Cookware

We prefer the control and flexibility of cooking on a gas stove, over an electric. There is one disadvantage to gas stoves, though — it can be hard to get the heat low enough for things like simmering a delicate sauce or slow-cooking a braise. The solution is using a burner plate!Burner plates, also called simmer plates, fit right over the burner and help to diffuse the heat. This gives you a wider range of temperature control and also helps prevent hot spots in your pan.

Bram CookwareClaybourg imports French-style clay cookware and bakeware — most of it painted in colorful patterns and designs. They have many styles of cookware and bakeware that we have struggled to find elsewhere, like covered faitout dishes and casseroles with handles (great for French onion soup!).They also carry salad bowls and cups in those same designs, so it’s easy to put together a matched set for yourself or as a gift.

I’ve been writing a lot of posts lately on various sushi-related items, such as how to make temaki hand rolls and DIY spicy tuna. In this post I’ll go over the essential sushi-making tools and ingredients. If you have a sushi lover on your holiday gift list, consider putting together a few of these items in a gift basket! Sushi Oke/Hangiri – optional, but recommended.

When it comes to kitchen tools, cookware, high-end bakeware, and flat-out classic inspiration for the kitchen and the table, Williams-Sonoma is in a class of its own.Williams-Sonoma was started in 1956 in Northern California, and it eventually established its headquarters in San Francisco itself. The founder, Charles Williams, was an early innovator in retail strategy and branding for the home and kitchen.

We can’t remember the last time we’ve been this excited about a pan – and a nonstick pan at that! Nonstick pans often lose out in both kitchen performance and sheer sex-appeal to their brighter, shinier stainless steel cousins, but Calphalon has definitely been taking some strides to close the gap. This one can sear meat and can even go in the dishwasher!

In our kitchen tour last week, we highlighted one of our favorite small space solutions: an over-the-sink cutting board. Use it any time you need extra counter space, whether it’s for chopping vegetables, mixing a cake, or holding a cookbook (just don’t turn on the faucet!).While it is not necessary to use a cutting board specifically designed for over-the-sink use, we like the built-in colanders offered in many models.

Q: I recently decided to upgrade from an ailing frying pan to a 9″ All-Clad French skillet, and felt really excited about making a purchase that made me feel both grown-up and self-indulgent at the same time. As someone who has never been fond of “no-stick” pans I opted for the regular finish.

We’ve spent more time than we care to admit gushing over the lighting and copper pans in Michael Chiarello’s Napa Pantry store. Although beautiful, they’re not exactly in our budget, so instead we’ve rounded up 7 colorful picks from Michael himself, that are a little more in reach for home cooks! He loves them and so do we!These picks are a great way to bring in a little color in some unexpected places (who would have thought a griddle could have been colorful?!).

One of the best things my partner’s mother ever handed down to us was her large ddukbaegi, or Korean earthenware pot. (She was downgrading to a smaller one for herself.) When I think of the pot, I imagine sounds: bubbling stews, sizzing rice, and the satisfying clunk of the heavy lid. Much of Korean cuisine is down to earth, and the traditional cooking pots – ddukbaegi and dolsot – share this unpretentious, robust aesthetic.

Although they held a strange fascination for us as children, melon ballers certainly aren’t the first thing that come to mind when we think about essential kitchen equipment these days. But if you’ve unearthed one during your kitchen de-cluttering and are on the fence about tossing it in the give-away pile, we think you should keep it.

If you’re starting to make pasta at home and don’t already have a pasta maker, you’re going to start pining for one soon, we guarantee! With price tags often over the $100 mark, basic pasta makers can feel like a pretty big investment to most of us. Here are a few thoughts and bits of advice for when you (inevitably) start looking…The vast majority of pasta makers on the market are hand-crank models that clamp onto your table or counter top with a vice.

I’m a pie girl. And when the stone fruits start dropping from the trees, my pie plate begins its annual workout. My mother in law turned me onto a great pie plate from Hess Pottery, a little company in Reeds Spring, Missouri, started in 1979 by Tom Hess. She’d gotten one as a gift, and I’ve since given it as a gift. The pie love goes ’round and ’round.The Hess Pie Plate is made from smooth, native red clay without any harmful glazes.

We use these words (ok, maybe not chinois so much) interchangeably to describe something, usually metal, that holds solid ingredients while liquid passes through it. It’s a strainer, a colander, a mesh thingy, whatever. In reality, there are differences, especially when it comes to that chinois… A strainer is really a catchall name for any type of, well, strainer. It is usually fine mesh and bowl-shaped, good for rinsing a pint of berries or draining pasta.

For those of us without separate, large capacity ice machines in our homes, bags like this are a necessity at times — any time you need to fill a bucket or re-fill drinks for a crowd. And without fail, the store-bought bag of ice becomes a rock-hard, solid block if left to its own devices in the freezer.We always pull it out and heave it on the floor in big thumps, disturbing the neighbors, and usually breaking the bag so that newly separated cubes go flying across the kitchen.

We usually leave the oyster shucking to the professionals. We’ve watched rubber-gloved guys behind the counter at Casamento’s in New Orleans open and loosen hundreds of raw oysters, jamming their blunt oyster knives into each shell with expert precision.But we’ve had the occasional pleasure of opening our own oysters, thanks to a family member who likes to smoke big batches tucked in wet towels on his grill.

So you’ve invested in a pizza stone–or dusted it off from where it was hiding at the bottom of the cupboard!You’re loving it when you bake your pizzas, artisan loaves, and various baked goodies.Now it’s collected a few spills and stains. Lovingly gained, but spills and stains none the less.How should you be cleaning your pizza stone and what kind of wear is normal? Read on!First off, always heat the stone with the oven.

We’ve talked a lot recentlyWooden utensils do have one downside: they quickly lose their attractive glossy finish, are prone to cracking, and are generally a little fussy to take care of. Here are a few simple steps to help you avoid replacing them every few months.Always hand wash wood utensils with soap and warm water. Unfortunately, the harsh detergent and heat in the dishwasher will wreck the wood in just a few cycles.Dry wooden spoons with a towel instead of letting them air dry.

Unless you’re lucky enough to have a brick hearth oven in your back yard, a baking stone–also called a pizza stone–is an essential tool for all of us would-be bakers!These stones mimic the conditions in those brick ovens by absorbing heat from your oven and allowing you to bake loaves right on top of the heat source. This creates a direct transfer of heat and ensures that your loaves are cooked evenly.

Whenever we have bread dough to separate, icebox cookies to cut apart, or even onions to scoop into a prep bowl, we find ourselves reaching for our bench scraper. As those of us diving into the Kitchn Cure this week start to think about trimming down the number of utensils cluttering our drawers, this one is definitely a keeper.A bench scraper is primarily intended for baking, where you’ll sometimes hear it referred to as a bench cutter or pastry scraper.

Here’s a question from reader artichoke queen. How do you keep your knives sharp? Looking for a good, manual knife sharpener that will work on Global knives and others. The Furi has been recommended. Any suggestions?(To All Good Questions) We confess right now that we are not as diligent as wes should be at sharpening our knives, so this is a learning point for us as well. Sara Kate initially suggested just getting a steel and stone.