noodsletter #.0014

A thanks to readers; feelin' leeky; knives.

Hello!

You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is usually at the end, everything else on top. This week’s recipe:

Leeks*

This week’s noodsletter features a fair amount of stuff provided to me by readers: links, the book bit, and the idea to catalog my knives. Thank you! If any of you want to send over things you find interesting, or that you think I would find interesting, I encourage you to do so!

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These Are My Knives

I’ve given a couple of friends in the last few weeks recommendations for knives, so I thought you all may be interested in that advice, too.

Now, I’m not a knife guy. Most of my knives are relatively inexpensive. But I think my collection might be instructive, in part because I own and use a couple of knives I don’t like. Half of giving good advice is copping to errors made along the way.

Here they all are:

Left to right, that’s a Chinese-style Daovua cleaver, a Tojiro DP gyuto, a Victorinox chef’s knife, a carbon steel santoku I got for free, a Fujiwara honesuki, a Tojiro deba, a custom-made wee deba, and a bunch of paring knives.

(As always, none of the links are affiliate links.)

Now, if you are a knife person, you’ll notice that these are all under a hundred dollars, which is about where my comfort level is for a knife (maybe not the santoku? I’m not sure). However, they are all (except for that beater Victorinox) good knives, or at least they’re more than good enough for my purposes as a very frequent home cook. I imagine I’ll own all of them when I die (including that beater Victorinox).

In buying these knives, I was mostly concerned with utility, but I’ve made some odd choices over the years to accommodate what few knife guy proclivities I have, like being interested in single-beveled blades. However, for most cooks, my advice about buying knives is essentially the same as my approach to buying knives, and that’s to be honest with yourself about your commitment to taking care of your knives, about your willingness to use specific knives, about what you use your knives for, and—if you’re considering specialty knives—about the frequency with which you will use your knives.

Every cook in the world needs just three knives: A serrated bread knife, a “chef’s” knife of some kind, and a paring knife. That’s it. You can certainly get away with just the chef’s knife, but even if you cook only once a month, you will thank your past self for buying that bread knife and the paring knife somewhere along the line; they’re very useful. A bread knife cuts bread, of course, and can’t be beat at that, but also a squishy tomato and an otherwise adamantine squash. Paring knives are endlessly useful; I don’t think I need to list the ways they’re used.

For the serrated bread knife, you should buy a Tojiro. It is very cheap and it’s excellent, I can’t recommend it enough. I do not own a Tojiro bread knife. I own a really bad bread knife that’s probably more expensive than the Tojiro, because the Tojiro is very cheap, and I regret the fact that I own this knife every time I cut bread, which is every single day. Unfortunately, my bread knife still works perfectly well, so I’m stuck with it (because I’m cheap!). Don’t make the same mistake; buy thee a Tojiro¹.

For paring knives, just get the cheapest one you can find. As long as it’s new, it should be sharp (they’re often made with thin, stamped steel). If it gets dull, just buy a new one. As you can see, I own a couple fancy-looking paring knives that, like my bread knife, I do not like. The Misen has a profile of a chef’s knife, and I find it awkward to use when peeling things with it; the other one has an odd handle and a weirdly steep incline as it sharpens to the tip. The Misen is also doubly annoying because it’s profile makes it easy to sharpen, so…I sharpen it, instead of throwing it away and buying a cheap paring knife. Save your money, buy the cheap ones. The ones at the knife store are ten bucks a pop, buy three and you’ll never need another one again (unless you cook a lot). I recommend buying the ones with a flat edge, rather than a curved one or a bird’s beak paring knife—that last one is for people who flute mushrooms and core Brussels sprouts, so not me (and probably not you). Those four knives will likely last me for 20 years, at least, especially since I sharpen the Misen.

However, for the chef’s knife, you have options, and this is where you have to be honest with yourself. I dislike the phrase “chef’s knife” for all kinds of reasons, but for our purposes the main reason is that it encompasses a range of knife styles. (“All-purpose knife” would be better, but then no one would know what I’m talking about.) The Chinese-style cleaver I have is as much a “chef’s knife” as the Tojiro gyuto, and the same goes for that beater Victorinox; ditto the santoku (kind of). If I owned just one of those, I wouldn’t need any of the others, as they all fulfill the same basic but large range of duties.

The first question you have to consider is what feels comfortable for you. A giant rectangular blade? A cylindrical handle? Do you find yourself rocking your blade when you chop things? For most Americans, I’d imagine the answers to those questions are no, no, and yes, respectively, because if you, like me, grew up reading French-inflected Western cookbooks and food media, then you probably learned how to use a knife the Western, French-inflected way. The knife in my collection that represents the style that is essentially designed to be used in that way is the Victorinox; that was the first “good” knife I bought, on the recommendation of essentially every food publication at the time (2006?).

However, the Tojiro gyuto is what many publications shifted to recommending over the years. A gyuto is a Japanese knife that has more of a Western knife’s blade profile, and consequently it’s better for use by those who like to rock-chop. The Tojiro has better steel, but it’s still stainless; it isn’t a stamped blade; it’s easier to sharpen than the Victorinox; all of these are good qualities! However, I know it can be a little uncomfortable to use; until I built up a callous on my right hand, right where my grip touches the top of the handle, it was kind of a (literal) pain.

