Ramen spork

If you have a kid either in college or recently graduated (which probably also means unemployed), then it's very probable that ramen figures heavily into his/her food budget. So check out this very fine ramen-eating implement.

This stainless steel spork was designed by Masami Takahashi for a chain of ramen restaurants in Japan. It costs $14 from Uncommon Goods.

4 good reasons to own a potato ricer

A potato ricer works like a giant garlic press. In go the cooked potatoes, out come long strands of "riced" potatoes. This particular model comes from OXO.









Mashed potatoes: There is nothing like the light, fluffy texture you get from mashed potatoes made with a ricer. Riced potatoes are also the foundation for gnocchi and a Norwegian bread called lefse.





 



Spätzle: These are tiny little German egg noodles made by pressing dough through the small holes of a specialized tool directly into boiling water. A potato ricer can also be used for this purpose although it makes thinner noodles than those made with a real spätzle maker.



 



Mont Blanc: This is a grand French dessert. It's a sweetened chestnut puree that gets extruded through a ricer into a mound that is meant to represent a mountain. The top of the mountain is covered with something white—crème fraîche, whipped cream or confectioners' sugar—to resemble the snow on top of Mont Blanc.



 


 Spaghettieis: I love this German dessert. It's vanilla ice cream pushed through a ricer to look like spaghetti, topped with a red berry puree for the tomato sauce and dusted with something white (coconut, white chocolate, ground almonds) to be the Parmesan.

Bagelpod

I confess that I like using devices for cutting bagels. Some people of my acquaintance consider this wussy behavior. ("What? Not willing to hold a bagel in your hand as you slice toward your palm with a really sharp knife? Sheesh.")

I currently use a wooden thingie that looks sort of like a paper napkin holder, but it has seen many years of service and I've been looking for a replacement. This is how I stumbled across the Bagelpod. I have resisted writing about it because I've never actually used one. However, the engineer dude who invented this is so incredibly earnest and detailed about the process he went through to create this bagel-cutting device that I just had to pass it along.

The Bagelpod sells for $26 from Amazon.

Here's a (maddeningly soundless) video of a person I suspect to be the inventor demonstrating the use of the Bagelpod.

Frustrating old recipes

Feeling in a old-timey kitchen mood, I decided to find an old-timey recipe for all of my home-dried apples.

I stumbled across one called March Pudding in an 1877 cookbook called Buckeye Cookery, and Practical Housekeeping. The book was conceived as a fund-raiser, with recipes submitted by local housewives in Marysville, Ohio. The book sold for about $1.75, and it raised $2,000 to build a parsonage for the First Congregational Church.

The March Pudding recipe came from a Miss Lizzie March, who (I discovered through a little genealogical sleuthing) was the 20-year-old daughter of the local Presbyterian minister, William Gilmore March.

Here is the recipe as it appeared in the cookbook.

It's astonishing to me that recipes with so little information actually got published back in the day. I guess the recipes were more like sketches than actual blueprints for cooking. Maybe all of the women of the 19th century were so accomplished as cooks that they didn't need annoying little details like How much liquid goes into this batter? What kind of pan does it cook in? How hot is the oven? How long do you bake it? And I defy anyone to follow the exact order of business as described in the recipe. It simply can't work.

However, I did my best to reinterpret the information given. I didn't change any of the quantities, but had to make a complete guess on the soaking liquid for the apples. Since it was called a pudding, I made the assumption that it belonged to a class of desserts that were sort of like plum pudding, so I baked it—with much expectation—in a shaped pudding mold*. The resulting dessert was more cake-y and less dense than plum pudding. And I could NOT get it to unmold, though it was perfectly tasty. I have temporarily given up (I mean really, how many molasses cakes is a person expected to have in the refrigerator?), but I may get back to this one day.

I'm putting this out there now in hopes that someone who stumbles across this says, why of course, Lizzie March said bake but she really meant steam. Or else she baked it in some other kind of container that made the dessert easier to unmold/serve.

