Kitchen Essentials - How to strategically buy stuff to make it look like you actually know what you're doing!
Welcome to The Kitchen! It’s a brisk Halloween Day in Fort Worth, Texas and I have some friends driving from Alabama. Time to make some bread for them.
A sidebar, if you read a lot of kitchen blogs like I do, you know the absolute PAIN of finding a good looking recipe and opening the page and having to read 45 paragraphs about how Sally Lou created the recipe for Chicken Soup on a day back in 1984 while Pa was working in the mines and the weather was brisk and horrible and this way was the only way to keep Pa happy while he fought off Mesothelioma.
I swear on my life that this will not be one of those posts. Instead this is a overview of kitchen essentials to make it really, really look like you know what you’re doing. If you’re like me, you do not know what you’re doing. But faking it is shockingly easy. I am not sponsored for any of the products I plug, but please someone sponsor me. Diet Coke please sponsor me. That’s not related to this but Diet Coke please I deserve it.
Anyway! Here’s an overview of Kitchen Essentials.
It took me six tries to take this picture and it still doesn’t look good!
1) A solid working surface - Marble Pastry Board
A solid working surface is so important! I previously only used my counter and it’s tile and wow cleaning got exhausting! There’s flour in every single crevice and it takes 15 minutes of scrubbing and I got tired of it so I googled cooking surfaces and a marble pastry board came up. I took an exciting trip to the World Market on Hulen, but similar products are on Amazon and by Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Benefits of this from the internet: Smooth surface, keeps surface cool for making pastries. My benefits: It looks so pretty. So pretty. If I ever figure out how they make the baking videos on Tasty that are overhead views, I would have this as the surface. I tried doing it but holding the phone in my mouth for the duration of the cheesecake recipe was difficult.
I can’t crop images well but I did my best.
It’s wrinkled, oof.
2) Everything is so messy constantly - Parchment paper
I can not undersell the need for parchment paper. It’s been said that parchment paper helps with the baking process. I could not care less, parchment paper keeps things cleaner.
3) Everything is so messy constantly (Part 2) - Soap
Literally any soap. My hands are covered in dough. Good for sanitation, better because I’m sick of getting dough stuck between my fingers. I look like a duck with webbed hands.
I broke this box prior to taking a picture lol.
4) Presentation is everything, cookies taste better if they’re in a pastry box that cost 93 cents per box - Pastry boxes
If you want to make your horribly sub-par, outrageously amateur, and honestly sad looking cookies taste good, put them in a pastry box. People think they’re fresh from a bakery but really the bakery is your kitchen.
I don’t have much to say here.
5) Stuff to move the dough around: Bench scraper and French rolling pin
Both of these were purchased just because I kept seeing them used in baking videos. The bench scraper helped me clean the pastry board of flour which is likely not the intended use but eh life happens. The French rolling pin doesn’t cause me to almost break my hand by accidentally punching the cookie sheet while using it. So yeah. French rolling pin. Less pain.
6) Thing to bake the thing - Dutch Oven
Convection, conduction, baking, blah blah blah. Baking my bread in this thing has made it so outrageously crispy and yummy and light and airy. I don’t entirely understand the science but take my word for it. Get this thing.
Ugh, it’s in bright crimson too. Love it.
All time best Kitchen Nightmares quotes? Both are from the same episode: “In movie terms, you’ve gone straight to DVD” and “I’ve never, ever, EVER, met anyone I believe in as little as you”. -Season 1, episode 6 - Sebastians
7) A way to watch Kitchen Nightmares so you can feel like you’re being judged by Gordon Ramsay - Google Home Hub, Tablet, Cell Phone, Laptop
If you noticed in the above pictures, Gordon Ramsay was yelling in some of the pictures on my Google Home Hub that I got for free from my electric company. He was yelling at other restaurants in the hit show Kitchen Nightmares, but man it makes you feel like you’re being yelled at which can really motivate you and maybe even make your cooking better! Maybe. Who knows.
Using these handy tips and equipment, you too can be a proper fraud and put on a proper facade to convince people you have it all together. Hope you enjoyed, can’t wait to have you back for lunch in The Kitchen.