\/li>\n<li>Japanese Rotary Slicer<\/li>\n<li>Meat Slicer<\/li>\n<li>Pacojet &#8212; \u00a0I use a Cuisinart ice cream churn<\/li>\n<li>Paint Stripping Gun &#8212; I use a creme brulee torch usually<\/li>\n<li>Refractometer<\/li>\n<li>Paint Spray Gun<\/li>\n<li>Tabletop Wine Press<\/li>\n<li>Thermocirculator &#8212; insert your favorite sous vide solution here. I use a small rice cooker and a Sous Vide Magic.<\/li>\n<li>Volcano Vaporizer &#8212; find a friend who likes smoking pot and borrow theirs. Seriously, there&#8217;s no other use for this thing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I have most of these items, but couldn&#8217;t say one is more important than the other really (with a few exceptions I&#8217;ll get to below). Usually I just pick a recipe and see what&#8217;s required, and buy equipment based on that.<\/p>\n<p>There are other things not listed here that I find remarkably useful, both for this and for everyday cooking. Again, I tend to let need dictate how I acquire these things, I haven&#8217;t bought anything arbitrarily:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Chinois &#8212; Listed above, this thing is extremely useful for getting the smooth textures that a restaurant like Alinea favors. You can use a strainer, but your purees will just be a little more rustic. They won&#8217;t taste any different. One of the best lessons I learned from this thing was how to pay attention to texture (I didn&#8217;t buy one until I noticed my purees were grainier than I wanted).<\/li>\n<li>Silpats\/silicone mats &#8212; Save heaps of time scrubbing sheet trays.<\/li>\n<li>Silicone spatulas &#8212; these might as well be an extension of my hand. I use them for EVERYTHING. I have several different sizes and shapes; they&#8217;re great for stirring and transferring stuff from pots to bowls, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Whisks &#8212; I have two stainless steel ones, I also use them relentlessly for breaking up or aerating mixtures.<\/li>\n<li>Rubbermaid containers &#8212; nothing in this book is prepared completely a la minute: everything is usually pre-made and then assembled for plating, so you need lots of storage space. I have around 20 plastic containers in various sizes. Make sure the lids are airtight&#8230;if they aren&#8217;t, things will go stale and degrade.<\/li>\n<li>Sealable jars &#8212; I keep most of my ingredients in Ball jars. I can see what&#8217;s inside and how much I have, and they seal airtight so things last a long time and no moisture gets in. I had some plastic containers in New Zealand that were not airtight and the humidity caused the hydrocolloids to clump and mat together. Gross.<\/li>\n<li>Thermometers &#8212; I \u00a0keep an oven thermometer in the oven at all times so I can make sure its calibrated properly, and I have another that&#8217;s used for melting sugar (it&#8217;s a candy\/deep fry thermometer).<\/li>\n<li>Tea Towels &#8212; I make an absolute mess in the kitchen every time I cook. I dirty towels like its nobody&#8217;s business. Seriously, I&#8217;ll motor through a towel an hour, wiping up things or drying stuff or pulling things off the stovetop.<\/li>\n<li>Chef&#8217;s knife &#8212; the &#8216;best&#8217; chef&#8217;s knife is the one that&#8217;s most comfortable for you to hold. \u00a0Go to a cooking store and ask to hold every knife they have, and pay attention to how it feels in your hand. No knife stays sharp forever, so the idea that you&#8217;re picking on the basis that it&#8217;s going to stay like a razor forever is misguided. Just pick the one that feels the most natural, and be prepared to learn to sharpen or it have it sharpened.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I have a whole host of other odds and ends, most of which are convenience items. My multi-wheel cutter, for example, makes cutting sections of melted sugar easy and precise, but it&#8217;s not a necessary thing. I bought a cherry pitter because pitting olives with a paring knife is a pain in the ass, but I wouldn&#8217;t say the cherry pitter is a vital tool. Etc. Usually if I use something I think is interesting enough to point out, I&#8217;ll include a photo of it in my posts.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;m happy to talk more about specific brands or answer more questions if anyone wants to ask (either in comments or via email).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new friend left a comment on a previous post asking what equipment was &#8220;most important&#8221; for cooking dishes like these. It&#8217;s a broad and involved enough question (and I&#8217;m&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwfL0-lS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}