Appliance hell--or is it heaven?

[Jenise]

I'm pretty anti-appliance. I want to own, maintain and store the absolute minimum neccessary. Especially if it has a motor.

But this week I added two to my minimalist arsenal.

1) A meat grinder: I needed ground pork this week--really good quality ground pork, without sinew or gristle, which will be one of the basis meats in the terrine I'm taking to Bill's annual terrine invitational on Saturday--and found that my local supermarket would not grind the pork sirloin I selected because, unbeknownst to me, and though I've had pork custom ground on one prior occasion since I moved here, there is now (and perhaps always has been) a law on the books that butchers can ONLY custom-grind beef. No other meats. All ground pork, lamb, turkey, chicken and veal here come pre-packaged from various meat suppliers.

So I bought the Kitchen Aid attachment for my mixer and happily ground up a bunch of pork last night. And now that I have this tool, I predict that I'll be grinding more meat, something I've long wanted to do not just for variety but to be able to make meat mixes and double-grinds. Happy times ahead.

2) A Food Saver, though not the Food Saver brand machine--it's just that this brand name seems to be to vacuum preservation systems what Xerox is to copiers. I would have bought Food Saver if Costco had had one--at this time of year they usually do. But I did buy the Food Saver brand plastic rolls, which Costco did have, to go with the Rival brand food saver thing that I purchased later that afternoon at a local hardware store. A few 'bags' came with the device and I was smart to have bought the Food Saver product earlier--they're stronger. With all the salmon we had to pack up, it was time to invest in a better preservation system.

Any new appliances lately at your house?

Any new appliances lately at your house?

A very kind and generous lady I've known for many years on a food and wine e-mail discussion list, sent me her former DeLonghi deep fryer when the conversation turned to fried foods recently and I remarked that I didn't have a deep fryer and was longing for onion rings! I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but hope to this weekend.

(She's like a Fairy Godmother. She has sent me many things over the years, never letting me pay for postage even. When I was given a trip to Paris for my birthday one year and mentioned it, within the week I had a stack of boxes from Amazon with French cookbooks and foodie guides to Paris etc. She's amazing! )

Edited to add that I want a Food Saver. It would be great to package up foods to prolong life since there is usually just me and things spoil before I can use them.

Jenise, I want BOTH of those things!!!

No new appliances here (the bench is full - I loooove gadgets), but a few new kitchen tools - a sieve shaped as a cake tin, a friand pan, a silicone whisk and sigh...231 glass jars.

I love my Food Saver. I wore out the first one and I'm on my second. I live alone and love to cook, so it comes in really handy when I have a lot of leftovers. I recently cooked up some tilapia I had frozen for well over a year and it was still delicious.

My favorite new appliance, if you can call it that, is a hand-crank ice crusher. I love crushed ice in drinks, and when it's this hot out I like to put a few slivers in the evening martini and sit out on the deck.

Our toaster died after a couple of decades. It was "Our Best Toaster" from HS. We replaced it with a DeLonghi Toaster Oven. We are very happy with it.

Well as you know I just got a new DCS range so I am cooking myself silly for a time. I got a new griddle (tava) last year and that is handy.

I use the kitchen aid grinder attachement to do falafel or sausage for guests. The food saver vacuum bag devices are really handy for keeping smoked fish in the freezer, or for buying large quantities of cheese and preventing that from going south. You will find more uses for it I am sure. Good for you. You need more stuff !!

1) A meat grinder: I needed ground pork this week--really good quality ground pork, without sinew or gristle, which will be one of the basis meats in the terrine I'm taking to Bill's annual terrine invitational on Saturday--and found that my local supermarket would not grind the pork sirloin I selected because, unbeknownst to me, and though I've had pork custom ground one since I moved here, there is now (and perhaps always has been) a law on the books that butchers can ONLY custom-grind beef. No other meats. All ground pork, lamb, turkey, chicken and veal here come pre-packaged from various meat suppliers.

As I was reading this, I was asking myself "Why doesn't Jenise just find a butcher who'll do it for her?" Then I got to the punch line. Wow: that law rivals most any blue law I've heard of for sheer silliness. Even here in mid-Nowhere I have two local butchers who do custom grinding, etc. The venison summer sausage that one makes is sublime. Too bad, but good purchase.

Mark Lipton

p.s. Not really an appliance, but my last purchase was a knife sharpener.

