Gadgets

Pizza knife by Van Vacter

Filed under: Gadgets

Let's say that you've got an addiction to pizza, and twenty bucks burning a hole in your pocket. The solution? Quite possibly, buying a "pizza knife" (prosaic lowercase name courtesy of the company).

What does you $20 get you? Well, the kind folks at Van Vacter^TM (a product line of Lassen Scientific, Inc.) are happy to inform you that each pizza knife (the ultimate pizza cutter^TM) uses patent pending Slicing-Slots^TM to cut cleanly through the pizza's molten cheese, leaving the dirty business of completing any given cut to the deadly-sounding Finishing Wheel^TM.

That blizzard of verbiage boils down to this: you get two pizza wheels in one. The big wheel has holes in it. The holes keep the cheese from sticking to the wheel when it cuts. The small wheel, which trails the big wheel at a respectful distance and looks like a training wheel, completes your cut and eliminates the need to drag your pizza cutter back and forth, over and over again.

Does it work? Absolutely. This is a beautiful piece of pizza-cutting technology. Overly wordy and arguably overpriced, but absolutely beautiful. If you see one on special (quite likely) or at a rummage sale (far less likely), snatch it up.

Posted by James Norton at April 29, 2008 1:01 AM | Comments (2)

 

Build a Better Cheese Knife...

Filed under: Gadgets

Those who deal with cheese know that slicing the stuff is more challenging than it looks. Good cheese is temperamental. A nice aged parm or cheddar, for example, would rather flake, break or just plain crumble than sheer off in a clean, healthy slice.

Enter: The Cheese Knife. The theory: a plastic knife comprised of little stacked triangles with work better than a lovely Henckels or Wusthof. And, lo and behold... it works.

The cheese doesn't stick to the side of the knife. Instead, it slices through even aged and fussy cheeses as though they were butter. Is it worth the $19.99 (at Kitchen Window)? That depends. If you go through 10 pounds of cheese a year, probably not. 50 a year, most definitely.

Posted by James Norton at April 10, 2008 2:32 AM | Comments (4)

 

Kitchenwarez: Poachpods

Filed under: Gadgets

Unless you're a fan of homemade Eggs Benedict, poached eggs may not be a big part of your kitchen routine. The ins and outs of Hollandaise aside, Eggs Benedict are somewhat fussy breakfast option that can bring a load of class to Easter or New Year's brunches, or that romantic morning-after detox session with a newly made acquaintance.

Although the sauce is the linchpin, the eggs aren't exactly a slam dunk. Poached eggs can go wrong in a number of ways; if the water is at too hard a boil and/or you put the eggs in too quickly, you get a veritable jellyfish of cooked egg white that becomes a drippy mess when you finally haul it ashore with a slotted spoon.

At $10.99 for a set of two at Kitchen Window, the Poachpod offers a relatively ingenious way to make foolproof poached eggs. Each Poachpod is a little silicone bucket that floats partially submerged on the water, cradling an egg. The silicone is thin enough to let heat through to cook the egg, but it slows down the cooking time; poached eggs take about 5 minutes, as opposed to under 2 by the conventional method.

The up side is a less damp, evenly formed, always elegant egg. Cleanup is reduced from an egg-coated pot and slotted spoon to simply a little, easily scrubbed silicone pocket.

Not only do these things make Eggs Benedict easier to execute, they put poached eggs — which are swell on top of toast, for starters — into your regular morning rotation. Is that worth $11? That all depends on your lifestyle, actual and/or desired.

Posted by James Norton at April 3, 2008 9:01 AM | Comments (0)

 

Kitchenwarez : Garlic Zoom

Filed under: Gadgets

In the kitchen, there are gadget people and then there are knife people. Gadget people are never content to rely upon a traditional, elegant solution to a food preparation problem, and instead use various colorful and wittily named gadgets. Knife people want to turn their sharpest knives on the gadget people resulting in a colorful and satisfying plume of blood and a cascade of the ever-intensifying screams, but do not ultimately do so for fear of somehow damaging the blade.

I have always thought of myself as a knife person, and, in fact, actually enjoy the vast majority of the tedious chopping / mincing / peeling / slicing / trimming that gadget people are happy to farm out to whatever piece of plastic is most colorful and readily available.

That said: sometimes garlic gets to be a little bit of a drag. At every meal — yes, just about everything including some sandwiches — garlic must be peeled and chopped. A garlic press just isn't suitable for many applications; sometimes "chopped" or "diced" is better than "pressed into a juicy, undifferentiated mass."

While walking through Kitchen Window the other day, I stumbled upon a garlic chopping device that was sensibility-defyingly interesting. The Garlic Zoom ($9.99) has all the Euro-plastic appeal of old-school Capsela toys, and much of the same geeky mechanical charm; its little rubber wheels turn an internal blade, thereby chopping up your (peeled) cloves into tiny little bits. The more you zoom the tiny garlic death car around, the smaller your final product becomes.

It works like a charm. And the clever plastic trapdoors very quickly release the chopped garlic and allow for quick rinsing. As an added bonus: the tactile stink of the plant is kept clear of your fingers.

The GarlicZoom is pleasurable to use, but — and this is a real testament to its actual usefulness — it's also a pleasure to reuse. You'll keep it on a counter somewhere, and when you think "garlic," you may well think "GarlicZoom!" shortly thereafter. Take it from a knife guy: As gadgets go, this thing's OK.

Posted by James Norton at March 10, 2008 10:34 PM | Comments (3)