A: One good knife is the best thing to have in your kitchen. Start with a good chef’s knife that’s sized to fit your body. I use an eight-inch Anolon chef’s knife almost exclusively. I like its weight and balance, and it was pretty inexpensive, too. I think I got mine for about $20 during a post-Christmas sale at Bed, Bath & Beyond. If you want to add a second, go with a good pairing knife for small-scale work. A third? I’d suggest a small, thin fillet knife, especially if you cook a lot of fish.

Spend a little money, too. I know you can probably get a whole knife set (including wooden holding block!) for not much more than the cost of a single chef’s knife, but please don’t do that. Just go with the chef’s knife. Seriously.

I wouldn’t suggest sharpening knives on your own. Some people probably get pleasure buying a whetstone and oil and going through the meticulous ritual of sharpening, but that’s jut not for me. I don’t have the time or interest to devote to that learning curve, and the guy down at the local hardware store has a much greater chance of getting a good edge on the knife than I do.

Alton Brown recommends sharpening your knives every year or so, and honing several times a month. I value his opinions when it comes to food and cooking gadgets.

And it is so important to use sharp knives! Imagine how your face or legs feel after using a dull razor. Not the best feeling is it? Now translate that feeling to your kitchen. Your whole body is involved when you’re really cutting, and life is easier if you have a sharp knife. Which reminds me, I really should get mine sharpened.

As for technique? I can think of no better resource than Jacques Pépin. It seems full runs of his series, More Fast Food My Way are available via KQED’s Web page. Just watching him work with a knife is amazing.  If you search through the archives, you can probably find several where he talks specifically about various knife techniques.

Also, Saveur has an excellent section on techniques. Check out the various knife techniques on their site. They’re not the most comprehensive (no step-by-step illustrations, for example), but they seem to cover the basics at least.

Finally, practice. Carrots are cheap and plentiful and packed with beta-Carotene.  Slice them, cook them up as carrots vichy, and enjoy.

Nathan Myhrvold, cookbook author

Nathan Myhrvold, ex-Microsoftie and founder of an invention company called Intellectual Ventures, is also really interested in food, so much so that he’s writing a monster cookbook (currently ~1500 pages) about the science of cooking.

In another discovery of culinary heat transfer physics, Dr. Myhrvold said the bulbous shape and black color of Weber grills were wrong. To achieve an even cooking temperature across the cooking grate, the inside of the grill should be vertical and shiny to reflect the heat. That can be fixed by adding an aluminum insert to the grill. “So we have directions for that,” Dr. Myhrvold said.

You may remember reading about Myhrvold and IV in Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on the nature of invention last year.

Two things: I’m not sure we need another cookbook on the science of cooking, especially one already over the 1,500 page mark. Harold McGee already wrote the amazing On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. If you’ve read any of it, you know Alton Brown owes much of his success to McGee’s work. Indeed, any cook worth his salt should send a thank-you note to McGee some time today.

More concerning is Myhrvold’s mistake. In examining hardware, he forgot about cooking. The Weber grill is masterfully designed because it allows for very specific heat regulation and air circulation. When grilling, you don’t want even heat distribution. The things you’re cooking should and will cook at different rates.

Picture this: the bulbous Weber with coals piled on one side in the bottom. Near that edge, the food is very close to the heat, perfect for quick grilling vegetables or searing thin meat cuts. On the other side, you’d have a relatively cool temperature, perfect for slow-cooking ribs or pork loin.

The review doesn’t call Myhrvold on his mistakes, which go beyond the beloved Weber:

Confit doesn’t impart a unique flavor, it’s a method of preservation

The book sounds audacious, and I’m sure will include some interesting bits of knowledge for those operating at the bleeding edge of food and cooking. But to claim something’s just wrong without proper context is just sloppy cooking. Journalism, too.

“Cooking is not a perfectly precise art, but a good grasp of the basics gives the chef or student the ability not only to apply the technique, but also to learn the standards of quality so that they begin to develop a sense of how cooking works.”
-The Professional Chef (XV [emphasis mine])

No one learns by himself. All of us take from sources around us. Passively or proactively, we research. To make this journey — this kitchen time worthwhile, I’ve compiled a small reference library that I hope will help, that I hope will teach more than any cookbook might.

The Basics
There is something appealing about the imprecise. A comfort found in the recipe that asks you to “mix the cream and lemon juice, then season with sugar, salt, and pepper.” Such was the advice of The Basics by Filip Verheyden and Tony Le Duc when I let it fall open in my hands and discovered “Salad Dressing.” This is the sort of recipe I like. The kind of recipe that asks, as all fundamental understanding does, “Given what we know now, what else can be done?”

The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen
The mark of every profession is a vocabulary. It’s what can make one an English professor, a journalist, a chemist, a janitor. A cook is no different. With each profession comes a shorthand, and I can think of no better, easier reference for this shorthand than Michael Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking. I also admire the man’s consideration of eggs:

“My reverence for the egg borders on religious devotion. It is the perfect food–an inexpensive package, dense with nutrients and exquisitely flavored, that’s both easily and simply prepared but that is also capable of unmatched versatility in the kitchen. Yes, an egg is just an egg, but it is also ingredient, tool, and object, a natural construction of near mystical proportions.”
Elements of Cooking by Michael Ruhlman (22)

I know, too, from Elements of Cooking that Ruhlman always had a couple books close at hand when writing: The Professional Chef produced by the Culinary Institute of America and On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.

The Professional Chef
The Professional Chef is a massive tome. I’ll be honest and say I’ve just gotten through the section on recipe conversions, but I’ve already learned much. Standardized recipes, for example.

I know I’ll never be a professional chef. I’m too old–my knees shot from years spent skateboarding–and too comfortable to work in a professional kitchen. It’s a good thing to understand, though. To know how food is put together. To become mindful of waste as if profits depend on it. To convert imperial to metric. To understand why weight, not volume, is the most precise measurement for ingredients. Plus, it already provided a wonderful quote, the singular impetus behind this new culinary journey. So there’s that.

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
No one serious about food should be without On Food and Cooking.  It’s a book that explains why we should let meat rest after cooking, traces the origin of oregano, the importance of salt.  In the pages of On Food and Cooking, McGee explains why cooked food tastes better than raw, and begins to explain the Maillard reaction before finally moving on, the number of individual chemical reactions making the up whole too numerous to detail.

The man can also write:

“What better subject for the first chapter than the food with which we all begin our lives?…A sip of milk itself or a scoop of ice cream can be a Proustian draft of youth’s innocence and energy and possibility, while a morsel of fine cheese is a rich meditation on maturity, the fulfillment of possibility, the way of all flesh.”
On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (7-8)

Proust and ice cream? Beats a simple recipe every time.