in attendance, saying, "This must seem pretty ordinary for a chef . . ."
She had no idea how magical, how reassuring, how pleasurable her
simple meat loaf was for me, what a delight even lumpy mashed
potatoes were—being, as they were, blessedly devoid of truffles or
truffle oil.
But you don't want to know this. What you'd like to know is how to make
your next dinner party look as though you've got the Troisgros family
chained to the stove in your home kitchen. Maybe you're curious about
the tricks, the techniques, the few simple tools that can make your plates
look as if they've been prepared, assembled and garnished by cold-
blooded professionals.
Let's talk about tools first. What do we have in our kitchens that you
probably don't? The joke is that many of our stock items—herb oils,
crushed spices, chiffonaded parsley, puréed starches and veggies—are
often made with home-model equipment, just like yours. I may have a
25-quart professional Hobart mixer and an ultra-large Robot-Coupe, but
chances are I used a home blender to make that lovely roast red pepper
coulis dotted with bright green basil oil drizzled around your plate. So,
what do you absolutely need?
You need, for God's sake, a decent chef's knife. No con foisted on the
general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as
the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various
sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks
everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers—all those
medium-size "utility" knives, those useless serrated things you see
advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those
ineptly designed slicers—not one of the damn things could cut a tomato.
Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department:
ONE good chef's knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand
name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-
school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or