Andre Soltner used Wondra to make puff pastry at Lutece.
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Iâve often said, here (I believe) and certainly on the other forum we all used to frequent, that a highly accomplished home chef could easily be integrated into a professional kitchen. They might even be bored in a Michelin kitchen, at least until they rose through the ranks.
Not a crappy pan at all. However, did you notice that he calls for âvery high heatâ? Teflon-lined pans like this do not last very long at high heat, so need regular replacement. It would make little sense to buy a better grade pan, especially by the case.
Also, thereâre no eveness or responsiveness issues, considering what heâs cooking, cooking on and the small size of the pan.
If equipment didnât matter, Ripert would be cooking on a $79 PIC and in a $29 Copper Chef fry pan.
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Those pans are sold to all kinds of restaurants by the tens of thousands every year - burger joints up to Michelin starred establishments.
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Sorry, meant to tell @Meekah it is ok to use Wondra. Learning all of the classic preps and ingredients is great, but itâs all about what goes on the plate.
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If all pizza were the same, we wouldnât talk about New York, Chicago, Napoli, or Detroit. Heck, weâd buy Red Baron instead of paying extra for DiGiorno.
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Of course. Theyâre cheap enough that they can be treated as disposable when the nonstick goes by overheating or running through the Auto-Chlor.
Youâre just grasping at something⌠nobody can quite figure out.
All that fish being cooked in Hawaii â on nonstick, just like Le Bernardin in NYC.
Can you help me understand why you mentioned the name of the pan? I donât want to make any assumptions.
Because I recognized it. Immediately. And because Vollrath is a fixture in U.S. restaurants and in European restaurants under other names.
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Itâs only within the past few years that I learned what it really was.
Iâm the proud owner of some really old Vollrath pieces. Donât even remember how I acquired them. It wasnât from reading the Internets, so maybe it was from the last gasp of a long-departed independent kitchenware store. There are things I missâŚ
Try the obvious: that equipment matters, at Le Bernadin, just like everywhere else.
I guess Tom Keller and investors wasted that $10 million on an unnecessary remodel. Forget the custom Moltini and Hestan suites. And the focus on Hestanâs Insignia cookware line. And the coolers, counters, grilles, and everything else.
As long as you have decent pans and decent knives and use a good quality stovetop and oven, I honestly donât think the quality of the cookware means that much.
A good home chef can still make pretty solid quality food in cheap cookware using cheap stamped knives, as long as the knives are kept sharp.
However I do find it a bit more joyful to use nicer quality cookware and knives in my home kitchen.
Does a knife with a nice pattern on the blade make it better to work with ?
Not really, but if the knife feels solid in your hand, cuts great and have a nice sharp thin edge, itâs simply more fun to work with in the kitchen.
Making food is hard tough work (to me at least), so I do what I can to make the process more enjoyable.
Cutting veggies for my dinner isnât funny any longer, itâs boring and tedious to be quite frank, once youâve done it a 1000 times, so having a range of knives to choose from makes it a bit more fun, in my experience.
The more times you make home made food in your home kitchen, the better a cook you become.
If using nice equipment makes you want to make home made food in your kitchen more often, instead of take away or restaurants, then by that logic YES! using fancy nice high quality cookware in fact does make you a better cook in the long run.
I can use the same non stick pan in my kitchen for many many tasks - but I feel I get a better fond development using a PLY or copper pan in general and in particular when HIGH HEAT searing steaks.
Is it necessarry to own copper cookware and thick PLY cookware for you to cook great food in your home kitchen - of course not.
But it makes cooking more enjoyable.
Cooking to me is hard work, so I do what I can to make it more enjoyable.
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Greetings! Your reputation precedes you! (Itâs goodâŚ)
I think I might be misunderstanding what âcookwareâ is. To me it seems like âdecentâ and âgood qualityâ is a reflection of quality. Not cost, but quality.
And the pan thatâs a fixture in so many restaurants is a âfixtureâ because it has a quality that works for the setting.
What am I missing?
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Restaurant supply cookware is great and CHEAP cookware, especially if used in professional kitchens where they have professional gas and induction stovetops. When you have professional high powered gas and induction stovetops, you can get away with using pretty crappy pans and still get a good cooking result out of it.
Also professional chefs are watching over the food theyâre cooking in another way than an amateur cook, they have that instinct and intuition you learn as a professional chef, they just know instinctly when to turn it and when to take it off the heat.
Even good amateur home cooks donât have quite the same built in instinct and intuition - it takes many many hours of cooking daily to build this instinct up.
Thatâs why you rarely see the really expensive cookware in professional restaurant kitchens - they donât need it, since their cooktops are ultra high powered.
If they cooked better quality food using expensive 2.5 copper pans and pots, you can better belive they would use it.
However, I would argue, that if you cook at home on a decent powered home stovetop, you will obtain a better cooking experience, if you for instance use an ideal shaped 2.5 copper pot for sauce making and a thick bottomed PLY pan for high heat searing and so on.
With that said - I can cook just as fine tasting sauces in a cheap aluminum sandwich bottom stainless steel pot as I can in my 2.5 copper sauce pots - but the cooking experience is more enjoyable with my copper pots, when I make my sauces. They react and respond faster to low heat and high heat and they reduce liquid faster. But does the sauce taste better - I doubt it.
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Eggs.
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I think she mentioned sheâs a physician by day.
Interesting. Is egg laying chicken count as food garden â I suppose?
