Marco needs to upgrade his T-shirt game.
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Have you seen the video? I just know you’ll love his bits of wisdom and life philosophies sprinkled around while cooking.
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Executive chef at the Belgian 2 star Michelin restaurant
Castor preparing a dish using a bunch of Demeyere Apollo sauciers, Microplane graters, De Buyer whisk and a Mac Pro sujihiki.
Link
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I enjoy watching him.
Hi damiano,
He’s a true chef–and he shows us why as he goes. The note of humor is when he tells us that he’s a home cook now.
If he came to my kitchen, he’d see the difference right away.
Ray
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Charlie, neither is ubiquitous, if by that you use that term per the dictionary definition of “found everywhere”. In fact, even in the Western Hemisphere, there’s probably more aluminum than disk, and quite a bit of clad.
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I’ve never had A5 (because I’m a cheap bastard) but have seen it a lot in cooking videos. There’s sooooo much fat marbling that I’m often left thinking “Where’s The Beef in that beef?”.
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No particular cookware brands here, that I know of at least.
But if you have an hour to spend, take a look at how this Japanese noodle restaurant prepares and cooks the dishes on their menu.
I learn a lot of cooking and prep techniques from watching videos like this.
Link
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Lunch in Serbia.
I see a bunch of Mauviel M’Cook pans & pots.
Many sauciers. More than regular saucepans. Seems like sauciers are really beginning to be very popular in professional restaurant kitchens.
But I was told that saucepans are really just as easy to whisk in by a dinosaur Chowhounder……huh ?!?
I love my sauciers and saucepans, but I vastly prefer my sauciers for all my sauces and saucepans for all the other stuff.
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I’m with you, Claus.
I’ve been favoring my sauciers over my saucepans so much, that I even gave away my largest All Clad saucepan. My favorite saucier is my All Clad coppercore 2 qt.
Ray
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This is incredible, Claus,
I’ve witnessed all of this from the outside when I was in Japan, but never saw it integrated with what happens in the kitchen before.
Very interesting!
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It’s in every kitchen/restaurant in which I’ve ever worked, financed, bought, or sold. Not to the exclusion of other types, but otherwise omnipresent. Plain aluminum is certainly there as well, as is nonstick.
I can’t recall ever walking into a kitchen that did not have more than a smattering of disk-bottomed stainless.
In the end, it doesn’t make tons of difference because the cook is cooking the food not the pan. As I was fond of saying on the other forum – you can cook in an old hubcap if you had to. You’re looking for visual and olfactory clues about whether the food has been cooked to specs of the dish and chef’s own idea of how the dish and product should taste.
If cookware has transformed one’s cooking it’s only because for some reason it engaged the cook in the process to a higher level. Michelin starred food has been cooked in thin stainless pots and pans and also in the most exquisite vintage copper money can buy. It’s the cook, not necessarily the equipment.
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Hi JustCharlie,
The OP is looking for specific brands–not generalizations–trying to explore possible connections between cooking in restaurants and in the home. I think Claus has been able to demonstrate more use of pans associated with home cooks and enthusiasts in European restaurants than I’ve been able to find through Google in the USA–except through projects funded by manufacturers.
Would you agree?
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Matfer and Vollrath for disk-bottom stuff. Sufficient number of price points within these brands, especially Vollrath.
Not disk bottom: Ondine titanium or Duparquet (solid silver) if money isn’t an object. As far as Ondine’s commercial use – it would be for stuff done tableside, not in the kitchen proper. That said, it’s largely a homeowner luxury brand.
Other brands already covered.
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Hi Charlie,
None of the branded pans you mention are sold to American home cooks–and Claus mentions others he’s found in Europe.
Vollrath does show up in American homes for those who are exposed to it in commercial settings.
The only brands advertised for the American home cook that might be crossover candidates for professional restaurants might be All Clad and Hestan–and they are cladded, not disk.
In my crazy Army years I was stationed for a while in San Antonio, and friends and I would often take a weekend down in South Padre Island, camping in the dunes.
One time we saw a knocked-down highway sign and retrieved it, and used it over a campfire to cook shrimp we’d bought along the causeway.
Not quite a hubcap, but still, Good Times.
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I wonder how European street signs work as griddles.
As good as Texas?
After all, everything’s bigger and better in Texas!
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Home chefs are unnecessarily limiting themselves by not shopping at places like Webstaurant, Wasserstrom, Katom, et al.
They all sell in quantities of one these days and have for some time.
If you buy cookware you’re afraid of using really hard, you’re usually screwing up. Not abuse, mind you, but not standing there more worried about the equipment than the food that’s in it.
I have a picture in my mind’s eye of a home “chef” standing there and almost all he or she can think about is hating that the stuff is getting dirty and looking forward to cleaning and polishing it before it goes back up on the rack. The meal being cooked is practically an afterthought. I 'spec that’s a shoe that fits more often than a lot of people would like to admit.
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Hi JustCharlie,
Speaking for myself, it’s meal to meal, day to day–mostly routine–with occasional projects that might involve considerable collaboration.
For the most recent 4th of July, I contributed a pre prepared french string beans/asparagus concoction ready to be steamed just in time for the meal. I brought a Le Creuset cocotte with the vegetables in an insert–ready for the final step. The host, without my involvement, set it on the burner without putting any water in the cocotte to produce the steam.
From the other room, we smelled something, and saved the vegetables for the meal–but the cocotte didn’t fare so well. After several days of effort, it’s 80% restored.
Just one incident out of the life of a home cook–who works very hard to keep his cookware beautiful.
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I have to agree.
I have myself on occasion been too worried about getting un removable polymerised stains on my Demeyere Pans instead of focusing 100% on the dish I’m making and the quality of food I’m preparing.
I’m not saying I’m abusing my two new Demeyere Proline frying pans but they are getting pretty heavily used for high heat searing and I’ve given up trying to get them totally clean of the oil stains.
They have now become workhorse pans instead of beautiful shiny metallic objects.
Given the amount of cheap restaurant pans you find in professional restaurant kitchens, it must be clear to everyone that the pans & pots are pretty insignificant in the overall equation of how to perfect cooking technique and cooking output.
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