My newest appliance, (and it is not new) is a sleek black and brushed stainless Food Saver that sits on my folding counter in the laundry room. I keep it plugged in all the time. There is a button I push and it turns vertical to makes itself smaller by many inches, while I fold laundry. I never have cheese mold or freezer burn anymore. This is the greatest thing for me!
It has a port that I can use to suck air out of plastic containers, should I every buy any of the ones that you use with the Food Savar. So far, I see no use for them - for us.

The thing about a meat grinder, which I rediscovered when I made that terrine a couple of weeks ago, is that you have total control over the coarseness or fineness of the grind, which is crucial to the making of a proper pate. I have an ancient but very powerful meat grinder which I inherited from my mother-in-law, and I've used it infrequently over the years, but when I need it, I REALLY need it, and it's great to have. If it weren't for that, I'm sure I would have bought the Kitchenaid attachment for my stand mixer.

Anyway, no new kitchen tools here.

My concern has always been how you clean a meat grinder. How do you clean a meat grinder?

My concern has always been how you clean a meat grinder. How do you clean a meat grinder?

All the parts that contact the meat come apart to be washed. At least it's that way with the dedicated grinder that we bought several years ago to deal with the 60-quart ice chest full of deboned venison we brought back from a successful hunt.

We've had the Kitchenaid meat grinder attachment for quite some time and I think it's a worthwhile use of storage space. When you want to make sausage, it's great to have it handy. We are not awash in storage space, so we keep this item in its box in the basement.

As for cleaning, you take it apart and wash it. It's not hard to get it looking as good as new. If you were extra careful, it would be no problem to soak the parts in a bleach solution.

2) A Food Saver, though not the Food Saver brand machine--it's just that this brand name seems to be to vacuum preservation systems what Xerox is to copiers. I would have bought Food Saver if Costco had had one--at this time of year they usually do. But I did buy the Food Saver brand plastic rolls, which Costco did have, to go with the Rival brand food saver thing that I purchased later that afternoon at a local hardware store. A few 'bags' came with the device and I was smart to have bought the Food Saver product earlier--they're stronger. With all the salmon we had to pack up, it was time to invest in a better preservation system.

Any new appliances lately at your house?

Jenise, I own a food saver brand vacuum machine, and use their brand of bags too. Actually I buy the multi roll package at Sam's club, the multi contains 3 rolls of the 11 inch and two of the 8 inch rolls. It is easy to see which I run short of soonest. The 8 inch independent roll ( at a grocery/department store is about a third the price of the multi pack which is almost $40. So, what price is the multi pack of the baks for the rival brand, and will they work on my Food Saver?

In my Nonna's kitchen, attached to the kitchen table with a special screw clamp, was a sliver metal (some sort of coated steel) 'meat' grinder that had a bell like opening on the top and at least two grinder plates on the end to provide fine and coarse meat grindings. You fed portions through the top into the screw 'grabber' and eventually out came the grind. I recall her spending hours using that 'machine' to make our sausage and salami as well as grindings for vegetable dishes such as winter salad. My Nonna would have marveled at a Kitchen-aid with a grinder attachement.

Things sure have changed !

I'd have actually preferred that, not that there's anything wrong with the Kitchen Aid but those old-timey hand crank C-clamp types are so rugged and elemental. There's a place up here that imports things and sells their wares to William-Sonoma and the like. They have a few of everything sitting around their warehouse that they photograph for their own catalog and once a year they have a sale to get rid of it. To tell you how good the deals are, I passed on an outdoor firepit for $25 that I saw a week later in the Williams Sonoma catalog for $300. I've never not found some things I couldn't live without for prices so low I just went "ho ho ho" all the way home. Well last year they had a bunch of those old fashioned C-clamp meat grinders, several sizes. They were probably all $10 or $15, but up to ten times more at regular retail. Dumb me, I passed.

[Jenise]

I use the kitchen aid grinder attachement to do falafel or sausage for guests. The food saver vacuum bag devices are really handy for keeping smoked fish in the freezer, or for buying large quantities of cheese and preventing that from going south. You will find more uses for it I am sure. Good for you. You need more stuff !!

Not sure that I need more stuff, the pantry's pretty clogged as it is (maybe I need less than 30 pastas on hand?) but I'm always coming across 'finds' like a couple pounds of thin-cut pancetta scraps at $3 a pound which I brought home, broke down and rebagged in half and quarter pound wads and froze for later convenience. The Foodsaver will be great for that.

