Ah, the prep chef, happily whacking away with a steady rhythm. You have no worries about how the Hollandaise sauce is going to turn out, nor how fussy those customers at table seven are. All you need to stress over is making food the correct consistency before passing it off to someone else. You can experience the day in an almost Zen-like quiet, just watching out for the little stuff.
The best restaurants will either let you pick your utensils, or have a good selection previously passed on from previous prep chefs. In case you’re selecting your own, you might be enticed to call that 1-800 number and just get a set of everything (with the bonus turnip twaddler) and be finished with it, or you may pay attention to your profession enough to spend some time seriously picking your tools. Good kitchen knives are never modest, yet they are a vocation long investment. Purchase wisely and your staff will use them 50 years from now – to commend your restaurant’s brilliant anniversary, of course!
The best-quality knife will be made of either stainless steel or a high-carbon steel and have a sturdy handle. The handle is ideally made of poly-carbonate or nylon instead of wood. Make sure that you get a plain edge, because those wonders that “never need sharpening” just don’t work.
It is also suggested that you pass on the total sets sold by the significant knife makers; they usually contain in any event one knife you will never use. Instead, purchase knives each in turn or in small sets and get the best quality you can manage. Some brand names chefs swear by (and this is an unpaid endorsement!) are Wusthof-Trident, Henkles, Sabatier and Friedrick Dick.
The three knives that you will discover essential in each kitchen are a 3-to-4-inch paring knife, a 8-inch chef’s knife and a 7-to-10-inch slicer.
The paring knife is certainly one of the most ignored tools in the kitchen. It gets the stripping done, yet it also can do a great deal of the slicing and dicing usually reserved for the more much of the time used chef’s knife. For reasons unknown, each time I watch another chef, they go after a knife that is longer than they need.
A good chef’s knife will deal with most of your dicing and cleaving enchantment. It is indispensable on the off chance that you have to prepare fresh garlic. Just lay the level of the blade on head of the clove and hit it with your hand, which will smash the clove and split the skin, making expulsion of the garlic flesh a breeze. A 8-inch blade works best, unless you are small or huge. At that point a 6-inch or a 10-inch knife might be all together, to represent the size of your fist.
Search for a chef’s knife which is offset well with a blade that is wide and somewhat overwhelming at the butt, close to the handle. A slight bend on the blade’s edge will give you a good shaking activity while slashing and make the knife a lot easier to use.
The meat slicer is used for the most part for cutting and slicing meat. It’s also good for mincing spices, since you can just pitch that bunch of chives onto the cutting board and rock the huge knife with the bended blade to and fro over it, with two hands on top.
These three knives are good structure blocks, however they’re just the start. Next, you need to include a bread knife, a bird’s-snout parer for stripping and coring round fruits, a second paring knife, and a 6-inch sandwich and utility knife.
To think about your knives, you should clean them off with a clammy sponge, get them dry with a dish towel, and store them in a knife block, with the blade always down. Never hand them to the dish washer, because the knives will slam against other silverware and get harmed. When using any knife, make sure that the blade lands on a generally soft surface, such as wood or plastic, instead of on a surface such as the metal surface or clay. This is because constant striking on a hard surface will dull the blade quickly.
Knives should be washed by hand and dried following each use. Because wood tends to swell, it’s anything but a good plan to immerse knives with wooden handles in water for a drawn out timeframe. Scouring mineral oil on the knife’s wood handle intermittently will keep up their luster. Stains on blades might be cleaned with a gentle scouring powder, or with a somewhat abrasive cushion – never steel fleece!
Acidic foods like lemon juice, vinegar, or mustard, should not stay on the blade after use as they will cause discoloration. Your knives should always be cleaned as soon as any activity is finished. Knives should be stored in a cabinet or in a knife block once they have been cleaned and dried. They should not be stacked, for purposes of both safety and appropriate edge care.
Recollect your safe food dealing with! To keep away from cross-pollution of microscopic organisms, knives should be cleaned before they are used for another item. Most especially they should be kept to separate uses of meat and vegetables for one supper, and never use the same knife for both crude and cooked meat.