I think that most people would probably prefer to use a Japanese-style blade, just because they’re thinner and lighter, generally speaking, and since gyutos would have a more familiar shape, I think most people should get a gyuto. My recommendation for people who want to get a good gyuto is this MAC knife. It’s the knife I use in the test kitchen at SE (I hide it from everyone else!); I love it. It’s lighter than the Tojiro, I think it has a thinner blade, the steel is basically the same. The only issue with it is it’s kind of expensive, but this (and the Tojiro, or any of these knives, really) will last you a lifetime.

I don’t recommend picking up a Chinese-style cleaver or a santoku unless you want to explore different knife skills techniques. The cleaver I own (and love) can be used in a similar way to a Western knife (it has that little incline at the tip, to facilitate rocking), but its virtues are more evident when it’s used for push chopping. As to santokus, I don’t like them; they are meant to be the Japanese all-purpose knife, capable of chopping vegetables, cutting meat, and filleting fish, but I find they’re not very great at any of those things, and they’re best used with push cutting, which isn’t a commonly used technique in American kitchens (including mine!). I take that santoku with me as a travel knife, but otherwise I let it sit in my knife drawer.

Of course, it will only last you a lifetime if you take care of it. It’s very hard to destroy a knife, but it’s very easy to make it bad to use. The Tojiro, the MAC, the Victorinox: they’re all stainless steel that’s relatively hard, so even if you abuse them (leave them wet, throw them in the dishwasher, cut on a marble slab masquerading as a cutting board, cut on a bamboo slab masquerading as a cutting board), they’ll survive and can be brought back to laser-like life by sending them to a (good) sharpener and forking over 5-10 bucks. But the point of buying a decent knife is to have a decent knife around all the time, so you may as well take care of it. That not only means treating it nicely, but also sharpening.

Sharpening is an important element to address before I get to the rest of these knives. If you don’t plan on sharpening your knives yourself, I don’t think you should buy any other knives than the three discussed above. The first two you can’t or shouldn’t sharpen; the all-purpose knife you can just send out for sharpening once in a while (if you get a Western knife, you can forestall sending it out for sharpening by using a honing steel—my understanding is honing steels shouldn’t be used for Japanese blades).

But these other knives, including the carbon steel Chinese-style cleaver and the carbon steel santoku, are basically designed to be sharpened by their users. Carbon steel is a relatively soft steel that sharpens easily and can hold a very sharp, thin edge. Carbon steel also requires a level of care and attention stainless doesn’t, which includes but isn’t limited to merely sharpening it; you have to keep them dry when not in use, or they’ll rust; you don’t want to be banging them around, resting them on hard surfaces, etc.

Now, you don’t have to be or become an expert sharpener. I am terrible at sharpening knives, and my operating assumption is that I will get incrementally better at sharpening over the course of my life. So far, almost 20 years in, I have gotten a little better. Will I ever be a good knife sharpener? No. And yet, my skill with sharpening a knife is perfectly sufficient to keeping my knives in decent, workable, safe, sharp shape. I highly recommend beginning your never-ending journey toward never becoming a good knife sharpener. This is a handy page of video resources.

The other knives in the line up are my honesuki, or poultry knife, and my two debas, or fish filleting knives. I love my honesuki; if you find yourself cutting up chickens a lot, you will love your honesuki, too. I use it a couple times a week, and while it literally is designed for taking apart birds, it can fill in for a boning knife. Mine is a Fujiwara, and it’s a little unconventional in that it’s got an asymmetrical bevel instead of a single bevel. (I’m just going to link out for an explanations of bevels…again, I’m not a knife guy.) The debas are both single bevels, as is traditional, and while I love debas more than any knife in the world, even in my kitchen they get relatively little use, because debas are fish filleting knives and America is not a good place to buy fish. If you fillet a lot of fish, you should absolutely, 100% buy a deba and learn how to sharpen it. It’s very hard to describe how good the heft of a deba (they’re quite heavy) feels as you cleave through fish skin and flesh as if the knife is discovering natural fault lines in the fish, although the honesuki has a similar effect. Both types of knife have quite thick spines toward the heel and very thin spines toward the point, and this produces a sensation of incredible, unstoppable momentum when you slice through things with the points.

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Book

Friday. Rain. The end of school. He could stay home now, stay home and do nothing, stay near his mother the whole afternoon. He turned from the window and regarded her. She was seated before the table paring beets. The first cut into a beet was like lifting a lid from a tiny stove. Sudden purple under the peel; her hands were stained with it. Above her blue and white checkered apron her face bent down, intent upon her work, her lips pressed gravely together. He loved her. He was happy again.

From Call It Sleep by Henry Roth.

I tend to pick passages from the books I’m currently reading, but this week’s selection was inspired by my friend, who just read Call It Sleep after I recommended it to her. She pointed out to me that there are many bits about food in the book, and she liked in particular the bit about a recent immigrant complaining about American bread. I didn’t recall that at all, and I’ve been skimming through to find it, but haven’t had any luck. I picked this for the image of the beet like a tiny stove, which I don’t quite see, but I nevertheless find wonderfully evocative, if that makes sense. It’s a beautiful book, even if it’s grim for the most part.

