It sounds like the joy of cooking for you might be mostly in the process and the final product. A significant part of the joy for me is in the tools.
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Me too. Buying second hand relieves me and takes away the anxiety of using tools. A bit of wear from prior use gives me permission to use and abuse, figuratively.
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I had a Global G-5 for a year. I didn’t like it much, so gave it to my company’s head of IT who loves it. My PC has run perfectly ever since!
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Knives can be a rabbit hole. Be careful going down that route! 
Imho just get a few MACs and one tough knife - eg Zwilling/Wusthof/Kiwi - and be done with it.
As for pots and pans, the solution was pretty simple for me. I just get the best possible pan (in my view) straight away. I went from a 20 euro restaurant grade pan to 2.5mm copper, without anything in between. This was a decade ago, and I have been happy ever since. No need for upgrades. Same for ECI: just get a Le Creuset and live happily ever after.
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Oh I’ve been head of kitchen equipment buying in my household for 40 years, so I know all about rabbit holes! I have maybe 8 ECI dutch ovens, of which 5 are LC, and only 1 has been used in the last 6 months. The knife example was just by way of illustration.
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Sorry, RJ,
Gender corrected.
I agree strongly that subjective value is critical to any upgrade. My 3" Chicago cutlery fillet knife cost a bit less than $10, and I only have used it on pan fish once in awhile where it was very good. Haven’t seen much need for an upgrade. I’d need a radical shift in usage to justify even $100.
Ray
Hi damiano,
I’ve followed standard business approaches since I began my cooking hobby: job and task analysis, cost value determination–establish target batterie. Build, step by step, starting by filling most needed job/tasks first. After each step, reanalyze.
One’s batterie emerges quite rapidly.
The big change for me as the batterie emerged was a shift toward harder steel knives while preserving and rethinking my initial batterie. It’s led to a two tiered batterie of stars and subs that I’ve just recently reorganized into a new grabbable system.
Ray
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Precisely. But we are talking about the op.
Most people can barely run their own life and have no business trying to run anyone else’s.
The op is uncomplicated. The op enjoys upgrading items despite not having a need to do so. If the income exists and no harm created then who should care?
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A reflection on upgrading tools. The more you cook and maintain your tools the better developed your senses of how they perform and work become, and therefore you have more stored data points to evaluate other tools. Take for example your chef’s knife. You are familiar with its balance. In maintaining it you have learned how to put an excellent edge on pretty much any non-serrated knife and maintain it. You have a sense as to its toughness (or lack thereof). You know how much cleaning it needs. You know if you like its overall look. You have a sense of the handle’s comfort. You have identified desirable and undesirable things like bolster, part bolster, or no bolster, the amount of knuckle clearance, and the amount of belly. If one or more aspects of your knife bother you, then you can upgrade by finding a knife that better fits your criteria, using your data to focus on knives that best fulfill your ideal. If nothing about your knife falls short, why upgrade? If something falls short enough that it regularly bugs you, upgrading may be in order, especially given how much you use a chef’s knife. If, however, the knife that bugs you is the heavy cleaver you only drag out every few years when Bob shares a carcass of some sort, good enough may be the more appropriate course. As to adding new tools, for me it makes sense when you are pretty likely to use it a lot. I make a lot of stock, and upgrading from cheesecloth and a colander to a chinois made sense. Adding something just because it seems potentially cool is altogether different. I make ravioli once or twice a year. I have an unused KA ravioli attachment. The old hand cranked Marcato and a pastry brush and cutter work just fine. It was a foolish purchase. Even more foolish would be a specialty tool for something I likely would make just once to say I had done it. And so I shall eat all of my profiteroles without ever assembling them on a croquembouche mold.
Knowing features that bother you is another great way to store more data. For example I have cooked on enough clad cookware to know it is excellent, but the way things stick on stainless is an issue for me.
