Maybe someday I’ll expand this to include the specific make and model of every piece of cooking gear I own, for the equipment fetishists. For now, this is mostly a page for me to tell you to get a good knife and a scale.
The Essentials
A Good Knife
There is nothing more dangerous or more frustrating than being in the kitchen without a good, sharp knife. Dull knives mean that you don’t have control, and it’s that, not the raw cutting power, that’s dangerous. You also don’t have to work as hard with a sharp knife, which will make prep that much more pleasant.
I honestly don’t care enough about knives to have deeply opinionated recommendations. As long as it’s sharp and a shape you find comfortable, it’s a good knife.
The essentials to have on hand are:
- 8" chef knife
- 4" paring knife
- 10" serrated bread knife
Brands I’d recommend:
- Cut Brooklyn
- Kan Kitchen
- Shun
- Victorinox Fibrox
- Wüsthof
A Digital Scale
If cooking with bad knives is the most frustrating, then not having a kitchen scale is a very close second. Putting aside precision, they make cooking a lot easier. You don’t have to hunt down the right size measuring scoop and then wash a dozen of them when you’re done making a simple cake. With a scale, you can tare and then drop each ingreident into the same bowl.
Not that the precision doesn’t matter at all. Especially with difficult ingredients, it can make a huge difference. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never get consistent quantities of flour or brown sugar out of the bag with a measuring scoop.