What's Your Most Important Kitchen Tool?
As a chef I get asked a lot of questions, what do you like to cook at home, where do you like to go out and eat, what would you cook for your last meal etc…? I love talking about food, especially local organic GOOD food, but I also love talking about the tools that we use in a professional kitchen to produce the great meals that we come up with. I was once asked what kitchen tool or gadget could you not live without?
That is a tough one. When thinking about this post I reached out to my fellow culinarians in the kitchen to see what they would say. Their responses varied quite a bit by position. I got a few “my chefs knife”, a couple of tweezers, side towels (I thought that was a great answer), and a few more answers that were no more or less significant than any of the others. Then it donned on me that as executive chef my most important kitchen tool is probably my small red Adams memo book. For some time now I have kept one of these at an arm’s reach with me all day every day. I write anything and everything in there. When I fill one up I note the finishing date next to the starting date on the front cover, file it away with the others, and start a fresh one.
So what is the significance of keeping an unorganized log of meeting notes, recipe ideas, food cost calculations, doodles, menu analysis etc…? That’s a great question. As a chef I work in a field that is evolving every second. There are new techniques, flavors, and trends popping up so fast that if you don’t pay attention they are uncool before you even realize they were ever cool at all. So personally I use my “chef’s diary” as an evolving foundation. Every dish, or idea, or management technique that I use today is somehow based on or evolved from a dish, idea or management technique that I have used in the past. By writing everything down it solidifies my thoughts even if I don’t go back and read them, which I do on occasion just for fun. It is kind of neat to see what the hell I was thinking a year ago. Some of the stuff will make me laugh out loud, “WHAT? I was serving that as a special? OMG!”.
For the home cook I have a few suggestions. I imagine most cook from a favorite cookbook, or this would work even if you are the kind that prints recipes off the internet. My first suggestion is that while cooking take notes. Do it right in the book or on the printed recipe that will soon make it into your new three ring binder (suggestion number 2). Don’t just take notes the first time you make a certain recipe but every time you do. This will develop your solidified, identifiable, foundation for which you can reference the next time. Even if you don’t like the dish and never attempt it again you might have a discovered a technique that you hadn’t used before that could be useful in another application. Examples could be… “grilled the corn over high heat this time even though the recipe called for medium heat, had a nice caramelized flavor.” Silly example but you get the point.
If you took away my knives I would borrow Benjamin’s, if my stove disappeared I would use the grill, but if my memo books went away I would lose my written foundation. Could I still cook, of course, but it would hinder my continued culinary evolution…
Plus I was hoping that I would get famous some day and maybe someone would pay me a lot of money for them????