* The steamed pudding mold shown above is from Creative Cookware. Search on Plum Pudding Mold; they sell 1.5-quart and 2-quart molds. They also sell nonstick molds.

Chitarra pasta

Chitarra means guitar in Italian, and it is also the name for a piece of pasta-making equipment that resembles that stringed instrument (although zither would be a better match). Maccheroni alla chitarra or spaghetti alla chitarra are made by pressing a thin sheet of egg dough onto the metal strings, thus cutting the dough into strands (duh).
        The resulting strand pasta is squarish in cross-section and roughish in texture--as opposed to the roundish cross-section and smooth texture you get from pasta strands that have been extruded through a round hole. It is said that the rougher edges of the chitarra-cut strands allow pasta sauce to cling better.
       OK, enough food blah-blah. Here's the cool thing: The chitarra shown at left is handmade in this country (Pennsylvania, to be exact) by an artisan who has been making them for over 60 years. It has a hardwood frame and steel wires set into cast-aluminum anchors; it costs $50 from Fantes Kitchen Wares Shop.

Now, for you DIY folks: Here's a little instructional from a math professor at Columbia University in NYC on how to build your own chitarra.

Fun bottle openers

For years I've had one of those old-fashioned bottle openers mounted on the wall of my kitchen. You know the kind: cast-aluminum with Coca-Cola in raised letters on it. When I was a kid it was the type that the downtown grocery store always had next to the giant, red Coca-Cola-branded cooler where they kept all the cold sodas. There's nothing like the convenience of a wall-mounted bottle opener, because you don't have to figure out where the last person who used it decided to put it down.

You can still get the old-fashioned cast-aluminum openers—with the logo of any beer, soda, or sports team you happen to favor. But here's a collection of out-of-the-ordinary openers.

1 This cast-iron gentleman is Mr. Top Hat. $13 from farmhouse wares.

2 The Roaring Lion opener is made of cold-cast resin (a very strong polymer) with a metallic finish. It's $30 from Things 2 Die 4

3 A cast-iron moose opener would look very cool on the wall; I might be tempted to get it even though at least one customer found that the moose's chin wasn't long enough to actually open a bottle. It's $19 from Orvis.

4 Yeah, this cast-iron guy is obviously determined to open your bottle. The Bulldog opener is $12.95 from Rejuvenation.

5 OK, this is my favorite. This hardened stainless steel Bottle Bunny is from a British company called Slam Designs. It's $14.50 from amazon.

6 And then there's really nothing wrong with the classic shape. This model is stainless steel and proclaims no particular allegiance, except to helping you open a bottle of Moxie. It's $10 from Homebrewers Outpost.

Floating duck tea infuser

There's really not much to say about this guy except, awwwwww, makes me wish I liked tea.

Made of silicone, so he doesn't mind getting into hot water, he's $9.95 from Perennial Tea•Room (whose brick and mortar location is in Pike Place Market in Seattle).





At left is a picture of Mr. Duck after a hard day's work, sitting next to his personal drip catcher.

Microplane herb mill

I remember the first time I saw a Microplane zester. It was the late '90s and the Microplane still looked like the woodworking tool that it had started out as (just a straightforward rasp, no fancy handle). Flash forward a decade and Microplane has a whole range of kitchen tools with colored handles and beautiful design.

And the word Microplane has become a part of recipe language. When you write a recipe and you want to be sure that people are getting the same type/quantity of citrus zest as you're expecting them to get, you pretty much have to tell them that you used a Microplane. (See my post on the subject.)

Anyway, blah, blah, blah. Here we are in 2010, and Microplane continues to put itself in our kitchens in a way that makes it hard to imagine how we accomplished these tasks before their tools existed. Microplane's fiercely sharp cutting edges can now be found in an herb mill. Put fleshy herbs (cilantro, parsley, mint, dill) in the body of the mill and a simple twist of the handle produces perfectly minced (not smooshed and bruised) herbs.

