restaurant auctions. As you've probably gathered by now, restaurants go
out of business all the time, and have to sell off their equipment quickly
and cheaply before the marshals do it for them. I know people who buy
whole restaurants this way, in what's called a turnkey operation, and in a
business with a failure rate of over 60 percent they often do very well.
You can buy all sorts of professional quality stuff. I'd recommend pots
and pans as a premium consideration if scavenging this way. Most of
the ones sold for home use are dangerously flimsy, and the heavyweight
equipment sold for serious home cooks is almost always overpriced.
Stockpots, saucepans, thick-bottomed sauté pans are nice things, even
necessary things to have, and there's no reason to buy new and no reason
to pay a lot—just wait for that new tapas place on the corner to go out of
business, then make your move.
Let me stress that again: heavyweight. A thin-bottomed saucepan is
useless for anything. I don't care if it's bonded with copper, hand-rubbed
by virgins, or fashioned from the same material they built the stealth
bomber out of. If you like scorched sauces, carbonized chicken, pasta
that sticks to the bottom of the pot, burnt breadcrumbs, then be my guest.
A proper sauté pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if
brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about
which will dent—the victim's head or your pan—then throw that pan
right in the trash.
A non-stick sauté pan is a thing of beauty. Crêpes, omelettes, a
delicately browned fillet of fish or tender skate wing? You need a nice
thick non-stick pan, and not one with a thin veneer of material that peels
off after a few weeks. And when you buy a non-stick, treat it nice. Never
wash it. Simply wipe it clean after each use, and don't use metal in it, use
a wooden spoon or ceramic or non-metallic spatula to flip or toss
whatever you're cooking in it. You don't want to scratch the surface.
I don't want to oversimplify here. Obviously, if you have no sense of
taste or texture, and no eye for color or presentation—hell, if you can't