Pie and Pastry Bible (182 page)

Ultra-flex spatula

Nonstick razor knife

Pastry jagger

Vol-au-vent cutters

NONSTICK RAZOR KNIFE
This is a knife like none other. It is the prize in my collection of over a hundred knives. Coated with a nonstick substance, it has an incredible thin sharp blade with a series of holes and a horizontal indentation that causes the blade, when dipped first in water, to sail through custard-type fillings without sticking. It comes from Japan and is called the Ito Chef, MO-V Steel. It’s available with a 5½-inch or 8-inch blade (Katagiri, page 675).

PASTRY JAGGER
This little cutting wheel, with a zigzag blade, is used to cut lattice strips with a decorative edge that looks as if it was cut with pinking shears.

VOL-AU-VENT CUTTERS
This nested set of curved metal plates with finger holes in the center is designed for cutting discs of dough to specific sizes (La Cuisine, page 675). Pot lids work perfectly well, but these specialized cutters are handier than searching out the perfect-size pot lid.

PASTRY BLENDER
This utensil, made up of several curved wires attached to a handle, is used to cut flour into butter when preparing pie dough by hand.

Pastry blender

ROSE LEAF CUTTER AND VEINER
For an illustration of a rose leaf cutter, see Designer Apple Pie (page 84). Of all the different leaf shapes, I find the rose leaf to be the most beautiful, so it is my usual choice for pastry cutouts. Using a special rose petal cutter with a vein imprint and a plunger to release the dough makes the task much speedier than shaping it free-form with a knife and then pressing it onto a veiner. Both the cutters (a set of varying sizes) and the veiner are available at New York Cake and Baking Distributors, page 675.

Pastry leaf veiner

GRATERS

ZESTER
A zester has a small metal head with a row of tiny rough holes in it. When scraped across a citrus fruit, it penetrates just deeply enough to remove the peel without removing the bitter pith beneath. For finely grated zest, first use the zester to remove the zest in strips, then use a chef’s knife to chop it very fine. A vegetable peeler also works to remove the zest, but care must be taken so that it does not remove the pith as well. The strips of zest
can then be processed in a mini processor or placed in a food processor, along with some of the sugar in the recipe, and processed until fine. (The sugar keeps the zest from clumping and disperses it more evenly when added to the larger mixture.)

Zester

I prefer either of these methods to a box grater because the zest tends to get stuck between the grating holes. If using a box grater, a toothbrush reserved for this process works well to dislodge the zest.

“
GREATER ZESTER
” Cooking teacher and recipe developer Suzy O’Rourke has come up with the best tool of all for zesting citrus fruit. Its grating teeth are sharp and shallow, making it easy to remove the flavorful portion of the zest without touching the bitter pith beneath. She has also created a larger model with deeper grating holes that works so quickly and efficiently for grating chocolate and cheese, making such even, fluffy pieces, it makes grating a sensuous experience (Cooking by the Book, page 675).

“Greater zester”

COCONUT GRATER
Coconut, freshly grated, is the best it gets, but producing evenly grated coconut has always been tedious. A coconut grater from Williams-Sonoma (pase 677) has a multibladed device with serrated teeth that fits into the hollow of a split coconut and, when turned by a crank, rapidly turns the coconut into a flurry of fine, perfectly grated flakes.

Coconut grater

NUT GRATER
If you don’t use a food processor to grate nuts, a Mouli hand grater, which comes with three drums, works well, using the finest drum to grate nuts even and fine.

FOOD PROCESSORS

If I were asked to nominate the greatest unsung culinary hero who had the most influence or the way we cook, it would be Carl Sontheimer, who single-handedly introduced the food processor and made it possible to do a wide variety of kitchen tasks virtually without effort. One of the unrivaled uses of the food processor is the preparation of doughs. Cream puff pastry is easy beyond belief. Chocolate ganache, previously a tricky preparation, is child’s play, and grating nuts or chopping chocolate is a joy.

Regrettably, Cuisinarts is no longer manufacturing the power strainer attachment to the super citrus juicer, which was the perfect device for puréeing raspberries, removing every last bit of fruit from the seeds without allowing the tiny seeds to pass through or crushing them in a way that released their bitterness. If you have one, treasure it. If you see one at a garage sale, keep your cool but be ready to pay whatever the asking price. It is worth its weight in gold. The only other device I know of that is fine enough to remove all the seeds from raspberries is the Pronto strainer from Villaware with optional berry screen (available through Fante, page 675), but the Cuisinarts model is all plastic and much easier to clean.

CUISINARTS MINI PROCESSOR
This smallest of all food processors is ideal for chopping small items that would otherwise elude the blades of larger models, such as ginger and citrus zest.

MIXERS

The KitchenAid K5M50P (5 quarts, 350-watt motor) and the Kenwood Major (7 quarts, 650-watt motor)
^*
stand mixers are more a luxury than a necessity when it comes to pies and pastry. Everything in this book requiring a mixer can be accomplished with a good hand-held electric mixer. Even brioche dough can be made with a strong hand-held electric mixer, such as the Krups or KitchenAid, which have dough hooks. Still, serious bakers will not want to be without a powerful stand mixer. It frees the hands for other tasks and for a baker becomes the heart of the kitchen.