Not content with the sleek stainless steel look of the mill standing up, Microplane also made the bottom of the mill (with it's surgical-grade blades) pretty darn cute.

The mill is available for $24.95 exclusively from Sur la Table through the end of this year. Starting January 2011, it will be available nationwide.

Message cookies

Two weeks to Valentine's Day.

But instead of those tiny candy hearts (which are gross anyway), let your feelings be known in a big way.

With a set of cookie cutters (three shapes: heart, star, and scalloped rectangle) from Williams-Sonoma, you can deliver your message(s) very taste-fully.

Each of the cutters in the set has slots for typesetting your own two-line message. The set comes with three full alphabets and some premade words/phrases (Happy, Birthday, Holidays, Thank You, I Love You, etc.). When you press the cutter into the dough, the outer edge cuts out the cookie and a plunger impresses your message into the center. The set comes with a dishwasher-safe mesh bag for storage and easy cleaning (because oh my lord, imagine cleaning all those little letters by hand). $19.90 from Williams-Sonoma.

Cookie cutters (part 6): Ravioli cookies

So think about it. Why couldn't you use a ravioli mold to make a filled cookie? Just change the pasta dough to a sweet pastry dough and change out the savory filling for something sweet. Bada-boom, miniature turnover cookies.

Here are two different ravioli trays from Sur la Table; each is $26 and includes the rolling pin. Both work on the same principle: You roll out 2 sheets of dough a little bigger than the ravioli tray. Place one sheet of dough over the tray and gently press the dough into the indentations. Fill the indents with the filling and top with a second sheet of dough. Use the rolling pin to seal the two layers of dough together and at the same time cut out individual ravioli cookies.

Another way to make ravioli is to use individual ravioli stamps, which Sur la Table sells for $6 - 7 apiece, depending on the size. Not a particularly practical choice for making a big batch of cookies, but perfectly reasonable for making ravioli if you're taking a shortcut and using won ton skins instead of sheets of pasta dough.

Cookie cutters (part 5): Fattigmann

Fattigmann are fried-dough cookies whose name in Norwegian means "poor man." Some find it hard to understand the word "poor" in the cookie's title because of the rich-man ingredients (eggs and cream) in the dough. But it should not be forgotten that eggs and cream were readily available to poor farm families who, though they didn't have much else, usually had laying hens and a cow for milking. It's just city folk who considered these ingredients costly.

No doubt the original fattigmann were just squares of dough dropped into hot fat, but somewhere along the line they got a little fancy. This fattigmann cutter from Pastry Chef ($16) rolls out a diamond-shaped piece of dough with a slit in the middle. One end of the dough is pulled through the slit and then the cookie is fried.

This roller would also work for other fried-dough cookies such as Lithuanian ausuke, Polish chrusciki, Rusian kosh tili, or Italian wandis.

Cookie cutters (part 4): Kolacky

If you live in Prague, Oklahoma, or Montgomery, Minnesota, chances are you are very familiar with pastries called kolacky or kolache. These two towns are among numerous in this country that lay claim to fame for their versions of this Central European pastry--a sweet yeast dough that holds or encloses a fruit, poppyseed, or other sweet filling. (There are also savory versions filled with cheese or meat.) The shapes of kolacky seem to vary considerably, possibly depending on the country of origin (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia).

When I stumbled across a kitchen tool called a kolacky cutter ($7 from Amazon), I was curious to see how it worked. Not so easy.

None of the U.S. kolache festivals seem to produce anything that look like they could have used this cutter. I finally resorted to searching Czech websites, which provided photographs but no help for how to make koláče (my Czech and Slovak are both very rusty these days). The picture at left gives a little hint to how the cutter must be used.

In any case, if you use this cutter to cut out regular sugar cookie dough and put a spot of jam in the center, you could probably find some creative way to fold in those windmill-ish arms to make something cool looking.