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“News”

Make pancakes like famous pancake maker John freaking Locke.

Been a while since the last time I read To the Lighthouse, but the “yellow meats” in the boeuf en daube does seem to be an uncharacteristic imprecision.

Wandering chicken seized near Pentagon

Climate change is coming for wasabi.

Potato…milk?

Is a potato alive? (This deranged link was sent in by reader Richelle. Thank you!)

あお @oanaca

Mary Berry…🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ #katsucurrypolice

I realized the grown meat people want people to relate to their products, but why would you grow a chicken breast substitute shaped like a chicken breast, the worst-shaped cut of meat? Just grow ‘em into tendies.

Not really sure how I feel about this story about a group of “finance bros” gaming online reservation systems. The covid check stuff aside, seems like the restaurants weren’t harmed?

My wife is planning her “balcony” gardening, so maybe you, too, need some tips for “epic” tomatoes.

Maybe a spaghetti tree?

I still get a very “yuck” feeling whenever I see food/lifestyle brands doing marijuana content. I have nothing against marijuana, of course, just the idea of affluent people yucking it up for website clicks while poor people of color sit in prison for lighting a joint one time. Also, hash? I haven’t seen hash since I moved to the US from India in 2001.

Feel like this reviewer went in with bad ideas about savory cocktails. I don’t drink cocktails, but I’d probably like ones based on meat stocks than literally anything else.

Should you roast a whole duck for a dinner party? I don’t know; I don’t go to or host dinner parties, but I don’t think you should. (I also dislike whole roasted chickens and refuse to believe other people love them as much as they say they do, which obviously puts me in a tiny minority!) Most people don’t buy ducks because they’re expensive, and since they’re expensive, my opinion is to wring them for all they’re worth.

Why chicken is artificially cheap (really upsetting, but good, video).

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Recipe

Leeks

This is hardly a recipe, but I was sick for the last month with successive waves of non-COVID colds, culminating in a light case of pneumonia, so it’s what I got. It also happens to be quite delicious.

If you’ve ever had a leek lying around and didn’t know what soup to put it in, this idea is for you. Leeks are, of course, delicious in all sorts of non-soup things, but my first and, often, last thought about how to use them is to put them in soup or soup-like things; for one winter, the only way I ate leeks was by adding them, chopped, to a pot of brothy beans right at the last 15 minutes of cooking. It was good, but still, a shame, because leeks can be enjoyed in a lot of different ways, like, for example, mapo tofu. This one is definitely the easiest.

You will have to clean the leeks, of course (how many? as many as you like). This is an instance where a sharp paring knife is very handy. Cut off all the dark green leafy bits (you can just chop the head of the leek off where the exterior leaf turns from pale green to dark green, but that can be wasteful), then slit the leek along its entire length, but leave the root intact. You can see I didn’t manage to keep the root intact on one of these and that was annoying to deal with; save yourself the annoyance. Once slit, fan out the leaves on each side and wash away the copious amounts of mud and dirt buried in the outer layers—take your time with this, no one likes a gritty…anything.

Then, get some aluminum foil. Tear off sheets that can comfortably encase each individual leek. Put the leek in the foil on the reflective side (matte side on the outside), drizzle with the olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and then wrap it up real tight. (You can add herbs or other dried spices in the packet, if you like—thyme is great, a bay leaf wouldn’t be bad, you get the idea, although you will have to remove anything that’s inedible or annoying to eat: thyme stems, the bay leaf, you get the idea).

Throw the packets under a preheated broiler or on a preheated grill and let ‘em rip for about 5-8 minutes per side, depending on how large your leeks are. To check for doneness, smush your finger into the foil at the leek’s base; if it smushes, it’s ready, if it resists, you must persist (in cooking).

Once smushy, unwrap each leek and lay them out on a cutting board. Cut off the ugly root end, cut the rest of the leek into bite-size pieces, arrange them on a plate, and douse in citrus juice (I used lime this time) and olive oil, and top with flaky salt. I do mean “douse,” they can take a lot. Topping them with a vinaigrette would also be good (and is a classic preparation).

Ingredients

• Leeks, trimmed, split, and cleaned

• Salt

• Good olive oil

• Flaky salt

• Citrus

1. Preheat broiler or grill. Place each individual leek in a sheet of aluminum foil that can easily encase it completely. Drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and wrap into tight, sealed package.

2. Repeat for any remaining leeks.

3. Place leek packets directly under broiler element or over hot grill grates and cook until leek is completely soft, about 10-16 minutes, turning once.

4. Remove leeks from packets and place on work surface. Cut into bite-size piece, discarding the root ends. Arrange leek pieces on a serving dish and drizzle with citrus juice and olive oil, top with flaky salt, and serve.

1. By the way, I’ll be linking to Chef Knives to Go wherever I can. It’s both a great store and an amazing knife resource, with a lot of great information about knife types and sharpening. If you end up buying knives from them, definitely opt in for the knife finishing service, something I regret not doing.