Also when you acquire a new piece of cookware that is constructed differently than your other pieces, use it liberally before you buy more. I was given a lovely oval LC DO. For about a year it handled all of my braises, stews, and beans. I love it in the oven but not on the stovetop. I am glad I did not promptly start amassing more LC. Also, sometimes an upgrade may cost less. I love oven braises in porcelain, and it is way cheaper than LC. I love high heat searing on carbon steel. It is way cheaper than clad.
Lastly there is the item you just love, will use a lot, and really do not need. Thanks to the temptations of Etsy I now have a daubiere.
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Yeah… it is definitively about nailing the final product. And while it is fun to tweak methods and recipes… once a dish becomes second nature to nail, I find the prep more of a chore than anything else.
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Hi RD,
I don’t think the OP is making a money spending decision. In fact, he says it’s a hypothetical example himself.
It’s about value–and it’s never uncomplicated.
Ray
Perhaps read the op again.
That’s too bad Ray. Keeping things simple can be complicated.
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Hi Vecchiouomo,
You’re a home cook artist, following your passion in cooking with new tools when you feel like trying them. Artists do things like that.
Sounds OK to me.
Ray
Given values that are, sometimes to a high degree, emotionally charged such as aesthetics, provenance, craftsmanship, history, etc. money is often a factor even though a lower cost option that does not tic your particular boxes may perform identically, or at least sufficiently close to identical that the vast majority of us would notice no difference. Take two knives, one made in your country and a roughly identical visually but much lower cost item is made in a country that you do not wish to support. If provenance is one of your boxes, there may or may not be a ceiling on a premium you would have to pay. You can also approach it on positive terms. If I like heavy tinned copper, ruling out Brooklyn or Duparquet, and I am just ok with French, Italian, or British, I am looking for those countries as I shop online. Think how hard it might be to identify all the countries I would prefer not to support!
I wish that for my products I could find high quality MiUSA BOB goods, but I can’t much of the time. In light of the priorities of supporting black owned businesses I have broadened the list of things I will buy when I identify one, even upgrading when it is not really needed.
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I try to keep my Occam’s Razor stropped.
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My kitchen serves several functions. Cooking, visiting, eating, and housing my collection. Also the dog sleeps there during the day. My collection has no specific requirements, but it includes, first and foremost a well stock pantry, but a wide and very slowly growing array of cookware, knives, tools, ceramic items, tinned items, etc. most all in line with what you might have encountered in a very well stocked kitchen, something like Cordon Bleu, in the fifties or sixties. It includes a few modern appliances and a few neither French nor even western, like a beat up old wok, chopsticks, and an active crock of kimchi beside the vinegar pots. The collection is constrained by the size of the kitchen. The rest of the house is close to meeting Marie Kondo’s requirements. Picking up items like the daubiere that fit into the overall collection are just straight up acquisitions to my mind. I could rationalize it as an upgrade, but I have made Provencal daubes and other braises of various types in other pans. I figure it is a pretty harmless collection, every bit of which will be used or, if not used, donated or gifted. My wife knows how vastly more expensive a lot of hobbies can be.
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That’s exactly what is worrying me a tad. Not losing any sleep over it, but maybe it should bother me a little less?
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It’s bang on real Ray, not hypothetical. However it is just an example of many other upgrades I’ve undertaken.
My wife said something like “sad & pathetic”, but maybe I misheard.
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Hi RD,
On a whim, one could go to Thomas Keller’s French laundry and spend $500 or more for a very interesting dinner.
I even once thought of going there on a promotion where I could walk away with an 11" Hestan nanobond pan.
But that’s not how a home cook typically thinks about an upgrade. That potential upgrade is way more than a one night stand and could be a mainstay to his cooking for an indefinite future.
It could also be a step backward.
For my birthday last year, I bought a Chinese slicer/cleaver as a potential alternative tool that I had refused to consider for many years: it cost $33.
For my birthday this year, I finally purchased the Chef Knife upgrade I’d been thinking about for five years. It cost $243.50.
Neither of them were about the money.
Thanks, RobinJoy