Cookie cutters (part 3): Shortbread stamp

Here's a cutie-pie cookie stamp. It's a petroglyph-style goat incised in stoneware by a ceramic artist named Kim Frazier. The stamp, which is 2 1/2 inches in diameter, is available for $8.50 from a goat farm in Luray, Virginia, called Khimaira. If you buy the cookie stamp, they'll send you their recipe for shortbread cookies made with goat cheese.

Cookie cutters (part 2): Lego cookies

This cute little roller makes Lego bricks out of cookie dough. Too bad it can't produce cookies with indentations on the back, too, so you could build a Lego gingerbread house.

Cookie cutters (part 1): Hello Kitty

Every December in the food magazine world, the inevitable happens: the Christmas cookie story. And every year it's a challenge to the editors to come up with new and different cookies. Given that all cookies are at heart the same 3 ingredients (flour, butter, sugar), it all gets a little predictable. (Seriously, a sugar cookie is a sugar cookie.) So I decided to see what I could find that would help cookies at least look different, even if they taste similar. Thus begins a series on "Not Your Usual Cookie Cutter."

First up is a cookie cutter that lets you assemble a 3-D Hello Kitty (be still my heart). It's a 3-part cutter: two legs and one body. The body piece is also a stamp that produces the wonderful vacuous look of dear Hello Kitty. The put-together Hello Kitty is about 4 inches high.

The cookie cutter/stamp sells for $10 from a website called TwinkleDoll, which specializes in anime-related products. Although the website is located in Florida, it's for sure that a nativeborn Japanese person wrote the copy for this cookie cutter, to wit: "Make your own Hello Kitty cookies to increase your appetite now!" (Increase my appetite??)

Specialized rolling pins

My favorite part of Thanksgiving is pie. So naturally, now that we're in the run-up to that great American tryptophan festival, I'm in a pie frame of mind.
This brings me to this fine collection of rolling pins, many of which belong in the Who Knew? category:

The first one in the collection isn't a Who Knew?, it's more of a I Wish I Owned One. This is an antique folk art pin. There are nine images carved into the 5-inch pin, which presses the pattern into a stiff cookie dough such as springerle. The images are then cut out and baked. It's $59 from House on the Hill.










Next up is a rolling pin for making hard tack, which is a very hard (duh), thick cracker/bread designed to withstand no refrigeration and months at sea. It was the standard fare of sailors (and soldiers) in the 18th century. To keep the crackers flat as they bake, the cook needs to work the air pockets out of the dough. The knobs on this pin do the job. Hard tack (and other crackers) also have holes pricked in the dough to give any remaining trapped air an escape route. This hardwood pin is 10 inches long and is $23 from Creative Kitchen.





This pin is here because I like the sleek, ergonomic design. Or maybe I like it because if Darth Vader baked pies, this is the pin he would use. It's from OXO Good Grips, and the barrel of the pin is nonstick. It's $32 from Sur La Table.











I love the look of this guy. It's made of cherry wood and is actually designed to cut noodles, not roll pie dough. It's $28 from Lehman's, where you'll also find a .pdf with a recipe and an instructional on how to make noodles using the noodle cutter.












This pin is cool. Literally. It has a stainless steel barrel with an opening at one end so you can fill the rolling pin with cold water. The water gives the pin weight and keeps it cool for working with buttery doughs. It's $38 from Fantes.











 Last but not least, a meat tenderizer masquerading as a rolling pin. Instead of pounding meat to tenderize or flatten, the knobbledy surface of the pin, and the pressure put on it by the human, evenly, and less violently, tenderize meat. The pin is almost 10 inches long and the barrel is made of silicone. Although sold as a meat tenderizer, this would clearly work as a hard tack rolling pin, too. It's $20 from Lehman's.

More apple gadgets

If you're not interested in giving up the storage space to the wonderful apple peeler/corer mentioned in yesterday's post, then maybe you could go for one of these more elementary apple cutting devices.

1 Possibly more objet d'art than kitchen utensil, this stainless steel Giro Apple Slicer twists to cut perfectly even slices. $38 at Uncommon Goods.

