Lifestyle - Kitchen porn

Twelve years ago, I shopped for kitchen supplies for my first-ever grown-up kitchen at Mehta Merchants and General Suppliers in Sarojini Nagar. Mehta Merchants didn’t believe in pampering the customer: if they had aluminum cookware guaranteed to give you a stomach ache, or knives that couldn’t cut butter, too bad. That was what you got.

It’s considerably different today. If you’re buying cooking pans, there’s Le Creuset — wildly expensive but absolutely worth it. Even the local kirana store will answer your questions about whether a knife has the right tang (the blade should run the entire length of the handle). And the debate over whether to buy Global, Glaser, Santoku, Furi, Masamoto or Misono can get ugly if serious chefs are involved. (Extra points for bespoke knives, especially if they were made by Dehillerin in Paris or by a fifth-generation knifesmith tucked away in a small village in Japan.) Olive oil pourers, copper casseroles, cast-iron woks, butcher block cutting boards that retail at over Rs 3,000 — all essential in the eyes of fanatic chefs or, unfortunately, amateur foodies like myself.
“Are we going too far?” I asked a writer friend who’s also a passionate cook. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if you’re rich enough to afford Le Creuset, my birthday’s in January.” Another friend who’s a professional chef asked not to be identified because she endorses several high-end products: “It’s gadget porn,” she says. “It’s about equipping the perfect designer kitchen. My question is, are you really going to cook in it? If you’re buying a Misono knife, do you know how to look after it, or will your maid be using it to slice onions?”
Good question. Like many amateur cooks, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes — usually to do with gadgets that look like they’re promising a lifelong affair when all that they’ll deliver is a one-night stand.
My whirly basket salad spinner does a lot of whirling and twirling, but doesn’t get the leaves dry — and it needs as much care as a week-old baby. (I dumped it on a foodie snob who doesn’t cook, but who loves showing it off.) The melon baller? Good buy: I use it for everything from scooping out little potato or apple marbles to, yes, melons.
The potato-and-egg slicer? Bad move. It mashes potatoes, turns eggs into egg salad, and I’ve sliced my fingers on it more times than I can remember. As for the cherry pitter, the stove grill pan that smokes the kitchen up in three seconds flat, the egg separator — I can only plead temporary insanity. And I would never use a garlic press — what it does to garlic is akin to what Jeffrey Dahmer did to his victims, and that’s what your fancy chef's knife is for anyway.
So what are the keepers? I polled a few dedicated cooks, and here’s what we came up with:
1) Knives, two sets: Let the household help have the cheap, short-tang set that will take a certain amount of abuse; invest in at least two really good knives for yourself. Learn how to use a sharpening steel, ditch the fancy knife block (it picks up dust in India) and use a knife case or magnetic knife rack. If you’re clumsy, don’t touch mandolins, no matter how heavily they’re praised by top chefs: you’ll lose more in blood and bone than is good for your health.
2) One really good cast-iron non-stick frying pan, one really good casserole ditto. Copper casseroles only if you’re prepared to look after them. A good wok, preferably cast-iron if you’re prepared to season it; a steamer basket and an omelette pan that’s used only for making omelettes. And a vegetable steamer.
3) A hand-blender and a stand mixer, but a juicer only if you’re fanatic about juicing — otherwise it’s just one more gadget to clean.
4) Microplane graters —absolutely essential and great fun to use.
5) And most important, a sense of fun. Cooking shouldn’t be about showing off what you know or what you’ve bought — it’s about enjoying food and spending time with family and friends.