Esoteric cooking equipment

One of my most esoteric pieces of equipment is a laser thermometer. Shaped like a gun, you just push the trigger and aim the laser beam at anything for which you want an accurate temperature. I use it to see how hot my baking stone is, how hot my ridged cast-iron skillet is before I cook a steak, etc., etc.

What's yours?

[Robin Garr]

You just made me realize, Larry, that I had one of those a few years ago, and I have absolutely no idea what happened to it. I guess it broke, but it's funny that my memory of what happened is gone-zo. Senior moment?

Senior moment?

Might be longer than just a moment. It's the joy of geezerdom.

[Robin Garr]

I don't know about you, but in my case, er-uh-umm--Robin, yeah, Robin, (I can't remember names, but I always forget faces), but my wife has a tendency to squirrel MY things away and forget where she stashed them. I might them find them years later or never. Right now I've been looking for months for my usb wifi antenna dongle, which had been on the dining table--just one of. many cases. I sometimes opine there's a black hole in our house.

[Jenise]

Mine is probably my oft-talked about asparagus peeler. Doesn't seem odd at all to me, but I'm apparently the only person on earth who has one. Let alone loves it.

Possibly more esoteric since they weren't meant for food use at all, I also have three putty knives of various widths straight out of the Hardware store for use on smoothing the tops of terrines.

The infra red thermometers are fun - think Alton Brown often uses one. See https://www.amazon.ca/Etekcity-Lasergri ... 8772&psc=1

I used to use one on the race car tires, only we called it a pyrometer (you can tune your suspension by measuring temp across the tire tread when hot). Haven't really seen the need for one in the kitchen, but a nice gimmick.

My oddest ball utensil is probably still my asparagus tongs or my vintage spiralizer....but I started a thread a long time ago about oddball stuff - will have to try and find it as there were a couple of other odd utensils like dedicated olive forks etc.

One use for a laser thermometer is for adjusting the oven temperature control so it reads correctly. Amazing how far off oven temps can be.

I have a spiralizer, too. Will have to think about what other oddball equipment I have.

Found the oddball utensil thread - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=57471&hilit=odd+utensils

Maybe time to add to it.

Here is an oddball historical one. I don't own one of these. It was a popular item, for those with the predilection, in the mid-19th C:

full-1A-700 10.10-23-f2.png

Pretty clear how it works but the tricky part is what is it for. Can you guess?

Cork extractor is the only thing that occurs to me...

[Robin Garr]

Pretty clear how it works but the tricky part is what is it for. Can you guess?

Whisk?

Robin is close. It's a champagne 'bubbler': around Lincoln's time and also afterward, members of genteel society felt that champagne often had too many bubbles so they carried these silver stirrers to agitate their drink before actually imbibing it.

Kinda like "too many notes" in the movie, Amadeus.

Yeah. Not sure what is the point of drinking champagne if you must get rid of all those awful bubbles first.

(OK, OK, I'm sure they only reduced the fizz, not dispelled it entirely.)

Anyway, it's funny to view these social norms from a vantage of different social norms.

Oh dear so many choices! I have an unfortunate tendency to collect odd kitchen things at op shops and markets.
So I’ll go with a retort stand, complete with ring and clamp. Great when draining/filtering through a funnel, and many other uses. Purchased at a weird second hand lab equipment store in Los Alamos NM (couldn’t get the EM or the cryostat in my suitcase. . Love my laser thermometer particularly when making cheese, keeping curds, water bath etc at the right Temp.

Mine is a mango peeler, bought in Thailand many years ago.

And not used for many years as it seems impossible to get a ripe mango in England (those labelled 'ripe and ready to eat' are rock hard until the moment they go rotten).

Which is why, while I am here in the Cape of Good Hope I start the days with fruit salad of half a mango, half papaya and a nectarine

My father lived in Florida as a teenager. He told me they had a mango tree in the front yard. Every year it would produce an enormous crop of fruit... which all ripened together, all at once. So you pick it all, make as much mango chutney as you can, and give the rest -- bushels and bushels still -- to your neighbors.

Who do the same thing to you, a week later, with the fruit from their tree.

(And I'm take-it-or-leave-it on mangoes. Not bad in lassi.)

It dawned on me today that I have a couple of really esoteric cooking utensils (at least for me). We have a tri-level. When din-din is ready, I call Edie down from her upstairs lair by using either my small or my large Vietnamese carved wooden croaking frog.

I have a heavy-gauge copper, tin-lined cocotte a pommes Anna.

Kinda like "too many notes" in the movie, Amadeus.

That reminds me of the exchange between Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings in the David Suchet production of Agatha Christie's "The Dream", concerning the pork pie tycoon Benedict Farley:

Poirot: Hastings, to say that Benedict Farley makes pies is like saying that Wagner wrote semi-quavers.

Hastings: Oh, they're good pies, are they?

Poirot: No, horrible. But there are a great many of them.

-Paul W.

I like that, Paul!

I like that, too!

[Jenise]

Thought of this thread when I was doing some yardwork yesterday, cleaning out the ornamental beds on the beach side of my house. Tongs are not esoteric, but taking an extra long pair made for barbecuing out to pick weeds and scoop up winter detritis is definitely not something anyone else does!

s-l1600a.jpg

Saw an ebay item that I thought I should append to this thread.

Sterling asparagus tray https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Sterling-Silver ... SwcwRerqor

Only 2500 pounds.....but hey - free shipping!