2 From the OXO Good Grips line, the Apple Divider. It cores and wedges in one motion. $10 from OXO

3 A straight-up apple corer from Kitchenaid. $10 from Amazon.

4 This tong-style apple corer solves the sometimes thorny problem of how to get the apple core out of the corer. With the tongs closed, you push through an apple as you would with any corer. When you pull the core out, you open up the tongs to release the core. $10 from Lehman's.

5 This old-fashioned looking apple corer addresses the issue differently. It provides a plunger to push the core out of the corer. $5 from Applesource.

6 And finally a really Old Skool apple corer from Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. This tin apple corer is made by the tinsmith at the museum and sells for $12.95 from their online store. It can be a little tricky to navigate the website and there's no way to provide a direct link. But if you go to the storefront and click on "Made at Old Sturbridge Village" and then "Tinware," you'll find it.

The essential gadget for making apple butter

This contraption is manufactured by many folks and has been around forever. If you're serious about cooking mass quantities of apples (now that it's apple-picking season), you absolutely need to have one. These pictures are from the day I made Apple Butter. You start by jamming an apple onto the prongs at the end of a long crank.

As you turn the crank, the apple is rotated and pushed forward at the same time. It passes by a spring-loaded blade that takes off the peel as the apple turns.








At the same time, another blade slices the apple into a thin spiral cut and removes the core.

You can find this style of apple peeler in lots of places. The Back to Basics brand I use sells for $23 from Amazon.

Dinosaur stuff

My son is 23 now, but when I see a dinosaur book/toy/object, I still get this parental urge to buy it for him. Or maybe it was always about me. I didn't have a dinosaur obsession when I was a kid, so I sort of lived that vicariously through my son. I was just as happy to know about the knobbed killing thingie (scientific term) on the end of an ankylosaurus tail as he was.

So here are the things that I've come across recently that make me wish I still had a 7-year-old deep in the throes of dinosaurophilia.

First up is this very fine pasta server (called a Pastasaurus), $7.50 from perpetual kid.










And what could be cooler (wink) than ice cubes in the shape of dinosaur bones? This set of two Fossilice molds makes Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops cubes. They're $14.95 at Amazon.







And finally, Dino Sticks, chopsticks for those not quite up to the real thing. They come in a set of 8 different dinosaurs, including the Parasaurolophus, Velociraptor and Pteranodon you see here. The set is $17.95 from Nexus Gadgets.

Salad spinners, old school

When I lived in France in my late teens, I was introduced to my first salad spinner. Jeanine (who was the live-in housekeeper in the pension where I lived) took a bunch of washed greens, put them in a dishtowel, formed the towel into a bag and then just did a Pete Townshend-style windmill with her arm. The centrifugal force made the water come flying out through the weave of the dishtowel. When she was done, she had perfectly dried lettuce.

There is a world of complex, multi-part salad spinners on the market, but sometimes the simplest is the best. Here are a couple of salad spinners that are based on the same principle: using the cook's arm as the operative component.

1 This is a really old-school French salad spinner. They probably don't make them like this any more; the basket shown here is a reproduction of an antique and is available on Amazon for $23.

2 Remember these collapsible wire baskets? It was probably one of the first grown-up kitchen items I owned after I graduated from college. The cool thing is that when you flip the handles down, they become feet for the basket so that it can stand on its own. You may be able to find it in hardware stores around the country, but you can definitely get one for $9 from Lehmans.

3 The flaw in these first two spinners (and in the towel-flinging method described above) is that you throw water everywhere. No problem if you have a porch or backyard, but sort of a problem if you live in an apartment—not that that ever stopped me. So here is a salad spinner (which as far as I can make out is still just sold in Europe) from a Danish design firm called Eva Solo. The bucket is flexible so that after you wash the greens in it, you pinch the rim of the bucket to form a spout and pour out the water. Then you whirl the bucket around by its nylon handle. The water is forced to the bottom of the bucket, where it collects under a drainage plate that separates the greens from the water. Check here for more info on the bucket (and other Eva Solo designs).