[Jenise]

My favorite new appliance, if you can call it that, is a hand-crank ice crusher. I love crushed ice in drinks, and when it's this hot out I like to put a few slivers in the evening martini and sit out on the deck.

I've never heard of such a thing, but can relate. I went through a stage of wanting all my ice crushed a number of years ago and would actually go a little out of my way to buy bagged ice at a liquor store that had a particularly clear crushed ice even though I had an ice machine in my fridge at home. The clear ice (without air bubbles, that is) melts much more slowly.

[Jenise]

Jenise, I own a food saver brand vacuum machine, and use their brand of bags too. Actually I buy the multi roll package at Sam's club, the multi contains 3 rolls of the 11 inch and two of the 8 inch rolls. It is easy to see which I run short of soonest. The 8 inch independent roll ( at a grocery/department store is about a third the price of the multi pack which is almost $40. So, what price is the multi pack of the baks for the rival brand, and will they work on my Food Saver?

I think you misunderstood me. It's the FoodSaver product that's the best. The rolls, just like you have--I bought the same multi-pak at Costco and those work in the Rival machine. The product that came with the Rival machine were actual bags, not rolls, made of a less substantial-feeling material.

[Jenise]

I have an ancient but very powerful meat grinder which I inherited from my mother-in-law, and I've used it infrequently over the years, but when I need it, I REALLY need it, and it's great to have. If it weren't for that, I'm sure I would have bought the Kitchenaid attachment for my stand mixer.

Lucky you! Up until now, I've always been able to at least adequately-enough-for-my-purposes control the grind by having the butcher twice-grind meat for me when I wanted a finer grind, but what I've never been happy about is my inability to be the one who trims the meat before it goes into the grinder. The butcher just isn't going to be careful the way I would be about cutting out all the fat or sinewy silver skin, both of which can be issues with even the best cuts.

How's Kirk's mom doing in her new apartment?

I have had a Kitchen Aid meat grinder for 20 years or so, still works great and was one of the best appliance investments I have made. I added the Kitchen Aid pasta roller a few months ago, and I am glad I did. Using the handcranked pasta machine is OK, but I like having both hands free to deal with the ever lengthening rolled out dough.

I bought a deep fryer recently, a type that allows me to control the temperature of the fry. Cooked homemade potato chips in it last night using a two temp cooking process. A little sea salt and I was a happy camper. Great appliance for about $50.

[Jenise]

I have had a Kitchen Aid meat grinder for 20 years or so, still works great and was one of the best appliance investments I have made. I added the Kitchen Aid pasta roller a few months ago, and I am glad I did. Using the handcranked pasta machine is OK, but I like having both hands free to deal with the ever lengthening rolled out dough.

I bought a deep fryer recently, a type that allows me to control the temperature of the fry. Cooked homemade potato chips in it last night using a two temp cooking process. A little sea salt and I was a happy camper. Great appliance for about $50.

The meat grinder is likely one of those things that once you have it, you think of all kinds of things to do with it where prior to owning it, your imagination just didn't go down that road. Like you, the pasta roller probably isn't far behind.

A deep fryer though, that gets into dangerous territory. Being able to make ones own potato chips any time? For me, that would be like living next door to the Abba Zabba factory--I'd never stop.

Using the handcranked pasta machine is OK, but I like having both hands free to deal with the ever lengthening rolled out dough.

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I would be lost without my 25 year old Atlas pasta cranker. Its part of the kitchen like my wooden pasta board.

The one appliance additive that I have avoided for years is the water, computer, mirror, telephone, GPS, back scratcher attachments in the door of the refer. Whats with all this crap that does not need to be there ? I want a plain door with a handle thank you very much.

I'm with you on that! My Atlas is even older than that, probably has 200,000 miles on it, and still works like a charm.

I'm with you on that! My Atlas is even older than that, probably has 200,000 miles on it, and still works like a charm.

You know what they say Stuart. If it ain't broke, don't fix it !! Atlas works fine, pasta is good. I have seen electric gadgets that mimic the same routine we use on the Atlas but I am not in that big of a hurry when I make pasta so why bother.

[Jenise]

I would be lost without my 25 year old Atlas pasta cranker. Its part of the kitchen like my wooden pasta board.

Not every kitchen has a reasonable mounting point, though. My Atlas sits in the pantry anxiously awaiting it's re-entry into polite society. It is in the meantime sidelined because there's no place in my kitchen to attach it's C clamp to, and I can tell you from experience that a Black and Decker Workmate makes a lousy substitute for a kitchen counter.