Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain - review, excerpt

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	Book Review and Excerpt
			Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain Trade Paperback 320 pages Ecco Press
	Anthony Bourdain is a chef, a novelist, and known to many as the star of the FoodTV show "A Cook's Tour" (and author of a book by the same title). If you've ever seen him on TV, you know that he's opinionated. He's definitely a guy with an attitude. That attitude shows in his writing. Kitchen Confidential is as engrossing to read as any novel, and it's instructional, too. You'll learn why you never want to order your meat well-done and on which days to order, and not to order, the fish entrée. You'll also learn the most essential skill for any chef! No, I can't tell you those things. That'd be like giving away the ending to a mystery. What I can do is show you this excerpt from the book. From the Chapter: How to Cook Like the Pros Unless you're one of us already, you'll probably never cook like a professional. And that's okay. On my day off, I rarely want to eat restaurant food unless I'm looking for new ideas or recipes to steal. What I want to eat is home cooking, somebody's -- anybody's -- mother's or grandmother's food. A simple pasta pomodoro made with love, a clumsily thrown together tuna casserole, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, all of this is pure exotica to me, even when I've been neck deep all day in filet mignon and herb-infused oils and all the bits of business we do to distinguish restaurant food from what you get at home. My mother-in-law would always apologize before serving dinner when I was in attendance, saying, "This must seem pretty ordinary for a chef..." She had no idea how magical, how reassuring, how pleasurable her simple meat loaf was for me, what a delight even lumpy mashed potatoes were -- being, as they were, blessedly devoid of truffles or truffle oil. Let's talk about tools first. What do we have in our kitchens that you probably don't? The joke is that many of our stock items -- herb oils, crushed spices, chiffonaded parsley, puréed starches and veggies -- are often made with home-model equipment, just like yours. I may have a 25-quart professional Hobart mixer and an ultra-large Robot-Coupe, but chances are I used a home blender to make that lovely roast red pepper coulis dotted with bright green basil oil drizzled around your plate. So, what do you absolutely need?
			...You need, for God's sake, a decent chef's knife. No con

	foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrong-headed or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I sometimes wish I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers -- all those medium-sized "utility" knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers -- not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef's knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously. But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won't)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I'd forgo the Germans. Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, very good Japanese products that have -- in addition to their many other fine qualities -- the added attraction of looking really cool. Okay, there are a couple of other knives you might find useful. I carry a flexible boning knife, also made by the fine folks at Global, because I fillet the occasional fish, and because with the same knife I can butcher whole tenderloins, bone out legs of lamb, French-cut racks or veal, or trim meat. If your butcher is doing all the work for you, you can probably live without one. A paring knife comes in handy once in a while, if you find yourself tournéeing vegetables, fluting mushrooms....
			Global's 5-piece starter set has a chef's, carving, bread, cook's, and paring knife. They come with a lifetime warranty against defects and breakage.
	A genuinely useful blade, however, and one that is increasingly popular with my cronies in the field, is what's called an offset serrated knife. It's basically a serrated knife set into an ergonomic handle; it looks like a "Z" that's been pulled out and elongated. This is truly a cool item that, once used, becomes indispensable. As the handle is not flush with the blade, but is
			raised away from the cutting surface, you can use it not only for your traditional serrated blade needs -- like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on --

but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish. My sous-chef uses his for just about everything. F. Dick makes a good one for about twenty-five bucks. It's stainless steel, but since it's serrated it doesn't really matter; after a couple of years of use, if the teeth start to wear down, you just buy yourself another one. (Ed note: The one shown in the picture above is an Oxo Good Grips Natural Grip Bread Knife. It, too, is stainless steel, and it only costs $11.99. That style of knife isn't one that I've tried yet, but I can see where there'd be advantages of not having your knuckles get in the way when you bring down the blade. ...Pam)

***end of excerpt***

This is a picture of the knife I believe Bourdain is referring to in the book:

I found that picture on BigTray. (I'm not familiar with that company, so use your discretion and judgment.) Wüsthof makes a knife similar to that one for fifty bucks.

Be sure to read the Bourdain quote at the top of this page. Another tip from the book: Look at the bathroom in the restaurant you are going to eat in. It is visible to the public so if it is filthy then the kitchen, which you cannot see, is probably worse.

Bourdain also recommends getting a mandoline: "...a vertically held slicer with various blade settings." Here are three options:

Hoffritz Stainless Steel Mandoline Slicer at $24.99: