Oh, I see I was wrong - the description has been changed and it’s now more honest!
When I bought them in January (via the Daily Beast store) the original $599 valuation was justified by claiming they were authentic Japanese handmade carbon-steel knives. They’re not bad knives, probably well worth this $50 price.
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What disappoints me most about these ads is just how ham-handed they are. BB should take a page from sites like Gizmodo and use the commenters as a resource to identify their favorite items (as we have in this thread) and then sell those things instead of trying to ouch a bunch of crap on us.
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Replying to correct myself: Actually the description here is fair, except for the 90% saving. These ‘Japanese-style’ knives are reasonably good quality stainless steel knives, probably worth at least $50, although they’re not ‘Japanese chef’ knives.
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here’s my list which is a much better list:
- knife and cutting board
- big cast iron skillet
- pressure cooker
- bread machine
- immersion blender
- high speed blender
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That’s all you need for shredded. Forks. Those things are dumb and a total waste.
Shite article is shite.
I have been cooking sous vide since the days of hooking up crockpots to PID controllers. It is incredibly convenient and allows you to do everything from precision cooking of eggs to steak to cheesemaking effortlessly.
Of course, the particular circulator here is crap. The clip - which will wear out more quickly than you can imagine - limits you pretty much to pots as vessels. The more convenient polycarbonate tubs have too much of a lip. And this brand isn’t highly regarded anyhow.
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Great! More kitchen stuff to use just once then never use again!
I know how much Alton Brown likes to put on his tight little sneer and announce this, but it’s bullshit.
A waffle iron is a unitasker for which there is no multipurpose replacement.
Same with a garlic press; sliced, chopped, and pressed garlic are very different
Or a nutcracker
Or a deep fryer if you regularly deep fry
Or a cutting board
Or clingfilm
Or the meat grinder and sausage stuffer (yes, I make sausage)
Or a cheese press (likewise cheese)
Or a Corni keg
Or a salt shaker or pepper grinder
Or a coffeemaker
Or an idli steamer
Hell, even the claws are useful if you are the sort of person who regularly cooks whole pork butts. I’m not, but I can see how tearing up thirty pounds of smoked pork with two little dinner forks like he recommends would be tedious and pointless.
I understand that he’s trying to keep people from buying a bunch of useless gadgets, but his little bromide is bullshit.
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Interestingly enough, Alton Brown did not start the idea of home cooks not needing unitasker or unique specialty kitchen equipment. What professional kitchens need and use are not what a home kitchen necessarily needs/uses.
Julia Child absolutely adored the old french brass duck press, but she never thought it belonged in the average home. It hasn’t been until recently that many pro kitchen products started becoming readily available for in home kitchens (immersion circulators are great examples of that).
My spouse bought an egg cooker recently, and I simply shook my head and asked her “What, a pot with water was too hard to figure out?!” Her reply was “I know I know…just give me this one gadget” It’s small and takes up little space, so it’s not a big deal.
I used my claws tonight on a pork butt, which indeed I do cook regularly. I like them for shredding and carrying the meat, but also they’re just awesome looking. So yeah, I’m not following Alton Brown anymore, I’m following Marie Kondo and these claws bring me joy.
Aside; if you think a waffle maker is a unitasker, you’re not on trend.
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I have that book
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I will defend your wife on that one: for $10-15 you get something that is brainless: put the eggs in, soft/medium/hard boiled eggs magically appear with no effort or attention whatsoever.
If you look at the energy and water savings, it’s actually a reasonable choice.
Not for households that don’t boil eggs much, I suppose, but I’m a Midwesterner.
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Pft. All I need to make my food is a microwave and maybe a toaster.
What? Come at me bro! Marie Callender is my personal chef!
Despite it being popularized by fancy high falutin’ modernist cooking types, the real value in sous vide, IMO, is in taking cheaper cuts of beef and making them fork tender from cooking them for an extended period of time at a steady low temperature.
Now that the prices are going down, they’re actually a good long term investment (assuming the quality of the lower priced units is good enough that it doesn’t die after the 90 day warranty period is up) for people that can really only afford the cheap steaks.
And it’s wrong too. You don’t need a food vac to sous vide.
I have a foodsaver only because my leftover bbq’ed meat kept getting freezer burnt and thrown out, and I do use it when buying some stuff in bulk, like meat on sale, but the only time I ever use the bags to sous vide meat is when I sealed and froze the meat in it in the first place: then, to save a ziploc, I season and re seal, as long as there’s still enough extra bag left to allow me to do so.
Every other time, I just use a freezer bag, submerge it in water to displace the air, then seal.
Now, I do think that it’s currently overrated and overused, but it’s still a very useful tool and technique for the home cook.
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I have not replied to others criticising the article. I was merely sharing a perspective and some comments from professional chefs, not endorsing it, necessarily. But ref your comment, I can do that in an oven or with a slow cooker and do not use a plastic bag every time I cook such a piece of meat. Personally, it seems to me that sous-vide is a lot of faff - including very specialised equipment - for some small gains in some limited circumstances. Some may find that acceptable, or even useful. I don’t think I would.
You can turn it into a pot roast in an oven or slow cooker, which is very different.
With sous vide, the steak stays a steak, and the roast stays a roast, as rare as you’d like in the middle.
If it is decent steak to start with, I can cook it fine and end up with a decent cooked steak. If is not a decent steak to begin with I should do something else with it than try to serve it as a steak (using another plastic bag and a specialised tool) or I should buy decent steak to start with. If I want a rare roast, my cooking skills and oven are of sufficent quality to achieve it (and a meat thermometer sometimes enters the fray if I really am that bothered - there’s a unitasker that IS worth the much smaller investment).
I get that you’ve found good use cases for you, but I’m literally not buying it. 
Correct. I live at around 7,000 feet, and we use a resin egg-shaped thing to test our eggs and noodles.
It darkens from the outside as it boils, and since the water here boils at a lower temperature, it takes a bit longer, but works the same way at any altitude.
When the little egg thingy indicates that the egg had reached the desired hardness (or pasta readiness), we remove the pan from the heat.
Never fails, and it returns to clear at room temperature, ready to be re-used indefinitely.
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On the bottom of the plastic cup that measures how much water to add to the machine to create the steam, there is a little metal pokey-bit for poking a hole in the egg. This helps tremendously against leakage/explosion. Also, having the eggs not be freezing cold when they start.
If you see an obvious pattern to the “off” cooking, you can adjust so that the soft-boiled eggs suit you. A tiny bit more water, for example, as if there were one less egg in the tray, will add a little bit more time.
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