The food lab better home cooking through science ( PDFDrive ) 73

generous girth of 3.9 inches at the front, and a hefty weight of 7.76 ounces It’s a size that can’t be beat—just large enough to smash a ball of beef into a 4-inch patty or flip a couple portions’ worth of browning home fries, without being so large that it doesn’t fit into a small skillet I’ve picked up a whole pizza off a hot stone with this thing I’d like to see your wimpy plastic spatula do that! The blade and tang are formed out of a single piece of cast stainless steel, which clocks in at a thickness of 0.04 inch (1 mm, or approximately 18 gauge) This is important: it allows you to lift a whole turkey or rib roast with reckless abandon If you flip the spatula over, its keen and sturdy front edge substitutes handily for a paint scraper, allowing you to ensure that every last bit of flavorful, crisp crust stays firmly attached to your burger or steak, instead of remaining in the pan The handle is made from tough, durable polycarbonate and features a full tang, for optimal strength and balance This baby’s gonna last a lifetime And there’s a musical bonus : When struck daintily against the cutting board, the spatula vibrates at precisely 587.33 hertz (really!), with an outstanding overtone series Even Stradivarius would be proud to apply his famous varnish to it It’s the very thing during that all-too-common situation when I desperately need to tune the fourth string of my guitar while applying cheese to my burgers You’d be hard-pressed to find a better stiff spatula 12 Japanese-Style Mandoline Sure, you can train for years and spend hours a day sharpening and honing your knives to get to the point where you can whip out fennel wisps so thin you can read through them or slice through your prep work at a hundred onions per hour And I’ll be the first one to tell you that you’re really, really cool But for the rest of us, a mandoline makes quick work of repetitive slicing and julienning tasks At one point in my life, I owned a fancy-pants $150 French model But you know what? It was heavy, bulky, and a pain in the butt to clean And, with its straight blade, it didn’t really do a great job The Benriner Mandoline Plus ($49.95), on the other hand, features a sharp angled blade that cuts much more efficiently than those awkward straight blades or clumsy V-shaped cutters Walk into the kitchen of any fourstar restaurant in the city, and I guarantee you’ll find at least a couple Bennies (as they are affectionately called by line cooks) occupying a prominent place Random trivia: “Benriner” means “Oh, how handy!” in Japanese (despite the fact that the Japanglish on the box front proclaims “Dry cut radishes also OK.”) 13 Spider A spider/skimmer accomplishes almost everything a slotted spoon does, and better, at a fraction of the cost It excels at fishing dumplings, vegetables, or ravioli out of a pot of boiling water And its wire construction and relatively open mesh creates less turbulence in the liquid than a standard slotted spoon, making it much easier to fish out food As for the task it was designed for—dunking and stirring foods for deep-frying—the only thing that even comes close in terms of agility and control is a long pair of chopsticks, and even Mr Miyagi would have trouble picking up peas ...you can whip out fennel wisps so thin you can read through them or slice through your prep work at a hundred onions per hour And I’ll be the first one to tell you that you’re really, really cool But for the rest of us, a mandoline makes... But you know what? It was heavy, bulky, and a pain in the butt to clean And, with its straight blade, it didn’t really do a great job The Benriner Mandoline Plus ($ 49.95), on the other hand, features a sharp angled... Japanese (despite the fact that the Japanglish on the box front proclaims “Dry cut radishes also OK.”) 13 Spider A spider/skimmer accomplishes almost everything a slotted spoon does, and better, at a fraction of the cost