Over the years, I have been uniquely privileged to sit under the personal tutelage of world-famous gourmet cooks like Julia Child, Christopher Kimball, Martin Yan and Jacques Pepin.
I have standing appointments with Ina Garten, Sandra Lee and Alton Brown. They come to my home and demonstrate every technique imaginable while I assume a prone position, front and center, in front of the television.
Or sometimes my coaches sit right there on my iPad while they walk me step by step through recipes and techniques.
They've taught me the importance of three things: fresh ingredients, the right equipment and a lot of practice. Which brings me to the topic of today's column: the right equipment.
We could go broke furnishing our kitchens with the right equipment if we look to television cooks and professional chefs as examples — although, I must say that my beloved Julia Child was the queen of using this for that. Just check out the photos in her classic tome "The Way to Cook." There are so many clever ways we can often use this for that and get the same results.
Bain-Marie
Also known as a double boiler, the bain-marie technique means cooking over hot water instead of directly over the heat source. You can buy a beautiful copper-clad double boiler at Williams-Sonoma for $365 — and spend the rest of your life polishing copper — or you can use what you have.
Fill a small pot with about an inch of water and bring it to a boil. Reduce the heat so the water is barely simmering. Place a metal bowl about the same size as the pot on top to make a bain-marie. Make sure the bottom of the bowl is suspended above the water level itself before you proceed.
Pizza or Baking Stone
Baking pizza and bread on stone produces excellent results. You can spend $200 for a stone insert for your oven or fork over $99 for the Fibrament-D pizza stone. Or you can take about $5 to your local floor tile or home improvement center and buy unglazed quarry tiles, which will do a fine job. You can completely cover the shelves of your oven with tile and just leave it that way for all uses, or use one 16-inch square for bread and pizza. At less than $5 a tile, you'll save a lot of dough.
Pastry Brushes
You can spend $20 for a three-piece pastry brush set from the kitchen department or buy virtually the same set of brushes in the home improvement aisle for half the price. Check it out!
Bakeware
Before you run out and buy every size of baking pan (8 by 8, 9 by 9, 9 by 13, 10 by 15), consider that you can probably use the size pan you have, provided you fill it correctly and you adjust the oven time and temperature accordingly. Regardless of the size of your pan, here are some filling guidelines:
Cakes and cupcakes: Fill no less than 1/2 and no more than 2/3 full.
Quick breads and muffins: Fill 2/3 full.
Casseroles and souffles: Fill no more or less than 3/4 inch to 1 inch below the rim.
Pies: Fill almost to the top.
As for baking times, good cooks and bakers never rely on the times indicated in the recipe. They use them as guidelines, relying on visual indicators and doneness tests like inserting the blade of a knife into the center of a cake (if it comes out clean, the cake is done). And when substituting a different size pan, you need to be even less reliant on the printed guidelines.
You'll find more information about these products and a link to a comprehensive Baking Pan Substitution Chart with details for how to measure a pan's volume at www.everydaycheapskate.com/thisforthat.
Mary invites questions, comments and tips at [email protected], or c/o Everyday Cheapskate, 12340 Seal Beach Blvd., Suite B-416, Seal Beach, CA 90740. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually. Mary Hunt is the founder of www.DebtProofLiving.com, a personal finance member website and the author of "Debt-Proof Living," released in 2014. To find out more about Mary and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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